Rev Left Radio - Breht Joins the Trades, Supports the Bolivarian Revolution, and Pops the AI Bubble...

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Breht updates listeners on the fundraiser for the family we are supporting in Gaza, updates listeners on his new job and talks about the challenges and rewards of joining a trade union, explores the economic developments in and around AI (the hype, the bubble, and the infrastructure build-out), and then discusses the US sending troops to Venezuela and the response from Latin America and China. Here is the new link to the Gaza family fundraiser: https://www.spotfund.com/story/c600f234-0528-4498-809b-88b76a159c9d ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/ outro music 'Xtruhhturrestreeall' by Spinitch find and support more of their work here: https://spinitch.bandcamp.com/album/com-postables-4-dessert

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right. So today is going to be a solo episode. In fact, there's probably going to be more of these as time goes on, which I'll explain here in a bit. Today I'm going to give you an update on the show. I'm going to talk about my new job a little bit. I'm going to get into the data center buildout in the country, the AI bubble, the state. of the economy, try to fight analogs historically for kind of what we're seeing. I'm going to talk about the phase of late capitalism, right, that we're in and wrestle a little bit with the concept of techno feudalism, which thinkers like Verifoccus and Jody Dean have written about to differing extents.

There's kind of controversy around that term. Allison and I are doing a full Red Menace episode on the, concept of techno feudalism and we're going to do that i think in a week or two so there's going to be much more discussion on that concept and criticism of that concept or just thinking through the implications of that concept but i do want to touch on it a bit today because i think it relates to the huge data center build out that we're seeing in this country and the uh the overall state of the economy and i also am going to touch a little bit on uh trump administration sending the u.s military down to Venezuela in an act of belligerent aggression against the sovereign state

of Venezuela, the lies that Trump is using around involvement with the cartels and how the rest of Latin America is responding and maybe how it relates, if at all, to China, Taiwan, and the overall state of U.S. hegemony and its precipitous decline over the last several years and especially under the Trump administration. But first thing is first. A week or two ago, a few weeks ago, I talked about this go fund me for this family in Gaza, right? I had my friend B. Come on, send a little audio clip explaining the situation. I'm talking about how it's vetted, verified everything. And the Rev Left audience showed up huge. Pour thousands and thousands of dollars in. I think the overall.

amount since I announced that show was $16,000. I don't think every single dollar came from us. There was some other campaigns being run, but several, several thousand. I think on the low end, probably 10K of that was Rev Left listeners. And on the upper end, almost all of it came through Rev Left listeners who heard about it when the episode dropped and then who got around to that episode in the subsequent days afterwards that, you know, heard about it seven days later and then donated. So it was like a rolling influx of cash. And the families in Gaza that we were helping were able to take a little bit out at first. And this is a GoFundMe that has been rolling for almost two years now, really since the genocide really started and started deepening. So they've been able for

many, many, many, many, many months to, you know, take out the donations that we've been able and other people have been able to direct towards them. And so when they got the news that they had an influx of $10,000 to $15,000, I mean, this is life-saving for the entire extended family, right? Life-saving amount of money. You know, they were celebrating, you know, being incredibly grateful for the people who set it up, the campaign, you know, B, who is my friend, who, you know, reached out to me and allowed me to use my platform to get the word out.

I mean, you know, tears of joy that they were going to be able to, secure food for themselves and their extended families. But like so much in this fucking world, an injustice occurred. Go fund me. Shut down after a couple thousand dollars were taken out. Shut down the account. Under suspicion of breaking guidelines, all very vague, all very shady. There's no concrete evidence of anything they're not saying.

This is the exact reason why we're shutting this down. It's just a huge imperial core corporate. that is faceless with no accountability saying that some obscure and ill-defined, you know, aspect of their terms of service was violated and, uh, they are issuing a full refund to everybody that donated it to that GoFundMe. Um, so in the coming days, I assume, uh, go fund me. This has been devastating to the family. I want to, I want to front and center that. That they thought they were getting this huge lifeline, right? Uh, you know, their, their father, their aging father was injured in the meantime, right?

Because he was trying to go out to an aid site and got shoved and pushed and I think fell and cracked several ribs, trying to get, you know, food at these hectic and criminal aid sites that is run by the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, which is just an Israel-funded, cut-out, bullshit organization. And, you know, there's been people, there's even been whistleblowers that have come out and spoke about. U.S. soldiers that went to serve, you know, as a subcontractor or whatever for the Gaza humanitarian fund that just talk about the rank criminality of and disgusting nature with which those things are done. But we all know, right? If you're paying attention at all, you know that these aid sites are massacre sites. They indiscriminately murder people at them. And because of the

lack of aid getting in, they can be incredibly chaotic, you know, and people can get hurt and stampeded and knocked around. And so if you're an elderly gentleman that's already mal in the shirt and you're trying to secure aid for your family and you're getting jostled and hit, so he got injured. And they were thinking that this money coming in is going to kind of help him be able to heal while they're able to go out and buy food and go fund me for no reason that we can make sense of ended the campaign. But they are issuing, of course, a full refund to everybody who donated to that campaign. So nobody is losing their money, right? If you don't get a refund, that means your money actually did go through before they stopped it.

If you do get a refund, that means that, you know, it was stopped before your money was able to be taken out. So nobody, except the family in Gaza's really hurt, right? If you donated, nobody's getting screwed out of their money or anything like that. It's a big corporation. They do refunds. They know how to do this shit. So you will be getting a refund. What we're asking now is that we've shifted over to a new fundraiser campaign. Same exact people behind it. Same families are being assisted, but this one is on spot fund, hoping that we can get some of that money through. Now, we know, unfortunately, that the huge amount of money that we got on that initial GoFundMe campaign is not going to be able to be matched on the second round, right? It's annoying

and it's shitty. We have to wait for the refunds, and then some amount of people that heard that first episode won't even hear the second one. People's economic situations change. They don't have the money. They get that refund. They need to pay a bill with it. So we know that that money is not going to go back and i'm not even asking for people to donate again because you know um it's a lot to ask of people and after i you know do a gaza the gaza go fund me episode i did get a so many people reaching out and it breaks my fucking heart that i'm unable to do it all but reaching out being like can you plug this one can you plug that one getting these really heartbreaking emails you know this is my friend and can you please do an episode on that and you know if if if i could i would

if I could just come here every day and give you a new, you know, GoFundMe to support, I would, but that weighs on an audience and there's a certain level of responsibility where I just can't keep coming back to my audience, but like give, give, give, give, give, people that want to give, if you're listening, people that want to give, there are ways you can give. You know, you know, how to find those resources, those charities, those GoFundMe's that you can give to and help people out. And I hope people do do that. I just have the capacity. using my platform to hone in on one or two. And I feel particularly responsible in this scenario because the RevLeft audience has helped

them in the past. And, you know, we are trying to help them right now and go fund me, fuck them over, you know, in a really grotesque way. So I have particular responsibility on this front that I'm trying to rectify. So I will link in the show notes to the new fund, spot fund. What I'm asking is not for new people to donate. If you want to, by all means do. There are many other amazing places that you can donate to as well.

But specifically what I'm asking here is if you were one of the people that already donated to GoFund me, you already gave that money to this family. And that money in the next coming days bounces back into your account. If you could slide that fund over to this new one, that's all we're asking. If we could recoup 60, 70% of the amount of money that we raised that first go run just on the money that people already gave without a single new dollar we would still be able to get thousands of dollars

to this set of families this interconnected extended family and help help people on the ground in Gaza so I'm going to click to, I'm going to link to that in the show notes here and I really hope

people, if you get that refund, can shift that over. I know it sucks, right? Giving money is it's the least we can do. We wish we could stop it. We hope something changes. We hope aid gets in. But in the meantime, you know, helping in this way is, like, the most direct material way that somebody sitting across or around the world can help real people. And again, I only despair over the fact that I can't come here every day and give

a brand new, you know, fund or fundraiser to support and get thousands and thousands of dollars every single time. There's a responsibility I feel to the audience not to continually come and ask and ask and ask and I know that people who are determined to help,

people who have the money and are determined to make sure it gets to people in Gaza they know where to look and there's a million amazing people out there trying to direct support

to various individuals and families in Gaza and there's no excuse to not be able to find one. So that's that on that, right? I will link to that in the show notes. And when you get that refund, if you could just shift it over there, it would be greatly appreciated.

And again, just thank you so much to everybody that donated. It's just an amazing outpouring of support, life-changing support for at least, you know, a handful of people in Gaza. Truly life-changing. So thank you so much to everybody who did. And it sucks having to navigate this, but I think it comes as no surprise that these Imperial Corps corporations are dragging their feet being shitty under pressure from this reactionary, outright fascist, Trump regime and the outright fascist Israel regime and its lobby in the Imperial Corps. So for various reasons, these things get shut down. And we just have to keep trying, right?

There's no other choice. All right. With that out of the way, I want to talk about my new job, but mostly I want to talk about the impacts on the shows that it might have, we'll see. I think there's a lot of interesting things here. So as many of you might know, I was doing two things simultaneous for a very long time. I was trying to become a high school teacher.

And to pursue that, I was active in a master's program for the last several years, getting up my endorsement classes, and in the spring, trying to get hired so that I could then get shifted into the teacher training program through my local university. I tried.

I went to interviews. I don't have any experience. It's one of those catch-22s where you have to get experience. In fact, I have to get hired to get the experience. So my program was in such a way that I can do all my endorsement classes in the background. But in order for me to actually become a teacher, I had to go get hired on the promise that if you hired me, I was going to be in this accelerated teacher training program and be ready to go by the next school year. So I'm competing with any teacher that has any amount of experience.

why would anybody fucking hire me? So it was kind of soul-crushing to jump through these hoops, to go to these interviews and just see, you know, just get turned down. I was like I really feel like I could offer my services as like an effective, charismatic, secondary teacher, you know, for my community. I really feel like if somebody took a shot on me, I could have excelled at that job. But nobody did, and that's understandable. It's crazy because you hear about these teacher shortages, you know, nobody wants to be a teacher. teachers get paid like shit we need teachers we need teachers okay here's me i'm ready to go be a teacher

i'm jumping through all the hoops i have really aside from the lack of teaching experience directly a really impressive i think resume of political organizing and political education and i've been in a phd program i have a degree i mean you know i i have documented proof that i've taught i've given speeches at colleges i've given speeches to high school classrooms i've run community organized political education programs, co-run them with some good comrades, but nothing gave. And in fact, I remember in one of those interviews, I was like hopeful, naively hopeful for this job is at this middle school in South Omaha where I'm from. And I was like, I would love to just, you know, give back to this public school in South O where I was born and raised. And, you know,

it's not the rich part of town, obviously. It's the heavy immigrant side of town. And, you know, one of the poorer aspects of Omaha. The north and south Omaha in general tend to be, you know, sort of underinvested in. And west Omaha and certain neighborhoods in central Omaha or like where wealthier people tend to go. And white flight happened in Omaha. Everybody went out west.

