Rev Left Radio - Political Comedy, Online Discourse, Utopianism, and Jeff Bezos

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

Shawn and Aaron from the "Srsly Wrong" podcast join Brett to discuss left-wing comedy, online discourse, ideology and tendencies on the left, the concept of Utopianism in politics, the crimes of Jeff Bezos, and more!  Find, listen to, and support the Srsly Wrong podcast here: https://srslywrong.com/ Outro Music: "Lets Start A Riot" by the Haymarket Squares Find their music here: http://www.haymarketsquares.com/ Support our Show: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Warning, today's episode of Revolutionary Left Radio has been hijacked by naive, utopian idealists. They have a high level of beautiful naivety, the type of beautiful naivety that deserves to be crushed and must be crushed. Revolution! Revolutionary left radio now oppose the system any way you know how Unite the left against the capitalist lies and liberate the proletary as mine Fight for all the working class

Fight for equality Fight against the right free fascist ideology Tune it in and turn it up loud. Revolutionary Left Radio starts now. Welcome everybody to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade Brett O'Shea, and today we have on the Wrong Boys, Sean and Aaron, from the Seriously Wrong podcast,

to talk about, well, a bunch of different stuff. We'll get into it. But Sean and Aaron, go ahead and introduce yourselves and say a little bit about your backgrounds for people who don't know who you are. My name's Aaron. Geez, my background. I don't know. We've been doing this podcast for about four years and we're just interested in exploring lots of different ideas and having fun with them and creating 10,000 years of world peace. Creating 10,000 years of world peace. Yeah, once we reach 1,000 episodes, that's a guarantee from us to you.

We promise. Yeah, and I'm Sean and yeah, I'm like a sort of a comedian and political cartoonist. We both live in Vancouver. We're both very interested in politics. And we like humor and permanent world peace forever. That's our number one is humor, second favorite permanent world peace forever. Beautiful. So if people that don't know your podcast, how would you kind of frame it? How would you explain it to somebody who's never heard what you guys do?

Well, we're very fascinated with conflict and like ideological difference. there's a term that we use that I think was used by like Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson reality tunnels is a big fascination of ours that someone could that two people can look at the exact same information and come to such radically different conclusions partially based on like their existing knowledge but also like the language that they prefer to use and yeah we're interested in like how those gaps are bridged and just like how can we build a mass understanding from from a perspective that like gets results to take care of people make the world a better place and which culminates in perfect utopia forever that's sort of um and and laughing like

laughing and making jokes and having leftism not be something that guts you that makes you feel like the world is hopeless that makes you feel like it's too often when you look at the inherited situation we have and like the reality that we face um it's it's really easy to be like, dejected and sad and pessimistic. And we want to counteract that. Yeah. Yeah. So, if anything, like, people criticize us for being too optimistic or not being cynical enough or being naive or being, I don't know, unsurious, I guess. Yeah, and those are all true, like, accurate criticisms. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But I think it's good. I think it's, it's like, it's a good thing. Yeah. We started doing the show, like, very quickly after we met each other. And it just,

it just sprung out of the conversations that we started having basically immediately, which was surrounding all the kinds of things Sean was talking about. And also just like, why aren't people more compassionate to each other like when we're trying to change the world? Like compassion's a good thing, right? What's with all this misanthropy? What's with like, oh, humanity sucks? Is like, is that really productive? Is that even really true? Like, yeah, it's true sometimes. A lot of humanity sucks sometimes. But it's also, often not true. Yeah, like every, every broad statement like that is true in a sense, false in a sense, and meaningless in a sense. Like, yeah, humanity kind of sucks, but then humanity also kind of rules.