Omaha is one of the most still, one of the most segregated cities in the entire country, de facto segregation and the legacy of redlining and all of that stuff. But all that is to say is like, okay, I could be a middle school teacher in South, though, you know, give back to the community that really I was born and bred in and, you know, serve a community that is under-resourced in general. And I was really excited. And I remember doing the interview and like just being honest, like I don't have experience, but if somebody takes a shot

on me, I promise, I want to learn. I want to work hard. I will do everything I can to be as good of a teacher as I possibly can, go above and beyond. And I thought it was going well, you know, but I was being interviewed by three administrative staff. And I looked over at one of the guys, who was on the panel of people hire as two women and a guy and the guy was doodling on the application of you know like when you're giving answers they're supposed to be like writing

them down and like kind of so they can go back and they can put their papers together and think about it and I looked over at the guy's paper and he was just like doing stupid ass doodles as I was talking it was just fucking heartbreaking dude I'm like oh so there's just like they're just kind of

humoring me with this interview I got all dressed up and drove out here and I'm just being kind of humored. And he knows in his heart like this fucking dumb ass is never getting hired. That's like that's the sort of like humiliation rituals that I kind of had to go through. But it is what it is. But at the same time as I had, you know, that cooking on the back of the stove, I'm doing the show, getting by month to month, but you know, no benefits. I don't have health care. Don't have a pension. Don't have any future. Just enough money from the amazing supporters of this show to support my family month to month. But nothing that allows me to save or have

any benefits. That's just the nature of a job like this. It supports me and David's family, of course. But again, paycheck to paycheck style living. And so I know I needed a future. I needed a pension. I needed health care for my family. And so as I was working on the teaching thing, I was also applying to trade unions in my area. And my whole thing was I'm going to go with whatever pops first, right? If I get offered a job as a teacher, I'm rescinding my application for the union and I'm going into teaching. If I get accepted in one of these trade unions, I'm going to go head first into that trade union and I'm giving up on my master's program and the teaching career.

And the trade union broke first. I had to jump through so many hoops, right, to become, to get accepted into this apprenticeship program. Just a huge amount of paperwork up front. You got to run around and get old high school diplomas and every class you've ever taken from all these things. You've got to go through countless drug test, countless background checks. You have to do an aptitude test, like a SAT-style.

intro tests and if you know just to get a qualifying score on that to move forward to do an oral interview and on like a panel of like 10 veteran tradesmen who will determine if you know will give you a score on your oral interview you got to combine the aptitude test which is like half math like you know at first like you know freshman sophomore level math and as as the test goes on it gets up to like incredibly difficult math that like I didn't even finish that part of the program but I'd study for weeks and weeks, refreshing my mind on, on, you know, algebraic concepts and running, you know, algebra practice tests in my free time to get ready for that math part. And then the other part was reading comprehension, which, you know, I think I am fairly skilled out, skilled that naturally. Like,

can you read this dense text and pull out the nuances and complexities of it? So, you know, I think I did fine on that part of it without studying much. So I got a good, I got a good score on that, and then I got a good score on the oral interview. Nothing breathtaking, not 100%, right? But it was like solid. Basically, if it had to be translated into grades, it would be like I got a B plus on both. And that was enough to put me on the list, right?

And you get put after you go through all that, which is literally nine months, from the beginning of when I signed the application to join the apprenticeship to when I got, I finished the oral interview and the aptitude test, nine months. And so then you get placed on a list based on your combined score. and I had no clue where the fuck I was on that list.

People are taking the aptitude test and doing the interview so you're constantly being jostled around. Lots of people try it and they don't hear back after a year. If you don't hear back, you've got to do the whole damn thing over again. The whole process all over again, reapply from the ground up. And then if you don't get called back a year, you've got to do it again. And a lot of people have to do it over and over again to get the call or other people have to go as basically a CW, a construction worker, a laborer, to get on site, on construction site, sort of experience, basically, but you're not associated with any of the trades. You're just kind of like doing grunt work on construction sites,

hoping that you kind of stand out to a foreman and just getting basic on the ground experience of what it's like to work in the trades, which is hard physical manual labor, right? So a lot of people get in that way. But luckily, I did well enough on the interview and the aptitude test that I got apparently on the short list. and got a call only a few weeks after, which is kind of unheard of. So I'm very happy that that worked out. I was absolutely ecstatic when I heard that I got accepted.

Afterwards, there's a bunch more hoops you've got to jump through. You've got to go get multiple physical exams. You have to do physical capabilities. Like, can you, like, balance on this beam? Can you carry equipment up a ladder? You know, those sorts of physical tests. And then a million drug tests for your union, for the contractor. for the job site that you're working on

through your contractor, drug test after drug test. So I just had to do a bunch of shit. But I did it. I got through. And so I am now in a union. I am in a high-skill trade union as a first-year apprentice. I don't necessarily want to talk about the details of what union I'm in, what my local is, certainly not what job site I'm on,

just for various reasons for just basis. online safety reasons and because i need to establish myself before i start you know making connections to who i'm working with or all that shit but needless to say i am in a a good union in the trades and this last week i started working on the job and what is the job consist of wake up before the sun fucking gets up i i have my alarm at 5 a.m every day get up put on my my boots put on my PPE, my hard hat, fucking gloves, you know, all the safety vest, the glasses you have to wear all day long, gloves all day long, hard hat all day long, and go out in the motherfucking elements and the heat and put in physical fucking work. And as a first year apprentice, you're assigned

under a journeyman and you're just basically their assistant. You do what they ask you to do and you kind of learn along the way. And then I do that 40 hours a week plus there's overtime offered where I can get time and a half already. You know, if I want to work on the weekends, for example. So a lot of that is, it's been a fucking hard shift. Like, from, you know, doing the podcast for the last seven years, I worked every job before that, right? All through my teens, I started working at 15. You know, a grounds guy on a golf course, worked in retail, worked on as a line cook in kitchens, delivery man for pizza places,

dishwashers. I've worked at fast food restaurants like Long John Silver's and Pizza Hut throughout my life. Um, I've worked a fuck ton of different jobs. I've worked as a, at an alcohol catering service where I'm just hauling kegs around to, to events all throughout the, the metro, you know, um, I've worked all the fucking job you can imagine. And for the last seven or eight years, I've been able to get by on, uh, on the, the amazing support, uh, for the patrons of the show that have supported me and my producer, Dave, um, and our families. And I've been incredibly grateful for that. And I'm not stopping this show. The show is everything to me and the community that we've built. up over the last eight years is everything to me. It's the most rewarding thing I've ever done. And the people I'm in contact with, the community we've built on Patreon, I wouldn't trade it for the fucking world. So I am never giving up on this show ever until you guys stop listening. When you do, I'll take that as a sign that it's time for me to set down the mic. But I'm never stopping on the show. But the show will naturally be impacted. I had to, for instance, you know, I just

have 40 hours a week, I'm doing hard physical labor instead of, you know, working on the show. So I had to reschedule some interviews. I had to like sort of not cancel them, but postpone them indefinitely and try to figure out how we're going to get on a new schedule where I can balance output here on the show on my other podcast. She listens in South Dakota. The stuff we do on Red Menace, which is, you know, some often more reading intensive because Allison and I are reading texts and then we're teaching those texts. So that's kind of hard. And I have all this community organizing stuff we're trying to do another round of um socialist night school for example and there's just an intense amount of time needed to pour into that um you know i teach two of the six classes

in a socialist night school and trying to do another run of it is you know we have a lot of meetings in the in the up running to that and that's been you know very demanding and plus i play sports i play softball i play volleyball and i have three kids so i need a lot of time for my family all this stuff right so it's just fucking hard to balance it all out and i'm trying but during this transition it's going to um just got to stick with me here and and what one one result of this might end up being that i do more shows like this more solo episodes because my schedule my free time has narrowed so dramatically that it's going to be increasingly hard for me to coordinate with guests well when are you free when are you free following up on emails trying to set times you know

reading people's books um you know drafting out the outline of questions rescheduling when they have something come up or I have something come up, that is really exhausting in a lot of the work behind the scenes, exhausting in the context of my broader schedule. So I'm still going to do interviews for sure. They might be less than. And I might do more solo analytical episodes like this, more Red Menace style episodes with Allison on current events and texts like that. But the show will still be the show. It'll still be good. And honestly, you know, as I've had eight years under my belt of doing this, I think I've earned, you know, and correct me if I'm wrong here on Patreon, but I think I've earned the right to come to this mic and give my

analysis of events that I've proven myself a reliable analyzer of global events and I can cover the news in a deep way as hopefully I'll show later on in this episode as well and that people will still come to Rev Left and still support Rev Left even if there's a 50% increase in solo episodes and there's not as many big guests or, you know, authors that I'm having on or whatever it may be. I'm hoping that's true and we'll find out. But I know when I do put out solo episodes, people love it. When I put up the philosophy series episodes, people love it on Patreon is often me by myself, almost exclusively on Patreon, me by myself, covering current events, covering philosophical concepts, and people have a great reaction to that. And so it might

very well shift in that direction. But I'm always going to try to stay dynamic. I'm always going to try to do multiple things while at the same time carving out Rev Left as a continually unique place to find a very specific sort of principled analysis and play my role in a bigger ecosystem of really principled voices doing their own thing. Right. So, you know, I hope that that works out. Another thing I want to talk about a little bit, speaking of the trades and speaking of unions and all this stuff. It is one of the last bastions for a decent fucking life

in this country, right? So much work is gig work, is precarious work, is side hustles. A lot of people, you know, try to do unorthodox forums, like become a YouTube influencer or pursue their passion,

and that's very precarious in its own right. A lot of people have jobs that are 40 hours a week, but there's no union, there's no secure benefits. There's no guarantee you're going to continue to move up or or that you won't be automated away, right? This new looming threat of hyper automation that like, you know, fucking people going

and get a computer science degree, which if you told them 10 years ago, I'm going to go get a computer science degree, everybody would just salute you, literally learn how to code. Like you are doing the exact right thing. You're positioning yourself in the perfect fucking way to make the most of this tech boom that's coming to make the most of the future, right? And now with these large language models, they're being automated and replaced. And now people with really impressive degrees and not just in computer science, but in a whole host of domains, are having trouble finding any work. And AI, the first thing it takes is entry level work, the ways in which the paths in which people coming out of college could get involved in these companies and get involved in this sort of work that they could then build from and build a career from.

Those entry doors are being slammed shut in people's faces. I've had many experiences over the last 10 years of trying to apply for various jobs, and they're all run by AIs. You don't even know if the job you're applying for is real, let alone that any human being on the other end will ever fucking read it, right? Almost like 99% of the applications that I've sent out for various jobs over the years, over the last five years or something, to try to get benefits as I was talking about. I just never heard back from just I spent a whole day you know sending in my resume um tweaking my my cover letter trying to do everything right you know filling out these long motherfucking applications and then just to never hear back just I just don't know that that went anywhere when I hit send it could have just fucking deleted it for all I know you know and then I'm like naively waiting to hear something back and of course you never fucking do this is the landscape people have to to operate on and so in that kind of context, these trade unions are one of the only places left, where not only can you find a good fucking job with an obvious pay scale that moves up every single year that you're learning a socially valuable and fucking necessary skill set that will always be wanted in this society.

Not only do those unions, by the way, titrate the influx of workers. It's hard to become an apprentice. That's for a reason. It's a high-skilled trade, so you already have leverage. You can't just get some guy off the street to become a steam fitter or a, you know, a construction utility lineman or an inside wireman as an electrician or, you know, all these other jobs, insulators or metal sheet workers or fucking iron workers, right? You can't just pull people off the fucking street and have them do these, these jobs. These are highly skilled jobs that you have to train for years in and the unions themselves. are the gatekeepers into who gets in.

And so they titrate the level of workers, right? Because if you flood a market with a million new workers, demand for that worker goes down. And so there's a million ways in which these trade unions really go to bat for their workers from the beginning, in the middle, and in the end, right? They'll have your back every which way. You have multiple pensions.

You have contracts with the contractors is that if you're taking these union laborers, you go to abide by these certain rules. If you're a union person and you fucking go on a job site and it's not up to code and there's not enough safety, you can walk the fuck off the site your union has your back. If you get laid off by a contractor as a union steam fitter or an electrician or a plumber,

if you're in the trade unions, right? Iron worker. You get laid off of a job. You get unemployment while you go, you sign the book and you wait for the union to find you a new job. You don't have to go out and apply for other jobs. the union has your motherfucking back, right? And we want these unions to survive.

Yes, these unions have limitations. Yes, their trade union consciousness is limited. Yes, there's a problem with trade unions in the Imperial Corps. We've talked about it a million times, right? But as a pathway to a decent fucking life in this country, where more and more pathways are fucking non-existent. And if you have the gall, like I did, to try and go educate yourself, to try to set yourself up naively for a better life,

only to come out the other end and find there's nothing you can do with your degree. And now you have $50, $60, $200,000 in debt that you're never going to fucking be able to pay off. As I still do, by the way, I have $75,000 in debt for my philosophy fucking degree in the one year of graduate school that I went to that I had to pay for out of pocket, right? I don't know if I'll ever be able to fucking pay that back. So you come out with no opportunities to do anything with the degree that you have and you're saddled with this fucking debt. and then there's a little hope dangled in front of you that'll get it canceled. Nope, just kidding. Of course you can't.

You fuck. You thought we were actually going to cancel your student debt. That's funny. So yeah, people are just fucking emiserated and they're fucking hopeless. And I felt that despair in my bones. I'm a father of three, right? The show got me through the month, but it was never enough to make sure my family had health care or that we had a future, that we had a pension, or that I couldn't be canceled

on Patreon any fucking day. and it just all goes away overnight, you know, and then I'm back delivering pizzas or whatever the fuck, which, you know, I did for many, many years. And I'm not shitting on that at all, but it's just a precarious situation to be thrown back into it. It haunted me this whole fucking time. So these unions are one of the only ways

that you can really forge a good life. And the unions themselves, for all their limitations, are the vehicle of working class power. When the unions are dismantled, first de-radicalized during the Red Scares in the McCarthy era, right, they were de-radicalized. The unions, the old IWW, the old days of like communist party members going into unions and radicalizing them, that was cracked down on, first and foremost, we have to de-radicalize the unions. They had a lot of success at that. And the neoliberalism and the rise of Reagan is like, okay, now there's still some de-radical, they're mostly de-radicalized, but there's still some unions, and that still gives working class people way too much power. Let's deunionize. That's a core part of neoliberal austerity and the bipartisan consensus around neoliberalism has been the all-out assault on the only effective vehicle for working-class power. The only way working-class people ever got a seat at the table of power was through unions, right? And they've always been seen as a threat to the capitalist class.

They've always been hated. The right has always pumped out anti-union ideology. to try to trick the proles that watch them into hating the main vehicle for their own advancement of their own self-interest. And Reagan and Clinton and the neoliberal project has devastated unions. And now there's only a few left. And they happen to be in these very specific areas of high-skill trade with deep, deep traditions, right?

These unions go back a century or more. They go back some of them to the 1800s, where they say. started. They have these traditions. They have this community, this generational handing off of the baton, right? The people who teach the classes that you have to go to during apprenticeship for four years are the guys in the trades before you, right? They've worked their way up within the union by, you know, paying their dues in the form of literal dues, but also of showing out at work that they have each other's backs and they put in the work and they're a good worker and they work their way up in the job site. They work their way up amongst forms.

and they work their way up ultimately within the union. And then they go on to teach the next generation. So immediately when you join these trade unions, you have a sense of community, your brothers and sisters. They start talking like that straight off the back. Brothers and sisters in this union, we have each other's fucking backs, right?

Safety, union safety standards are so fucking high. We're not just out there trying to save our own lives. Construction sites are one of the most dangerous fucking places you can work, right? You have to go through hours and hours of OSHA training and safety training from your contract, from the job site, from the union themselves, to try to beat into your fucking head. You can die at any moment out here.

And more than you, your brothers and sisters, this is the union side of things, are at risk. You have a responsibility to be safe, not just for yourself, but for your brothers and sisters in the union and to have each other's. And just the workers on the site, right?

Some of them are non-union, the day laborers, the laborers that are doing grunt work on those, they're still your brothers and your sisters. There's that sort of community that is fostered. So you have a tradition. You have community. You have pride.

your work because you're actually building up society. You are constructing things, hospitals and schools, many, many other things that are socially, utterly necessary for the functioning of any basic society. So at the end of your workday or at the end of several months on a job site, you walk away and for the rest of your life, when you drive by it, you get to say, hey, I helped build that fucking hospital that's treating people. I help build that fucking school that is educating people right now. That is meaningful work, which I never, ever felt when I was working, for example, in retail, right? For many, many years. I worked in retail selling consumer goods, couches and mattresses and shit. People need to sit down and

people need to sleep. But, you know, that whole world of, like, selling things and being a merchandiser and stuff. Like, it just felt like I'm just, these things that I'm selling are going to end up in a landfill in five fucking years when they want a newer version of the couch or they want a new color couch to fit their new decor or whatever the fuck, right? Very meaningless, in my opinion. Some of you, I think, can relate to that. Most of the work I've done in my life have been meaningless. So, wow, you have meaning, you have reward, you have community, you have rights of passage, right? You have to earn your respect.

Your name, your reputation is everything in the union and in the trades. It follows you from job site to job site, foreman to foreman. So you have to pay your dues by like literally putting in the work. And that is in its own right, a right of passage, which we lack in our society. So these things are amazing, and I sometimes ask myself, and immediately when I get in, I'm fucking prideful. I'm already ideologically aligned with unions. Now that I can say that I'm in a local, that I have a union, oh my God, I fucking love it. Just the sense of dignity that it bestows on you. And I was actually out there working and just doing like, you know, hard ass fucking grunt work

in 95 degree heat, sweating my fucking balls off, lifting big ass shit, climbing over scaffolding and all this stuff. And I thought to myself, you know what? If I wasn't in a union right now, if I was getting paid half as much as I'm getting paid, if I had no motherfucking benefits, if there wasn't a union meeting after this where I can go and meet with my union brothers and sisters

and participate in these events, if there wasn't this whole infrastructure of meaning and reward and community surrounding this toil, I would fucking quit right now, you know? But because that's the same exact labor that I'm doing, the same exact task I'm doing. Because it's surrounded by this infrastructure of meaning and support and community and I know that I'm building a future for my family and I know that I'll have people that have my back and that I won't fucking be without a job or that I won't just be tossed aside by some company who decides to automate me away and I know that I'm building fucking crucial skills that are necessary to the functioning of society and that maybe one day one of my kids will enter the trades and they can use me as a name to get in. maybe one day I can go and work on the union side of things as a political you know representative of the union

fighting for the working classes a whole and for the for the workers in the like these are that makes all the difference right and then the the the wages on top of it the journeyman I'm working under he said he was a non-union worker in the trade for many years and when he he's like a lot of guys that I worked with they didn't even know about the union they didn't know how to get into the union they didn't know about the benefits of the union. They were just kind of clueless about us. We were just doing the trade. And, you know, he's like, when I finally joined the union, my wage just doubled overnight. Not even to mention all the benefits that you get, just doubled overnight. And that makes motherfuckers proud to be in the union. Everybody's wearing union shirts. Everybody has

their respective union stickers all over their hard hats, all over their lunch boxes. They're proud to be in this, in this environment for all those reasons. So I ask myself, why aren't more people in shit you know like this is an obvious path like why aren't more people into this and there's many reasons one of them is it's hard to get in it's they're they're picky with who they let in and you have to jump through all these fucking hoops the second thing is for adults my age to get apprentice wages they're good i mean they're fine they're not great and if you've been working at any other job and you've gotten up to the point where you're getting $25 an hour 30 dollars an hour or whatever it might be to drop back down to $19 an hour for first year apprentice wages,

even though you get all these benefits. Okay, I have an in-law, right, that I said, hey, man, maybe you should shift over here. Like, I bet you could get in. And, you know, he's my age and everything. He was like, dude, I would love to, but I've worked in this fucking whatever business, non-union, just, you know, just a normal job. He's like, I've slowly worked my way up to whatever, $28 an hour. And I have kids and shit. I can't drop down to 19. right so why am i able to do it thank god because of listeners and supporters of this show are enabling me to still bring in an income that can support my family while i work through four years of being an apprentice four years so that's that's one obstacle it's hard to get in

obstacle number two um older people that have built up something like a decent fucking wage uh it's hard to drop back down to apprentice level wages right so you'll see a lot of like 19, 20-year-old guys coming into the trades who they can, they don't have families and shit, they can take on that, that low wage, they don't expect much more when they're just coming out of high school. That makes sense for them, but, you know, older guys, they often won't, older men and women often won't drop down. But if you can take that hit, for whatever reason, you don't have a family, you don't have large overhead, your, your partner makes enough money to sustain you through it, I would highly encourage you to think about it. Another

reason, it's hard backbreaking labor. Okay, no matter what trade you get into, there's no soft trade. There's no trade where you're just sitting in air conditioning all day with your legs up. Now, I personally find sitting and I've worked those jobs where I'm sitting inside an AC staring at a computer for eight hours a day, I wanted to fucking blow my brains out with the nearest weapon. Personally, it just, I fucking hated it. When I worked as a line cook in a kitchen, hot, sweaty environment, everything's moving. You're boom, boom, boom, boom, I actually kind of enjoyed that, the pace of it.