Like, we invented the criteria that evaluates whether or not we suck or we rule. So that's pretty good. But then another sense is totally meaningless because, like, why even put humanity in some sort of category? Like, what purpose does that serve? Like, what's the functional purpose of that analysis? Well, yeah, you know, a few years ago, and I was part of this, too, I, I, I, certainly partook in it, but like on the internet, um, a few years ago, before the, the most recent election during the Obama administration, there was like this market increase in the amount of pages that were like nihilistic and, and depressing and a bunch of people would, you know, there's like a big like sort of nihilistic, depressing meme

culture that arose, sort of like in the midst of the Obama administration. Do you guys remember that at all? Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah. And then like as the past few years have went on seeing like the wholesome meme thing start to pop up and like just memes about friendship and caring. We were just like, oh, yeah, that's, that's more my speed. That's, that's my thing. Well, yeah, and I feel like when we first started doing the show, I felt like we were legitimately acting in this rebellious way that we're saying, like, no, you can actually

be funny without being, like, shitty to each other. And like, there's ways to, there's, there's types of comedy that are rooted in, like, the best things about humans rather than the worst things. and I mean I obviously still have a taste for like you know dunking on low information voters of gas price voters like sure like that's hilarious and like being negative definitely has a place but like I think that we identified sort of a lack of balance that was important for us to try to like counteract and it was something that we we bonded over in the show yeah I think you guys you guys make a lot of use of irony but it's not this sort of this sort of newer negative irony where

it's like, you know, we're trying to tear shit down. Like your irony, at least from my judgment of it, it seems more directed and more constructive than other forms of irony that are popular today. How do you guys think about the use of irony in your comedy and irony broadly? Well, I think one thing that happened early on in the show was that we noticed that, okay, we have this idea of compassion and being nice to people and giving everyone a fair shake. And we were like, there's a there's a marked lack of conflict in a lot of our episodes like we would manufacture arguments between each other like and it's obvious that that's what we're doing but just to bring that into it and it's it's become a huge part of how we do the comedy bits and the

comedy sketches is to instead of the target of irony being niceness or goodness the target of the irony is this like just you know so many of our characters are completely self-interested psychopath wild fucking just idiotic monsters that just like cut each other down at every chance they get they exist only to like just just to be completely lack all self-awareness and just cut each other down and like while also trumpeting what fantastic people they are who contribute so much so yeah if the target of your irony is awful insane psychopaths who are self-interested monsters. It has the opposite message while getting the added benefit of the dramatic tension and the conflict being part of the sketch. Let's go ahead and get into the broader discussion because, you know, I started listening

to Seriously Wrong probably right before I launched Revolutionary Left Radio. And I did find it so unique because it mixed, you know, left-wing politics with genuinely, like, hilarious sketch comedy bits. And as you guys were kind of indicating a deeply sincere humanism and empathy that really permeated everything you guys did, there have been shows where, you know, you've made me laugh out loud one minute and you've, like, legitimately brought tears to my eyes the next. And I find that, you know, so refreshing in a world of just sort of like, like, as you're saying, like destructive irony or just kind of like being pithy for pithy's sake, etc. So I guess why did you guys start the podcast and what were some of its founding ideals and goals?

And how have they changed over time? Well, I think we just started it because, like, we met on the internet. We met, like, in comment sections on Facebook, like, fighting about veganism. Yeah, mostly veganism. And, yeah, we had, like, this big, like, anti-Atheism rationality kick, like, right at the beginning of our, and it's, like, not that we're religious or, like, not even that I don't think. think rationality is good, whatever that means. Like, it's pretty good.

But, like, just these people, these obnoxious people that were, like, just... We could be honest. Like, one specific person in particular, like, just caught both of our ire. Just, like, vegan, atheist, just, like, annoying human being. Some of the founding ideals and goals, I think, came out of the first conversations we were having, which were about some of the things we've mentioned. like reality tunnels or another phrase we've used for it is ideological tribalism bridging differences between those things uh anti-misanthropy and compassion um we've also both had an

interest in utopianism and just like uh fully automated luxury communism like that that branch of um yeah from before there was really a meme like that we had the sort of like beginnings of the fully automated luxury thing, like... Yeah, like post-scarcity. Even, yeah, before even those words were strung together, we were talking about post-scarcity societies and like how automation's good. And like, we've talked about anti-work politics was a string through earlier episodes. And it's not that like, you know, people shouldn't do work,

but it's more of like the tragedy of being forced to do things you don't want to do just in order to survive. I think those were a lot of the founding ideas. Also, we were very interested in something we called expanding people's perceptions of the possible, just like throwing things out there that aren't, you know, like the most radical person in the world might say, oh, a 20-hour work week isn't under the same system we have now under capitalism. That's not a very great change.

It doesn't do a lot. It's guillotine insurance for the... Yeah, it's a mere compromise from the parasitic ruling class. But in terms of the mainstream conversation, talking about things like that, talking about things like providing everybody unconditionally with food, shelter, clothing, expanding libraries to be like skill building centers and having tools and all sorts of other things being provided to people, talking in terms of reforms. I guess, but reforms that are so out there that we could hopefully try to shift the Overton window more in a direction of like, yeah, some of these more radical, far-left liberal things are possible. And I would just rather the mainstream conversation be more in that direction than, unfortunately, the direction it has been going. Yeah, and the sort of like opposition to the cycles of online conflict. in these like circular, just useless conversations where there's nothing communicated, there's

no middle ground reached, there's no understanding, increased understanding between two people, but there's just that like very rigid conflict with something that we wanted to counteract early on. And as for like how we changed over time, I think one of the main things that we discovered, like for ourselves, for our own purposes, we didn't discover for humanity, but we discovered for ourselves, like arguments and ideas that were new to us that really captured us and and helped shape our ideology over time and that sort of changed and I always want to sort of shit on myself in early episodes like I was really naive and stupid and that's like probably true but I'm not sure how much less naive and stupid I really am now I think it's just

four years you kind of like cringe when you look at your own going process yeah and also this another thing that's changed is the society around us because when we started it was sort of before the Nazi turn. So, like, in society, where, where Nazis suddenly became, like, relevant again. And so, like, early on, we were very much like, oh, everyone has a, you know, everyone's got a good point of view to, like, consider. And, like, just because someone has bad ideas, doesn't mean that you shouldn't, should, like, hate them as a person.

And then we're like, oh, okay, well, actually, uh, we were, we were wrong. And, yeah, when we were talking about, like, the far right in early episodes, we'd like anarcho-capitalists like yeah they they get a lot of things wrong but like maybe we could forge some alliance with them you know they have they have some right ideas and like that's the furthest right you can go right and it's like oh no no no Nazis are back right and we're like oh geez yeah exactly i think anybody like you're talking about like looking back and seeing some things that you didn't see coming and being kind of cringy looking back i think anybody with a facebook has that feeling because we all have that timeline reminder of five years ago you know

three years ago you said this and it's like oh god like please can i scrub that from the record um so i think that is that's just a human thing even like we've only been doing our show for maybe a year and a half not even a year and a half and i've like developed politically immensely in in that in that period of time so i mean i think that's just a part of of growing and as the material conditions change all around us we're sort of forced to to grow with it um you you mentioned the sort of sadness and the tragedy of wage labor and the wasting away of our lives. I feel that in your guys' show, and certainly we talk about it a lot in this show, and podcasts weirdly are something that I think the modern worker, especially in our generation,

leans on to sort of get themselves through the day. And I've certainly listened to seriously wrong countless work days to get through the drudgery. and the meaninglessness, and the sort of soul-crushing toil that wage labor promotes. And so, like, if my body is forced to be rented out to the ruling class in order to put food in my kids' bellies, at least I can put on these headphones and let my mind be intellectually engaged and stimulated

and my education continue, even in the context of me doing totally meaningless, soul-crushing shit on the side. So, like, how do you guys think about the role that podcasts play in the workplace generally. Yeah. Well, like, I definitely have that have had that same experience. Like, uh, until about a year ago, I was doing hotel maintenance. And so I was just basically by myself all day, like being called to fix things or doing whatever kind of random junk around the hotel. So I always had an earphone in listening to various kinds of podcasts. And it, it is like edifying in exactly that way you talk about like, okay, you're,

I have to do the things that you're saying, but I can control what is going on in my ears and my head. It's a little mini zone of autonomy that's provided for by this technology. It is pretty beautiful. Yeah, I think the only saving grace is that our bosses think that we're listening to music because if they realize that we were actually really enjoying ourselves somehow, they would have stopped it right away. Little do they know we're listening to communist propaganda.

What you listen to? Oh, just some communist propaganda. Oh, cool, cool. Maybe I'll check it out too. Yeah, you should, boss. It'd be great. So it's funny we, sorry, before we move on, it's funny we bring this topic up because we just got a phone call.