when I worked as a maintenance guy on a golf course I'm out in the fucking heat I'm out in the elements I'm doing stuff it might not be as meaningful as building things but I'm taking care of this golf course I was a teenager at the time and you get through the end of the day

and you feel like you did something you're physically exhausted you sleep like a rock you know you get to go home and shower off all the sweat and you're like I did something today and for me that's always been more rewarding

than the the cushier jobs which many many people people do have and that's i think a temperament thing right some people say if what the fuck no i'm not going out in a hundred degree heat or going out when it's negative 30 wind you know with the wind um in the midwest winters and working outside fuck that so they're the hard physical labor part of it but there are some people who are willing to do that right and um maybe you are maybe you're not something to seriously worth consider my first day is getting slapped in the face to be honest the second day i woke up to go back to the job site i had honestly what amounts to an

anxiety attack it wasn't a full on panic attack but the night when i went to bed and when i woke up in the morning at five a m getting my coffee and getting everything going i had this huge churn pit of my stomach dread and despair am i cut out for this this is a radical lifestyle shift right this is radical i have to get up i have to go put on my shit i got to go work in this fucking heat all goddamn day and all this PPE like holy fuck i'm kind of like intimidated you know this shit is hard um and i think no matter what you will experience that now what did i do after years and years of buddhist meditation and all this stuff i meditate every morning when i get up from 5 a.m to about 520 5 30 i meditate and so that day i got up 5 a.m got my coffee and i just felt

the anxiety churning and churning my skin is hot i'm like oh fuck oh fuck am i really going to do this again is this really what you know can i do this for 20 plus fucking years and i just sat with it sat with it i don't run away from the anxiety anxiety is here don't run away from it sit with it feel it welcome it is an old friend it's been a while since i dealt with anxiety so it was a little disorienting at first but i just sat with it loved it by the time i clocked into work and started working there's no time for the anxiety it went away and it hasn't returned and uh day two day three and beyond, I start feeling like, okay, okay, I can get into this rhythm. Okay, this work is physical, but it's rewarding. You know, it's 95 degrees out today. It's not the worst thing in the

world. I can survive it. Your body has a tendency to adapt to physical labor and the elements. Now, will I ever get used to having to take a shit in a porter potty when it's 100 degrees out a construction site where a thousand other men have taken a shit before me? I don't think I'll ever get used to that but you know there's pros and cons to every motherfucking job um and that's one of the one of the harder transitions if you will my god can we get at least bathrooms with AC um but but okay so i went through the anxiety um got acquainted with the porta potty's uh sweating my ass off but go home more and more feeling really good about how i spent my day um there's so so that's another barrier to entry right physical labor are you willing to do that or not it's not for

fucking everybody um but there are people out there that you know or not i don't want to be mean about this but there's people out there that are not the most physically fit and they do it so it's not something that is like prohibitive like you you know you don't have to be a fucking a crazy motherfucker to to do this stuff like it's it's doable for sure but it does it takes some discomfort and getting used to the discomfort and then there's an adaptation phase okay on the other side of it though and this is where i think it gets tricky another barrier to entry when you're an apprentice you are doing classes you are learning so two days a week for four years um from whatever september through may the normal school year i think we get summers off from

classes but two days a week after you went out and worked for eight or nine hours in the elements you get in your motherfucking car and you don't drive home you drive to the union hall for a three-hour class you learn the theory side of the practice. Whatever your trade is, you go in and you study that trade. And depending on what it is, it could involve math. It could involve understanding the code. It's safety. It's a million different things.

There's classes like it's a college course. You're basically running a four-year college course in your trade. You want to be a steam fitter, right? You're going to be learning about steam fitting and pressurized valves and all this fucking shit, welding and all this stuff, right? and so it goes with all the other trades. So what happens in this scenario is, let's say the 19-year-old kid coming out of high school who parties with his buddies and crushes 10 bushlights a night, he can do the outside labor shit.

He's never known anything else. Maybe his dad was a laborer. I can work on a fucking construction site. I don't give a shit. After that, can you go in and study theory? So a lot of those guys will wash out. 19 years old, you don't have the discipline. you don't have the study discipline and the ability to sit there and turn in homework and pass

tests and if you don't pass with an 85 at least you have to redo the fucking class right it's it's straight up school for the trades so there are people that can do the physical side right they're not so good at keeping up on the on the academic side and there are people i mean shit i have i have a long career of academics as well right so i'm right at home in the motherfucking classroom i've been in PhD programs. I've been in master programs. I have a bachelor's degree. I've been in community colleges at universities, right? I've sat through many, many, many, many, many classes on many, many, many different topics. I know how to study. I know how to pass tests. I have that experience. So that theory side of things is doable for me. The physical side of things, that's also

doable for me. I play sports. I lift weights. I like being out in the elements. I'm kind of perfectly positioned to be able to balance these two things out. But there are people who can go in and kill the theory side, kill the class side. But that might not be able to gut it out on the physical labor side. So I think having to do both of those things, that's a real challenge. And for one of those two sides or another, it washes people out. Some 40% of every apprentice class will just not finish. Right. So they bring on a lot of people and one by one, you start seeing them drop out.

Okay, what's another barrier to entry? drug test and shit when you're in a union you hold up a high standard of sobriety you can't fail a drug test the drug tests are all throughout your onboarding phase they are every time you switch to a new contractor every time you switch to a new job site and they're random there's every time there's an incident if you're involved with any incident any injury any any destruction of property immediate drug test and then they just randomly pull names every month to random drug test so you just cannot be somebody who uses drugs even casually and be in the union so you're a 19 year old guy you're going to classes you're fine with the grunt work but you and your parties like you and your buddies are

smoking weed on the weekends and you get a random and you're done you're kicked off right then maybe you bounce back into the union and you go through an appeal process and they give you one more chance you fail a second one you're done you're not meeting the standards of being in the union so there's a discipline and accountability aspect that you know is the death drive to a lot of young guys and I'll tell you something my ass at 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 I am not being able to do that I mean fuck everybody knows I I um I quit a long time marijuana habit last year right I quit it had nothing to do with the job or anything like that it just for my own growth and maturity I needed to grow beyond this this addiction that I had that I had developed since I was a teenager and I was a daily smoker

right I needed to get this out of my life and I struggled and I tried and I failed and I tried and I failed and then finally it stuck very happy I did I always tell people the number one benefit that accrued to me mental and emotional stability holy fuck I did not know that I was ringing the bell of my neurochemistry every single day and that reverberated throughout my day so basically you're smoking weed every night you get high you wake up the next morning you start coming off the drug if you're going to be one of those people that smokes when you wake up good luck to you that's not a life that i could that's not a lifestyle i could sustain i would i would smoke at night and um you're basically going through

withdrawal during the day and then you you're hitting the gong of your neurochemistry at night then you're going through a subtle withdrawal during the day and you're hitting the gong of your neurochemistry at night and what that produced was wavy ups and downs right i'm depressed one day i'm anxious another day i'm just in a pissed off mood the next day i'm really groggy the next day right it's just like you're you're oscillating and that's true if you use alcohol every day if you use any sort of drug or substance every single day you're developing a chemical dependency that your brain is expecting and it is trying to constantly oscillate and calibrate itself to the intake of that chemical um and there are much harsher and worse things to be addicted to

than marijuana but even if you're a cigarette smoker you know how this fucking thing goes i drink coffee right that's my last remaining addiction is coffee um if i don't drink coffee one morning I have a fucking pounding migraine right so even on that level it's like this is not this should not surprise anybody this is how the body reacts thank goodness I got off that and then all these things started falling into place and life unfolded in a perfectly timed way but what that basically means I could not have met met that discipline and accountability structure at almost any other time in earlier life I'm in my late 30s now Jesus Christ it hurts to say I'm in my late 30s so being able to

to be able to pass random drug test. Now I go into a drug test for the first time of my life, not a concern in the world. Every other iteration of my life where I've had to take a drug test, it was a fucking thing. How am I going to figure this out? How am I going to, you know, to have that completely wash away

and just knowing that at any time I could pee clean because I'm in a different phase of my life. But again, that's what would have prevented me from doing this at any earlier iteration of my life. So I'm not judging young people who are coming up and can't hack that part of it. I mean, I dropped out of college the first time I tried when I first got out of high school, go to college.

I signed up to be an environmental scientist, 18-year-old me, just fucking doing drugs all the time and partying hard as shit. Like, I dropped out. I failed a few classes and dropped out immediately. And it was only after we got pregnant with my daughter when I was 19 that I went back to college and gave it a second try and finally succeeded. But all that is to say, that discipline and accountability aspect to this apprenticeship programs is no joke either.

So for all these reasons and more, people are dissuaded from pursuing one of the only paths available to working class people to have a life of dignity. And that is a sad indictment of this fucking social order. And it's why this social order will not last. But for young people coming up or people looking for a change of pace who can look those problems and those barriers in the eyes, say, I can tell, I can. take the low apprentice wages. I can do the theory and the practice. I can have the discipline and the accountability required of me. I can adapt to the union culture and the work site culture.

If you can check those off your list and you're interested in this, I would say fucking go for it. I would say fucking go for it. It's not going to be good for some people. Some people have other goals and dreams and mind. And I totally understand somebody just saying straight up, dude i'm not working on a construction site for the rest of my life i get it i get it uh but that answered the question that i naively had of like why doesn't everybody do this well you know i think i'm getting a glimpse of why that's the case but for the few of you out there listening who you can check those boxes off um and you know you want you have a family and you're looking to try to build some sort of a motherfucking future and the rotting corpse of this social order um there's there's

something there for people to think about. And young people coming up, you know, I have lots of nieces and nephews, lots of teenagers in my life that come to me for advice. And, you know, it's really hard to tell a young person, go to college and pursue your dreams. My ass did that. I had a philosophy degree. It's really hard to tell somebody, go pursue your dreams and get burdened with several tens of thousands of dollars in debt with no guarantee you're going to come out the other side with a job. And like we say, well, that's because you're a humanity's guy and you know if you do fucking stem you're fine and that's probably more true than not but computer science people people that went to learn how to code they're getting fucked right now in such

an unstable and simultaneously dynamics uh historical moment it's so hard to think five 10 20 years out but you know what's always going to be needed steam fitters electricians iron workers plumbers right sheet metal workers insulators construction crews any society in any country all over the world those people exist

there's also needs for fucking teachers and there's also needs for nurses and a million other totally respectable motherfucking working class jobs and some of which really do give you a chance to excel or at least just to carve out a decent fucking life

that it's not riddled by precarity for yourself so this is just one path of many. But I am inclined more and more to recommend to young people. Think about it. Think about it. You know, think about the trades. But yeah, we shall see. I think one of the last things I'll say on the trades is they're hard to automate, right? It's physical labor. You've got to crawl in to regardless of what kind of trade you do. You're often working on huge construction sites. Every day you're doing something a little different. It's very physically demanding until they make robots that are as strong as

as guerrillas and as agile as spiders that can also be programmed with AI. I don't think those jobs are at risk of automation like many other jobs, especially white collar jobs, are at risk of automation right now. So there's that protection as well. But okay, AI, let's talk about this. And I want to talk about data centers and shit too because they're going up everywhere. they're propping up this rotten economy at the moment. AI.

I just want to say, and maybe I've made this point, maybe it was Allison that made this point on a previous episode, but I want to reiterate it. This is a misnomer. AI means artificial intelligence. What we are actually dealing with right now, even at the cutting edge, are large language models.