We have like a hotline on 1-800 number for people to call and leave us messages. And we got one yesterday from this guy who was very drunk, but right at the end, he was just like, I'm trying to catch up on your show, but there's so many episodes. and, like, I love getting paid to listen to you guys. And when I get paid to listen to you guys, it's so good. And I think we were laughing. Yeah, we were like crying, laughing, listening to this message. And I love you guys.

I would totally listen to you for free. But if I'm getting paid to listen to you guys, oh, my God. That shit is so nice. Oh, oh, I love that shit. I want to get paid to listen to you guys. I wish somebody would pay me to listen to you guys, but I'll just keep going to work and listen to you guys at work. So I love you guys.

Peace. That's like my strategy at work. You know, I obviously work a shitty, like, office administrative job, low pay, just horrible all around. But like I make it a sort of a game. Like, how little can I do without getting in trouble? Like, how long can I go to the bathroom for? Like, how long can I disappear without anybody thinking?

like I'm totally off the fucking rails and all the time I'm listening to podcasts I'm working on the outline for this podcast I'm listening to comedy I'm just trying to like squeeze as much life out of my wage labor day as I possibly can without getting fired it's it's really the dream

I mean they're pinching everything they can out of you and I mean depending on the job I think that you actually have a moral duty to try to do less work absolutely so I want to talk about your comedy a little bit because there's lots of left-wing podcasts all running the gamut from liberal to, you know, the most extreme leftist you can imagine. But one thing that I find

unique about yours is the sort of, is the comedy that you guys inject into it. And my favorite sketch bits that you guys do are the keyboard warrior segments, fully equipped with the sound of the keyboard clacking away at a million miles a minute. I think I find them so funny precisely because there's such a perfect reflection of the absurdity and the arrogance and the toxicity of online spaces, especially online political spaces. So I guess where did you, where did the idea for that come from? And how do you view it as a, do you view it as an ironic critique of some of the more toxic elements of online leftist discourse? Yeah, definitely. Well, and I mean, not just leftist discourse, but I think political discourse more generally, it just happens that we

mostly have leftist discourse ourselves now. But back when we started that, we were in more sort of in that original headspace, like the ANCAPs, like maybe we should figure out how to talk to those and caps so they understand why pooling resources for shared good is a positive thing. Yeah, even the first time we did that sketch, like when we came up with it was on an episode about nonviolent communication. It was episode 16, I think. And the person that we had on and was interviewing for that was an ANCAP who's very into nonviolent communication. But yeah, we were just looking for sketches to do and we were like, well, where do people have the worst kind of communication like for our comedy bit? It's like, oh yeah, the internet. Yeah, there's something just uniquely

toxic about sharing short pieces of writing with each other in a place where you can't see each other's like face or social cues or like the subtle things that let you know when you've hurt someone's feelings and that they're a human being and they deserve basic human respect like you would treat a bus driver or something. But over the internet, because you're mixing like in our regular sort of day-to-day life in conversations in person, we've built up a lifetime of experience of conversations that are based on a bunch of really complex, sort of like subtle cues in the way that we move our hands and our eyes and our face and the modulations of our voice. But then when you move to the online environment, you're writing tiny essays at

other. And I think there's sort of a natural, when you're writing, you're using a different set of experiences to inform that. And the natural things that come out of writing to some degree is like an increase in fantasy, an increase in like polemics, an increase in, like, just completely writing off other people and their ideas. And there's all these dishonest tricks you can use to like be a more effective internet arguer at the expense of like shared, like shared enrichment like for example picking their weakest argument and only responding to that and ignoring everything else they said like that's really really useful online you can't really like pull that off in person the same way yeah i think there's a certain um there's a performative

aspect online i mean that that might sound obvious at first but when you're in a face-to-face discussion with somebody you're not actually performing for a third party you're actually talking to that person on their own terms and you two are engaged in a social situation where if you say something that crosses the line it could get aggressive or you say something weird it could get awkward and so you you sort of put your best foot forward and try to be as understanding and friendly as possible but when you're online you are not only directly attacking whoever your opponent may be that moment but you're also performing it for everybody that follows you everybody that you know is inevitably going to search through that thread and read this argument