There is nothing about them that thinks, despite the way that they put them, you know, your AI is thinking, and it like shows the algorithmic churning that the AI is going through. They are large language models that are predictive software based on probabilities. And you train this predictive software on enough information. They construct and, you know, they really do an impressive job at this. They're like, you know, Google searches on steroids.

They basically do predictive modeling to come up with word after word after word after word to answer basically queries what they are fundamentally and i really i mean i don't think anybody that's listening to this show is going to be tricked by this but we see more and more people thinking like oh my i actually loves me and my ai is is conscious i actually my oh my god my there's a whole world of this too my a i spiritually awoke because of my probing of my ai it it's actually it became sentient right people are getting tricked into like divorcing their wives and shit because they think their AI loves them and, you know, using it for therapy and stuff. And I would just remind people, there is no intelligence here.

There is no reflective novel thinking here. These are predictive language models you're talking to. And at the end of the day, when you're talking to chat GPT or grok or Claude, you are talking to a sophisticated mirror. The AI is mirroring back to you what you put into it. right whatever political ideas you put in whatever romantic ideas you put in it will sycophantically less so now they they turn the sycophant dial down a bit because it was getting a little too greasy with the way that it was lubing people up with the way it talked to like fucking there's that meme going around that every dumbass you know is being told right now by their chat gpt that they

they're just a brilliant thinker like absolutely your idea is great it was the very sycophantic and they tuned that down a bit and people got pissed because people that were in love with their AIs or we're using it as therapy or we're using it as their best friend in this lonely-ass fucking society we live in, they were pissed off at the sick of fancy went down. Maybe one of the only times in their lives that people talk to them that in a way that makes them feel heard, makes them feel validated, makes them feel that their feelings and their thoughts matter.

And, you know, it's heartbreaking. I don't blame those people. I'm not shitting on those people. I get it. But I want to warn people that are listening to this show when we're talking about, hey, These are fucking mirrors. These are complicated Google search algorithms, right? Use them if you want to.

Don't use them if you don't. But there are plenty of other people that can't avoid it because of their job or simply will use it as a utility tool that they use. And I'm just telling those people, it's a mirror. It's a large language model. The whole idea that it's artificially intelligent is a marketing scheme. And that gets into this next thing, which is AI hype. Is this a bubble?

right is just like we saw with the dot com bubble just as we've seen throughout the history of class society and through the history of commodity production we've seen time and time again these overhyped bubbles and there is a way in which this AI stuff is definitely a bubble and it's definitely going to burst but they're really building out some infrastructures data centers that I want to talk about in a second in relation to this idea but I want to make a point really quickly about just because something's a bubble doesn't mean it's all bullshit right there's a reason that google and meta and facebook and all these other motherfucking huge at microsoft all these huge ass companies are building billions and billions and billions of dollars of data centers going around

the country sucking up electricity and using people's fucking fresh water and it's not on a delusional hype dream right they're building out infrastructure in a way that's very analogous, actually, to the railroad boom of the 1800s, where you have this new technology coming online, you have huge capital investment in this new technology, that gets filled up like a bubble that does eventually burst, as the railroad bubble did burst, but what was left behind was still the railroads, right? Many companies went under. We saw the process of consolidation and monopolization. We saw the rise of the billionaires of the people that did own these big railroad companies

that were able to stay around. At a certain point, you're not competing with Union fucking Pacific in the same way that right now you're not competing as a small, scrappy mom and pop startup with fucking Google and meta, right, or Microsoft. There's no way for you for a small business to front the billions of dollars needed to construct a data center. So is the A.

Is there AI hype in a speculative bubble? Yes. That bubble, like the dot-com bubble and the railroad bubble and many bubbles before it will burst. But the dot-com bubble in the 90s didn't just burst and then there's no internet. That's not what it means to burst. It means that there is an overinflation of value here. There's a capital glut being poured into this industry that the actual reality of that industry turning out a return on investment doesn't meet up to. And so there's a coaling back. of that overinvestment. That's what we call when we say a bubble bursts, right? The railroads didn't go away, but a lot of fucking people went under when that bubble burst. The internet didn't go away, but a lot of small startups and mom and pop people trying to enter the arena did go away.

And in the wake of both of those bubbles, what did you actually see? They popped. There was chaos economically. There was restructuring, and then there was monopolization. We saw it with the railroads in 1800s. We saw it with the dot-com bubble

in the early 2000s, or late 90s, 2000s and we're going to see it with AI but these data centers are being built out and when the AI bubble pops it's not going to be a way that this infrastructure won't be needed right there is a way in which this is like the digital this is the railroad infrastructure for the digital age and a lot of these are AI service but there's also like so many other things like um just like cloud storage and logistics and you know automation that is that is happening through here and these big companies also that own these data centers because they're monopolies, they can lease them out to smaller companies to use their data server space.

So, you know, Facebook or whatever, one of these huge Microsoft is building a huge data center, so and so. Hundreds of these are going up around the country, by the way, building this huge data center. It's not just all going to be used just to fucking train AI. Some of them will be, and a lot of them will be, and parts of those buildings definitely will be. But there's a million other things, too, that even if the AI bubble does pop, these companies are not stupid. They're not investing billions and billions of dollars because Elon Musk or Sam Altman have convinced them that there's hype, right? So be aware of that. And here's another difference, though, that I think is really worth pointing out.

When the dot-com bubble burst, the overall American economy was much healthier. And yes, there was some economic chaos during that transition and in the wake of that bubble bursting. But the overall economy was more diversified and at a healthier point in the late 90s. 90s and early 2000s, where it more or less metabolized that bubble bursting. When the housing bubble burst in 2008, right, that was a lot, that was entering an economy that was a lot less healthy than it was in the 90s, and we felt that a lot more. When the AI bubble burst, you are talking about a rotting structure. The economy of 2025 is not as healthy as it was in 2008 or 2007 or 2006, not as healthy

as it was in the 19 motherfuckin' 90s and is less healthy than it's ever been in our entire lives. In fact, and this is a stunning fact that I heard getting into the data center talk. Data center construction

happening all over this country is making up, I heard this on breaking points. Crystal Ball said this on breaking points. Is making up one third of all growth in the economy. So these data centers going up everywhere right all over the fucking country they're spreading them out so that they're less vulnerable

to to attacks or one data center goes down or power outages here doesn't affect all the servers everywhere else so they have to build them out all across the country it is the infrastructure for the digital age there is a bubble to it though and that bubble the AI hype will burst and maybe I'll get back to the AI hype aspect but as these data centers are being built out and we all meet this contradiction on the front lines when it comes to utilities spiking the cost electricity going up because these fucking data centers are sucking them in and fresh water concerns and even noise pollution concerns. I think in like rural Texas outside of Dallas they're building one of these big ass fucking data centers and this small town outside like an hour or something outside of Dallas. I think the perfect union did a did a episode of this. You can find the perfect union online. They did an I think it was them that did this a little investigative mini documentary on this. These people are just like, The decibels in their house at 2 in the morning are like 105 decibels, right? Which is fucking insane, right?

You probably listen to your music and you're in your earphones at like 80, if you're not crazy, 80, 85 decibels. I tune my shit down a little bit because I care about hearing and I'm scared of tinnitus. But, you know, to have you wake up at 2 in the morning and just to hear this rumbling 24-7 because you happen to be living in a town where some dumb fuck piece of shit like Elon Musk decided to run his next to put his next grok training fucking Mecca Hitler data center next to so that you have to not only have your electricity skyrocket, your local water supply be poisoned but you have to now be harassed 24-7 with a low acoustic hum noise that's just bulldozing your fucking brains in 24-7?

There's, I mean, and I mean, this is Texas. There's no regulation. There's no politician going to fight against these techno-billionaires. This is Texas. They have their own shitty fucking power system that goes out every three days because they refuse to get hooked up to the broader grid because they're independent Texas. They're just handing over their whole fucking state

and their whole population to the whims of the, these fossil fuel fucking psychos and these techno billionaire data center constructing fucking psychos with minimal regulation because that's the that's the real legacy of American conservative libertarianism is just let the corporations do whatever they want no regulation the guy that fucking Trump put in to run the EPA is pro pollution he hates the fucking planet these fucking psychos do not care about anything they serve one purpose, the maximization of profit, and the politicians all over the country, but especially in a place like Texas, get on their knees and suck off corporations for a living.

And so these data centers are going up all over the country. They're devastating communities. They're exacerbating every concern you could possibly have about pollution and water supplies and utility costs and climate change, right? they are at the same time propping up the rotting corpse of this economy. The fact was, and I think I repeated this early, I'll say it again, one third of all growth in the economy is coming through these data center constructions, sites. So you take away that part of the economy, we're immediately in a recession.

And we are in basically a retreading of some of the economic paradigms of the 70s where you had stagged inflation. So you had a stagnant economy unable to grow and at the same time you had rising inflation. So things cost more and the economy is not growing, especially on the pace that this system depends on. This system depends on voracious, continual, infinite growth. And not even if it declines, if it just stops growing for a little bit, we call that a recession. If it stops growing for long enough, we call that a depression. So there's a way in which these data centers are basically propping up the entire edifice of the U.S. economy. And if you stopped work on all those data centers right now, we would immediately be in a recession. What is going to happen is there is going to be a crisis in the next four years. While Trump is in office, there's going to be an insane fucking crisis, an economic collapse probably.

An international conflagration of conflict probably is a number two likelihood. Or number three, some sort of environmental fucking collapse, at least regionally. Some may be combination therein of all three. I think the economic collapse is the most likely to happen. That is just going to rattle the foundations of this rotting edifice. And we saw what the Trump administration did the first go around when they had their crisis. That was called COVID And he was like getting up

And talking about pumping bleach Into your veins And his fucking cult supporters Weren't wearing masks Because it's not freedom or something Because they're fucking toddlers And they think freedom means doing Whatever they want at any time they want

Regardless of the cost to everything And everyone else That's their conception of freedom It's an infant's conception of freedom Wham, wah, I get to do whatever I want Nobody can tell me no And it ended his administration The reason that Trump did not win a second term is largely because of the COVID crisis, which precipitated and exacerbated the 2020 uprising, which is deeply connected, right?

Do we have the 2020 George Floyd uprising, the size and scope and intensity that it was if we did not have the COVID pandemic in the months leading up to it where everybody's at home, everybody's angry, everybody's deeply precarious, everybody's. stuck to their fucking phones and their, and their, and their, and their, and their, and their TVs, all at home, not doing shit. So everybody's tapped into the same cultural moment and then we see that video come out and the fucking country goes berserk, as it should have. And I was a part of that and you can go back and listen to episodes of Rev Left during 2020. They're heated. The America on fire episode I did, um, at the pop off of the 2020 George Floyd protest still goes down in my mind as one of the most iconic Reve Left episodes of all time because it was just so of the moment

and going back and listening to it now might feel so out of place and I've not done it of course I don't go back and listen to old episodes but I remember like walking out of the shed after that episode just fucking fuming my heart rate at 200 beats per fucking minute so I mean that was that moment right

and the organizations on the ground here in Omaha and across the country participated in a million different ways and face the brutal, you know, crackdown from the police state that came in the wake of that. So all that is to say, we saw what happened and then, you know, in the wake of that crisis during the Trump administration and they're absolutely abysmal handling of anything serious, we get the corpse of Joe Biden propped up by the Democratic Party. And remember, Bernie won the first several states. In 2020, Bernie again had a, had a transcendent run. and those first few states in the primaries all the way up until South Carolina

Bernie was winning Biden was like fifth Kamala Harris was getting zero percent support in these fucking in these fucking states I think it was Iowa and New Hampshire and then South Carolina was after that but never I think almost never and these facts are in the back of my brain I haven't used them for many years but pretty much no candidate for the Democratic or Republican Party has won the first two or three primaries and not one

the nomination to be the general candidate for the general election for their party. Bernie did that, and that's when Obama got on the phone, and what was the fucking, the black politician in South Carolina, I forget his name's escaping me. Fuck. It doesn't matter. You can look him up. He came out and spoke in favor of Biden.

The whole thing was rigged for Biden. Biden was a joke. And the primaries leading up to the Iowa caucuses. And then in the first couple of instantiations, he wasn't even the top three. and it was only because of DNC and Democratic and Obama colluding behind the scenes because the donors did not want Bernie to come through and become their candidate, right? That they orchestrated the Biden run it. And the Republican Party and the Trump administration were so fucking beat down

because of COVID in particular and the economic and social crisis that emerged out of it and the fucking horrific response to it that the Democratic Party could have literally taken a shovel of shit and slopped it on to that fucking debate stage and more people would have voted for it than Trump at that moment. And then four years of feckless, corrupt, impotent Biden rule and people just forget about it and say, the economy was pretty good though under Trump, right? And let's do it again.

And so we get Trump again. And then after these four years, the American people, whatever crisis occurs, are going to be so beaten down, so beleaguered. so fucking exhausted that the Democratic Party can come up and dump another pile of shit onto the stage and, um, I, you know, they'll win. And who the fuck are the Republicans going to run after Trump?

JD fucking Vance? Good luck with that. So, I mean, that's kind of the death cycle I've talked about, the oscillation back and forth, back and forth as the, as the, as the American population desperately just wants whatever, whatever is not the case right now, they want that. so you get four years of Trump whatever's not Trump we'll go for you get four years of Democrats of Biden whatever's not Biden we'll go for and back and forth until the whole fucking thing collapses which is coming and it could happen within the next four years I'm

I wouldn't be surprised if it does if it does would not be surprised at all so so the big crisis is going to come and just kick in the fucking door on the Trump administration and it's just a matter of what that crisis will be environmental economic international some combo thereof or some other fucking thing we can't see coming who knows all right now i want to touch really quickly back on the ai hype thing the ai thing is hype for a million different reasons it is a bubble it will burst there will be infrastructure left over these data centers will continue on they will create the infrastructure for whatever comes next there will be plenty of data

centers that lose out that have to be decommissioned when the bubble bursts who knows about the broader economic trends, but they're going down in every fucking way. Like I said, if it wasn't for the construction of these data centers, we'd already be in a recession. And we probably in some ways are. And even measuring the economy by GDP growth is already bullshit. The fact there's like little weird indicators, like nobody's going to Vegas anymore, because nobody has the fucking money to do that. So I think in the ways that matter, we're already in a recession. Even if the GDP technically is increasing, the actual experience of most working class people in this country is one of an economic catastrophe that's only getting worse and worse and worse.

So all that aside. The AI is also hype in a different way. And there's two, this is marketing. But there's also a way in which Silicon Valley is a cult that sniffs their own fucking asses and believes their own bullshit. So when Sam Altman gets up and says, we're going to go into universal basic income and AI is going to take everybody's jobs

but it's going to be a good thing and Elon Musk gets up or he did a few years ago and he would say the AI is going to take over it's going to be by 2027 we're going to fucking live in a dystopia run by the matrix and the AI is going to take over

both this techno-utopianism that AI is going to lead the way into post-scarcity society and this techno-dispopianism AI is going to take over and immediately break out of containment in and usher us into an AI overlord situation.

They're both marketing schemes fueling the bubble. They both grotesquely and unfathomably overestimate the actual potential of again what is not even artificial intelligence which is large language predictive

models based on statistical probabilities and trained on already existing information. So novel thinking that could create the sort of breakthrough is necessary to go in the direction of post-scarcity, it's not even there. If you believe in the term AI, you're much more likely to believe in this super bullshit, which is artificial general intelligence and then artificial super intelligence.

We're not dealing with intelligence at all, right? It doesn't mean these things don't have amazing capacities and they're not, you know, useful tools, but just like the dot-com bubble, think about the utopians and dystopians at the beginning of that process, the internet, right? There's the Y2K dystopianism. There was the Matrix got released in 1999, wrestling with some of the implications of this technology in a dystopian way. But there's a lot of utopianism.

The internet's going to connect everybody. It's going to expand democracy. This is the end of history. We're finally going to bring people together across the planet. They'll be able to connect and relate to each other. The economy will just go into perpetual overdrive and everybody will benefit from the fallout of the rise of the internet this is an unforeseen totally new magical technology that's going to take us into the next evolutionary state of our species and it's not that there's some

benefits there's some drawbacks but we muddle through because we have the same fucking mode of production underneath it and the same with AI there is no post-scarcity abundance fucking thing around the corner that's bullshit to get capital to invest more and more in these AI fucking techno oligarchic companies. And it's not going to be the fucking takeover in Terminator 2.0 and fucking Matrix by the end of the decade. That's also bullshit that basically implies that this is revolutionary technology. It's not. It's the next iteration of the thing we've seen every time.

When in history has there been new technology where every new technology, I mean, the fucking printing press had this, for Christ's sake. There's hyper dystopians and hyper utopians, and both of them are never right. It's always somewhere muddling through in the middle. And there's some real benefits for sure, and there's some unforeseen consequences and drawbacks that nobody was talking about, that aren't dystopian but suck ass. And the same basic mode of production continues on. That's what's going to happen with AI.

It's not to say there won't be layoffs. It's not to say there won't be automation. there will be for damn sure but these will be continuing piling up contradictions of capitalism there's an ecological contradiction there's a worker versus techno oligarchate contradiction

there's how are people going to fucking get by if there's a 20% spike in unemployment let alone a 40% spike or a 5% or 10% spike right these contradictions are going to keep piling up they can never be liberatory under capitalism they'll make god the mode of production makes god damn sure that

the techno-utopians will be incorrect, right? And the techno-dispopians, again, are just putting too much inverted faith in this whole fucking thing anyway. It's going to be more shitty capitalism. And the technologies, the general real advance, genuine real advancements that do take place

will not be put to the social good. You'll have a drone helicopter flying around you, making sure you don't have wrong, think about Israel. Right? You'll have a surveillance state now with techno, elements that you can even conceive of 20 years ago, 10 years ago. But the same basic structure

will plot along until it's overthrown or until it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. And I think that's what we're actually heading for. So don't buy into the hype, right? The bubble will burst.

Every other bubble before it has burst and just look back through history and see that this is what's going to happen again. All right, and this gets us into another aspect of this. I'm just going to touch on this because Allison and I are going to go much deeper on this, but the concept of techno-futalism. And here, I think, something I want to say just as a prelude to this conversation coming up. what happens at the end of any mode of production and it's weirdly happened historically at the end of the Roman Empire and even in late feudalism is that the productive capacity of that mode of production that got it to where it was eventually fails and in in the last phases of that mode of production there is rent seeking right a rentier form of the economy

me comes to the fore as an indicator of the decaying nature of the system overall as well as one of the final ways where profit can be extracted from a system that is no longer generative right that is not producing

real things and generating real growth and innovation that is materially sustainable the elites of that society basically strip the society for copper and what we call that process is rent-seeking, right? And again, we're going to get more into this. The idea of techno-futilism,

and I could be wrong here, and people could use techno-futilism in different areas, but why I'm skeptical of the term is that, you know, and again, maybe these authors are not making this argument. I really doubt Jody Dean is making this. Verifakis might be making this. I think he's making this argument that this actually represents a new mode of production, this techno- oligarchic techno-futilist phase um but i would say no what tech what we call techno feudalism is the rent seeking stage of late capitalism we're not going we're not regressing modes of production right monopoly capitalism is the highest stage of capitalism what does that mean it means that there's no higher stage than that for capitalism to evolve into and lenin is still right about that he was right then he's right now

The goddamn thing is taken longer than any of us would want to die, but it's dying. And we're not going into a feudal mode of production. This is all about capital. This is all about investment. This is all about return on investment. This is about profit extraction. This is capitalism through and motherfucking through. But in the late Roman Empire, in the late feudal, monarchical feudal system where there's

agricultural production stagnated and, you know, people basically shifted to a tribute system and a landlordist system. It was always there, but this rent seeking became more and more predominant as the elites of that decaying order tried more and more desperately to extract profit and extract surplus from the laboring classes. This has happened again and again as a whole mode of production comes to an end. This is a long process. It doesn't happen. It's not the decade long process. How long did the fucking Roman Empire last? Two thousand plus years? How long did it collapse

last? It wasn't overnight. It took fucking generations. But I have made the argument that every mode of production has sped up. So while the ancient slave motive production after primitive communism lasted several thousand years, the Roman Empire itself lasting 2000 plus years,

monarchical feudalism lasted about a thousand years and capitalism's been around for about 250, 300, depending on where you want to draw that line. You have mercantileism as the transition from feudalism to capitalism where, you know, mercantilism represented the birth of capitalism out of the decaying corpse of feudalism. And that's how these things, that's how they move. That's how the historical materialist process unfolds. And so what we're seeing is not a regression to a previous mode of production with a new techno spin. What we're seeing is the final highest stage of capitalism in its decaying phase.

Monopoly capitalism is the highest stage. There is no stage after this. This is why we call it late capitalism, by the way. It's not just a nice little term that we say because we're hopeful it's going to end. It's because we know that it cannot go on indefinitely. And as this monopoly stage, the final stage of capitalism decays, it enters its rent-seeking phase. It can't regenerate itself as it has in the past, right? I'm sorry, there is no new deal coming.

The new deal with FDR came at a very specific time in global, international, and capitalist development where that was possible in a way that it no longer is. You can't just redo that. So we're living at the end of this era, and techno-futalism is a poetic way of describing the rent-seeking phase of monopoly capitalism during its decay. And, of course, all of these systems will try desperately to revamp themselves and reconstruct

themselves. And just as we've seen with capitalism, it's been able to do that, right? But eventually it can't. Right. It can't do it forever. It can't adapt and reconstruct itself forever. It's a very dynamic system, right? For sure. More dynamic than feudalism or ancient slave societies by a mile. And that's why we're in the post-industrial revolution and we're talking over computers right now it's all computer right feudalism and romans not roman but ancient slave societies can't produce this and we know as historical materialist that capitalism is this boom explosion of wealth and production and technology and science and medicine that then gets taken over by socialism as a new mode of production such that all of those gains can be put to the social good

instead of the pure and singular focus of profit maximization for a few. And in this way we see capitalism is at one point historically progressive coming out of feudalism. It produces the industrial revolution. It produces and comes out of at the same time the Enlightenment, produces science and all the medical advancements that all of us, you know, are grateful to have today. But its force of production contradicts its relations of production. It produces things so that people don't have to go without homes and without health care and without the basic accoutrements of a decent life. But the relations of production are structured such that it just benefits a few fucking elite

and the rest of us are still forced into social misery and social precarity. It's the relations of production taking society and organizing it along capitalist lines that prevents the system from producing for the general good. but by doing that it creates contradictions mass poverty right next to trillionaire wealth an ecological biosphere pushed to its absolute motherfucking limits as the system itself insists on perpetual and continual growth

these contradictions are showing hey you're done what was once a historically progressive force is now bumping up not just against its social limits not just against its economic limits against its environmental limits. That's new. Feudalism, ancient slave societies,

all other previous hitherto existing societies could bump up against localized or even regionalized environmental limits. We've seen that happen. This is global environmental limits because capitalism is a global economic system. The first really truly globalized system, there's always been trade networks,

going back to the Silk fucking Road, right, and the era of colonialism and all these trades has always been trade but the hyper commodity producing global profit-seeking hyper-integrated globalist economy is fucking new and it's unique to capitalism in its instantaneousness and the depths of its of its interconnectedness so capitalism produces all this stuff it actually even shifts us into a global community right even though we still have nationalism and in war and imperialism and all these things that's another contradiction we're at the same time a global society dependent on each other and actually suffering under the same problems we all suffer from in differing

degrees for sure but we all suffer from something like the collapse of the fucking biosphere or the complete destabilization of the climate system that's a global problem that you can't just say is their problem over there right that is going to affect us all one way or another so capitalism produces the things and actually brings humanity together through its technology that creates the groundwork for socialism and eventually communism. Because ultimately, we're not Americans versus the Chinese or white people versus black people or men versus women or whatever that. We're human beings who have to cooperate for human life and human civilizational flourishing

to fucking be possible. That, yes, there are real differences between us in some ways, but at the end of the day, we have to see our identity as fundamentally a part of not only the human space, species, which is already the cutting edge of psychological identification, because we're still an ego identification mode, and tribal identification mode, and nationalist identification mode, we clearly have to break out of that and become species identified, which is probably the socialist phase, right? But even that isn't sufficient.

We have to become sentient life on earth identified. We have to see that our interconnectedness isn't just human to human, which of course it is it's human embedded in the whole biosphere the plants and animals are fucking crucial to our existence we don't exist without them and you want to fucking kill the fucking bugs and the insects and you want to undermine the biosphere to such a level that plankton fucking levels decrease and and fundamental food chains the base of food chains are irreparably damaged hobbled or even destroyed, human civilization falls, and then human life in general becomes questionable. That's what we mean by barbarism or socialism. Barbarism isn't just mad max level shit,

although it is that too. It's the dissolution of human civilization and possibly the premises and foundations of human life overall. Maybe not, right? Maybe the regression is such that human civilization collapses. Pockets of humanity remain, but they're knocked back thousands of years and then slowly rebuild over generations of millennia to get back to where we are. Maybe they can do it in several centuries, just to get back to where we are. But

that's horrific. That's billions dead. That's an apocalypse. The collapse of human civilization, even if it doesn't mean the extinction of the human species, is a fucking apocalypse. And that's what's at stake. So are we regressing modes of production?

No. Is techno-feudalism a useful tool, yes, but not because it describes a new mode of production outside of capitalism but precisely because it describes the decaying phase of the monopoly stage of capitalism. The final stage

in the final bigger stage, the final sub stage in a bigger stage which we call monopoly capitalism, which has been around since Lenin's time and before. I mean, you know, it was emerging in Lenin's time. In the same way, Marx existed in the rise of industrial capitalism

and talked about that, Lenin existed in the rise of monopoly capitalism and talked about that. And now we're living at the end of what he saw the beginning of, the end of monopoly capitalism, which we can poetically call techno feudalism, but which is still just raw fucking capitalism, you know, turning around and eating its own tail. Hinting at, not even hinting, explicitly pointing to the fundamental unsustainability of the system as a whole. So the question of this century really is,

Which way, not Western man, as the reactionary memes will have it, but which way human species? Hubris, ego-identified, capitalistic, class society-oriented, psychotic, chaotic, self-sabotaging barbarism? Or begin to identify with the human species and the biosphere itself, see ourselves as deeply interconnected and embedded within a web of life, and take the responsibility, accountability, and maturity that it will take to shift the global economy into a new mode of production. a mode of production that you and I call socialism, which is like mercantileism was the bridge between feudalism to capitalism, socialism is the bridge between capitalism and communism. It is the mercantilism of this stage.

Building out of the ruins of the former, still marked indefinitely by the scars of the system it's building out of. socialism is still class society, right? Socialism is still marked and hobbled by the contradictions of capitalism. It still has to navigate its way out. It is not magically and instantaneously communism. Just like feudalism didn't just switch from feudalism to capitalism overnight. No, there's a several hundred years situation we call mercantilism, which is a rough word that we place on this messy transitionary phase

where you still had crazy monarchs existing next to weirdly independent burgeoning republics and everything in between. Studying that period of history is really interesting because then you can apply it to what's going on now and you can see oh, there's some

states that are calling themselves socialist in the same way that the Dutch Republic hundreds of years before republicanism became a widespread mainstream thing. This mercantialism gave rise to these little spots, these little city, states, these little towns and maybe these small little countries in certain parts of the world that were experimenting with republicanism because they were the advanced edge of mercantilism at that time, and they were

basically preludes to the development of liberal capitalist republics. And in the same way, those states today calling themselves socialist are imperfect, are scarred and marked and traumatized by the capitalism they're trying to emerge out of, have different strategies, from Cuba strategy to China strategy to Venezuela strategy, they're all different, but they're all trying to move in that direction and they're the seed bed out of which, you know, global socialism can and will emerge. And as the crises of capitalism continue to mount up, more and more countries will see it in their direct, immediate material interests to restructure their societies in a way that is sustainable and, you know, copacetic with

human fucking life and flourishing. And then those examples, We'll begin to be seen by the rest of the world in our hyper interdependent, interconnected, instantaneous, communicative world. And we'll see, holy shit, that country over there is experimenting with it. And it looks like it's going goddamn well. That country over there just totally did a 180, ushered in a new socialist regime. And they're making these crazy experiments that are actually working out to solve real problems that us over here face two. And when you start to see that, oh, that's how this takes place. experimental pop-ups and some fail and some continue to succeed

and it happens more and more and the good ideas spread oh wow that's how this happens once you realize that then you'll see why the imperial core has to drown every experiment in blood because if it weren't to grab Cuba by the throat and strangle it to death with the embargo there runs the risk of them being able to solve problems and us up here being like, hey, why can't we have that? Hey, that problem that we're facing that is making our lives hell,

that country down there just solved it. Oh, we can't have that. So send in the CIA, send in the sanctions, send in the embargo, try to assassinate Castro 670 fucking million times, right? Have a CIA agent in Bolivia hunt down and murder Che because these motherfuckers are showing what could be. Look at Rosa Luxembourg. the liberal capitalist social democrats teamed up with the fright core the prelude to the Nazis to kill Rosa and Carl because they represented what could be and for a while they can get away with it but eventually more and more happened yet the Soviet Union this scared the fuck out of the west now it failed that was an experiment that was huge robust it served its historical role in so many ways it fell to various things including internal revision

and eventually collapsed. Well, that was the first socialist experiment in human history on that large of a scale. Did we expect it to succeed and forever go on marching and never fail? No, there's stutters and fits and starts and there's regressions and there's experiments that succeed and collapse, experiments that kind of succeed, but then ultimately fail, right? And then hand down to the next generations their successes and failures to learn from, and then we build on that. that's how socialism is going to emerge and guess what

it's much more likely to emerge in the global south than it is in the imperial core for a million different reasons but we need to have socialist and communist presence in the imperial core as that's already happening and continues to happen and that's why we support Venezuela and Cuba and many of us even despite its flaws support China because they're holding out the line and the hope and they're doing different ways of experimenting

with building socialism. You might not agree with China's approach to building socialism. That's their motherfucking approach. And we can criticize them all day for working with the Duterte regime or working with the Israeli weapons manufacturers

which we have to be clear-eyed and honest about but at the same time they play a historically progressive role in this moment of history taking on to some degree the U.S. hegemonic rule helping develop bricks which is an alternative to U.S.

being the reserve currency coming out and saying things like it's time to arrest Netanyahu and we support Venezuelan sovereignty. This is a block of countries that are imperfect but that are the only material force opposing U.S. NATO Israel, hegemonic rule. And it's very clear that if we're going to make progress as a civilization, if we're going to keep moving in the direction of socialism,

we have to take out its number one enemy. We have to weaken and destroy its number one enemy, which is U.S. NATO, Israel as a block, as an economic, military, political bloc. And the U.S. government is not the U.S. people. When I say I fucking hate the United States of America, I mean I fucking hate this corrupt, disgusting political system, this fucking corrupt, disgusting, exploitative economic system,

the deep state, the military regime, the military industrial complex, the CIA, etc. It does not mean that I hate the people. There are some strains on the radical left that gets so fed up with the Imperial Corps, they start turning around and hating the American proletariat. I mean, I get the frustration. Let's just say that. I understand why you would be when you're agent-ornging a fucking genocide and the people around you are acting like nothing's happening. I can understand why you can start to get real disillusioned with the revolutionary capacity of your neighbors and community.

But at the end of the day, these motherfuckers in it choose to be born here. They're people trying to get by. Life is fucking hard. Life is suffering. They're scared about their future. They're not all tapped into our algorithmic echo chambers. They don't all fucking follow the news. They don't all have the moral or intellectual capacity or curiosity to pursue the things that you and I might pursue or might not pursue.

There's still human beings in a global order that has more interest in our system than the other one. And at the end of the day, all my friends and family are fucking working class people. born in and around Omaha, Nebraska, for the most part, the ones that I deal with on a day-to-day basis. They're good fucking human beings. And they don't want fucking babies killed in Palestine. And if they knew what the fuck the U.S. was doing in Venezuela, they'd be against it. And if they had all the information, I'm positive that they would come to the right conclusions. But they don't, and they probably won't.

But you and I, we know. We have the burden of knowing and the responsibility that comes with it. And the moment you start writing off millions of people, you know, that is the poison to building a mass movement. And we don't have to be narcissistic and think that global socialism is going to be led by the U.S. proletariat. It almost certainly won't. But we need to build up a serious, principled, Marxist, organizationally mature situation here in the U.S.

that has unapologetic fucking support for comrades across the global south. That's proletarian internationalism. You don't get to dictate what society you're born into or the social conditions you have to operate in, but you still have a responsibility to do everything you can in that context to try to create a better world, ultimately for everybody. Even the assholes and dumbfucks. So, you know, keep that in mind.

With the Venezuela situation, who knows how that's going to happen, Trump tried to do that embarrassing coup in his first administration and was defeated by Venezuelan fishermen, which I fucking love that story. They were rounded up in hogtie until the Venezuelan government got to them. But unconditional support of Maduro and the Venezuelan government, right? Unconditional support. I'm not interested in people sitting in the Imperial Corps with their quips about this or that. they are fighting for their fucking lives

Trump administration is the U.S. government unhinged, right, with no restraint. The deep state, Israel, Zionists, the CIA are going all the fuck out. They're trying to topple domino after domino at Syria. The Iran war is coming.

Israel is not just done with Iran. They know the Trump administration very well might represent their last chance to move and topple Iran and do to Iran what they did to Syria. They're putting pressure on Venezuela because why? They're trying to weaken this global

alliance of countries that are imperfect, but that are joined in solidarity by their victimization at the hands of U.S.-NATO Israel. Iran is very different in nature than Russia, which is very different in nature than Cuba, which is very different in nature than Venezuela, which is very different in nature than China, which is very different in nature

than Vietnam. We can go down the list. Vietnam is a little different because they have pretty good trade relations with the U.S., but you know, they technically have an ostensibly and genuinely, you know, from an ML perspective, socialist government there. So, you know, then you have the Sahel states coming together to try to resist French and U.S. Afriqom imperialism and neo-colonialism on the African continent. Movements like Hezbollah and Ansjah Allah in Yemen and obviously the Palestinian resistance on the ground of Palestine doing the same thing.

And these are the material forces actually opposing U.S. imperialism, Western colonialism. and ultimately because these are all different aspects of the same thing, global capitalism. Whether they know it or not, right? Whether Iran knows it or not, they're on the front lines against global capitalism. Because they're on the front lines against global imperialism. And monopoly capitalism is the highest stage of capitalism is synonymous with imperialism, as Lenin taught us. So these are the material forces at the forefront. My only wish on China, and this is just the wish of some dumbass in Omaha, Nebraska,

God damn, can't you see China, as I've said many times before, that of U.S. NATO Israel, the Fourth Reich, as we can call it for shorthand, if the Fourth Reich can topple Syria, topple Iran, tie up and militarily deplete Russia, topple Venezuela, strangulate Cuba, they're doing that because they're coming for you, China. They're doing that because they understand they have to go smaller domino to medium-sized domino to the big down. domino and you're the big domino and if you don't step in aggressively at some point along these dominoes falling eventually the you the fourth rike is going to be able to achieve its aims weaken all of its enemies and all your possible fucking allies economically militarily or both reconstitute and replenish their military arms supply and come for you Maduro came out and said that leaders of other left-leaning countries throughout Latin America have been in talks with Maduro and are ready to show solidarity. We'll see how that turns out.

I'm not exactly sure how far various countries will push it. They all have their own national interest to be concerned with and entering a direct hot conflict with the U.S. is not high on a lot of Latin American country's wish list, as it wouldn't be on anybody's. but they see the writing on the wall to some extent. And, you know, they know that having the U.S. come into their continent, basically, and be able to do what impose the Monroe Doctrine and topple governments at will is not good for them either. And so we'll see how much they resist.

The left-leaning regime in government, democratic fucking government actually serving the people in Mexico, has come out and said completely that this, pathetic attempt by the Trump administration to link Maduro and the Venezuelan government with the drug cartels is just laughable. There's no evidence to support it. They're deconstructing the ideological pretense that Trump is flimsily using to show aggression to Venezuela. And who knows if they'll actually push forward on it, but there's no reason to think they won't. They tried in the first administration. It's clearly a top goal of the deep state here in the U.S. and the

military industrial complex broadly conceived, which includes the CIA. It's clearly at top of their agenda to topple Iran and Venezuela, right? Why would it not be? And so would I be surprised at all if Trump makes a belligerent, aggressive move on Venezuela? No. Now, the Venezuelan people ain't going to sit back and fucking take it. Venezuela can fight back. They're not as big or as rich or as strong as the U.S., but the U.S. is scattered.

There's no real desire at home for any war like that. We don't have a democracy, so they'll do it if they want. But for the Venezuelans who have lived through decades of Chavez and then Maduro and under socialist government, they've been deeply educated on the reality of imperialism. And, you know, they might not always agree with each other. They might have differences with the Maduro government. But almost nobody in Venezuela wants to see the U.S. come in and topple their fucking government and install their own puppet regime.

They will fight like hell to prevent that. And America, for all its strength and belligerence and swagger, I mean, it gets, its nose-blooded whenever it goes in anywhere from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan certainly you should fucking go into Venezuela you're going to get your fucking shit rocked and some 17-year-old, 18-19-year-old

who wants a Dodge Charger and Free College are going to go fucking get in a tussle with a motherfucking Venezuelan hard-ass motherfucker trying to protect his homeland and his family and you're just doing it for your fucking personal paycheck and because the CIA wants you to? So I said,

tongue and cheat kind of but I mean deep down I wish this would fucking happen if the U.S. makes a move on Venezuela love to see any Latin American coalition come together to do anything to try to resist it and then China make a move on Taiwan the moment the U.S.

becomes actively directly engaged in Venezuela and they're trying but they're still not out of Ukraine yet and they're fucking funneling all their weapons and shit into Israel so they can do a genocide. They are stretched thin all over the planet this is how empires fall and if you let them topple all the

dominoes dominoes and then restructure it's going to be way harder and china's made very clear from day one we're going Taiwan is ours it's not if it's when we are getting Taiwan back that is the last refuge of the scoundrel nationalist that we're defeated in the civil war and it's our fucking territory and we're coming for it fuck you and it's it's a matter of sovereignty that's our shit The U.S. fucking owns Puerto Rico and Guam and Hawaii, and it thinks it has the moral right to tell China that Taiwan is not rightfully theirs. That's just ideological fluff.

It's all material, right? They want Taiwan as a basing ground out of any future aggression they might impose on China, and there's a strategic economic situation with Taiwan as well, with its chip manufacturing, and just its strategic geopolitical location for Western imperialist powers. to be able to operate in the South China Sea in and around China and throughout the entire region. It's a forward base. Just like South Korea is their base of Northeast Asia.

Israel is their forward-facing base in West Asia. Taiwan is their ideal forward-facing base in the South Pacific. So we'll see what China does. It's very restrained and moderate and reserved in these matters. It doesn't want to encourage war when it doesn't have to. But it's also very smart and it has to see what's coming. And again, the Iran thing with Israel still on the table. That's coming.

Israel is in a recouping phase. It's getting ready with fits and starts and promises and holdbacks to go into Gaza and clear it out because there's a contradiction between the right-wing government in Israel that wants to use this opportunity to go forward. full steam ahead and take over Gaza and create basically a new West Bank out of it where they can ethnically cleanse the area and then settle it

and then there's the material concerns of the US or the US same thing. The Israeli military which says hey we're depleted our reserves are exhausted we need more time and weapons to plan this fucking thing out because we're going to go in there we're going to face

Hamas militants in the rubble fighting a guerrilla warfare against us with these fucking reserves that got shit training and are already exhausted. So, you know, Netanyahu is saying we're going in and maybe we're not. Okay, we're going in. He's kind of trying to satiate both sides of that balance. But they're going to go in eventually.

And in the same way that they're doing it on a miniature level with Gaza, trying to navigate that balance and trying to recoup to move in, they're doing the same thing with Iran. They're buying themselves time with Iran. So the U.S. Empire wants to, take on everybody, right? Let's take on Iran. Let's take on, you know, the comrades in Yemen.

Let's take on Venezuela. Let's take on Russia. Because they're coming for China. And it seems to me that China has to eventually make a proactive move, not a reactive move. And they're trying to with the bricks and these other things, playing the long game in a way that the U.S. can't. But I'm not sure how much time they have left. And Trump administration is belligerent enough to make Taiwan a part of their third or fourth year plan for this administration. So I think that is coming sooner than we might otherwise expect.

I could be wrong. I could be wrong. There's lots to consider and there's lots of variables there. But it seems clear what the U.S. strategy is. And if China wants to preempt it, you know, doing something when they make a move on Iran and Venezuela, seems like a no-fucking brainer. But what the fuck do I know? All right, my friends, that is the episode for today. Again, this is a solo rev left up. This is where I come and talk about current events and give my analysis.

And for better or worse, and I hope for better, I'm going to be doing a lot more of this on the main feed because, again, my schedule is so motherfucking tight, is so narrow that it's becoming increasingly hard, if not outright, impossible to coordinate interviews with people, follow up, et cetera. If I've already made a commitment to you that I'm going to interview you, I will see good on that commitment. I'm a man of my word, and I will make sure that if I already promised you an interview,

we will do that interview. I'm not going to cancel anything. But as time goes on, I might have to shift more and more to these sort of things where I have complete control when I come in and what I talk about, as opposed to trying to do all the behind-the-scenes coordination with guests, read the books, create the outlines, find the right time that works for both of us. That's becoming increasingly hard. I have like four hours and one day a week where I can do shit.

And so let me know what you think. The way that you can contact me most routinely and in a way that almost always gets a response, as I always say, is on the comment section of Patreon. I can't follow up my DMs on Instagram. I can't follow all my DMs even on Patreon. But when I post these episodes public or Patreon, I post everything on Patreon. And in the comment section of Patreon is where I respond to people. So if you have something you really want to say, or more importantly, if you want to

give feedback on episodes like this and you want to give your two cents on something I said or push back on anything I said. That's where I will see it. That's why I will read it. And that is where I will respond to it. The comment section of the Patreon post and everything we do also goes up on on Patreon, whether I'm a guest on somebody else's show, whether it's a public episode like this or whether it's a Patreon exclusive. They all go up on Patreon either publicly or to the the specific um tier of people who support the show obviously everybody gets if you support the show you get bonus content from me um but they all go up there so if you want to respond to anything i say that is the place to do it if you want to reach me for any reason that's the place to do it and i really

would love people's a opinion on if they're cool with this if rev left shifts not completely but more in this direction um and i'll do cool things like i i did a thing where i took a bunch of questions on Patreon that I'm going to turn into like an office hours thing where I'll take two to three questions asked and I'll mull them over. I'll do some personal research when I have the time and then I'll come and I'll give like a really considered studied opinion on a very specific question asked exclusively by patrons. So that's another cool way that we can communicate and interact. So yeah, on the Patreon, let me know if you're cool with that kind of honestly necessary shift that the show is going to make but also know that I'm going to try to stay

dynamic as possible. We're always going to do Red Menace. We're always going to do Rev. Left solo apps. We're always going to do interviews from time to time. We're going to try new things like the office hour stuff. And we're going to continue to do stuff like the philosophy series where I reflect and respond to philosophy lectures, which people really like. So Rev.

Left's going to stay dynamic, going to stay present. It's just always in a constant state of evolution. Like, as we as dialyticians know, everything always is. Love and solidarity. You know, I'm sorry.