or read that post. And that also, I think, helps distance us from the social realities of one-on-one engagement and sort of becomes like we're all dancing on a stage for one another. Do you guys agree with that? Yeah, no, totally. We're also searching for like those dopamine hits of the little notification that someone has, someone has liked your, and it's the same dopamine hit, whether or not, it's the person you're arguing with or someone who always agreed with you in the first place. Either way, you're like, ooh, yeah, a little red dot. Thank you so much, Zach. Yeah, what I was going to say. What you're talking about with the performance is like this extra layer of self-consciousness because if I'm having a one-on-one discussion with someone I

disagree with, I can talk to them for them and the words are tailored to them. And I don't have to worry about what all my other friends and the entire judgment of history, you know, like if this gets screenshoted out of context and shared somewhere, like part of you now, especially as we see this happen more and more, like realizes that everything you say online has to work from all these different angles and for all these different audiences. And it really, really changes how you talk to people. Yeah, because like part of empathizing with someone is meeting them, if not halfway, at least a slit, like just a little bit towards their reality tunnel, a little bit towards the way that they see and think about the

world. But there is, I think, a real risk, especially around leftist circles, that if you are trying to meet someone halfway to be able to actually communicate with them, that you'd be worried that you would say something that implicitly supports, like, their arguments or implies that, like, you support them or you're part of the same sort of group as they are. It can at least be interpreted that way. Yeah. And if it can be interpreted by that, if it can be potentially interpreted that way, and there

are people who don't like you for any reason, then someone will interpret it that way. And they'll make a website about you. Or at least a group, a group about how bad you are to share screenshots. For sure. I was going to ask you guys, you know, I feel this a lot. Obviously, you know, with the podcast and me being online as much as I can. And like, there is this sort of, like, when you get called out, even whether, regardless of the sort of integrity of the critique, whether it's total

shit or whatever, but there is a sort of low-level anxiety that we impose on ourselves by having this sort of online toxic relationship and this performative aspect of being online, where like if I post something and I see that it's being taken off in a new path that I didn't anticipate, usually I'm pretty good about like, okay, is there anything in this tweet that could be taken, you know, in any direction that I don't like. like, but once in a while it'll slip past you. And then all of a sudden there's this confrontation now. And so like this, this, the phone in your pocket or whatever while you're at work is like

a, is burning a hole through your leg because you have this low level anxiety now that you have to go back and address these arguments because exactly because you're, you're trying to not only address the arguments, but you're trying to put on a show for other people. Like this, I don't think we talk about this anxiety of confrontation online enough. But I think we all have it. And I think when we're getting called out from whatever. angle, I think there is this level of anxiety and this sort of dislike of the, the rabid

confrontation that the online circles sort of perpetuate. Do you feel that at all? Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, definitely. And there's like these new social dynamics that have popped up in relation to those kinds of things. Because like, if you get accused of, you know, doing something wrong or this tweet implicitly supports homophobia or just whatever the thing is, then as soon as you start explaining yourself to be like, oh, this is why that's not what I meant, then that can also be taken in poor faith as being like, oh, now you're backtracking or you're refusing to admit that you said something homophobic or like as soon as you start explaining, there's a million more ways for you to lose.

And especially when people are acting in bad faith, it's, it's, it's, can become impossible to dig your way out of any hole like that other than by saying I'm so sorry I'm sorry I was wrong I take it back I should have deleted it I'll whip myself 10 times and I'll never say anything like it again and you you were all right I apologize um good book thank you yeah thank you for telling me thank you for yelling it's different it's different online than in person too because like like obviously i think it probably goes without saying that when you receive some criticism uh like it's really important that you evaluate that criticism you decide like whether like how you're going to integrate it like that that that really goes without saying

but on online where you have an increased capacity for bad faith like very very easily and the sort of like pseudonymity of it um and then whereas in person i think again there's all those subtle things about like people's cues in their voice where you can see that oh this isn't this isn't Aaron trying to like wiggle off the hook for for his bad tweet this is this is Aaron expressing in a heartfelt way that he he he he really didn't want that like he really didn't want that interpretation it doesn't reflect how he he it doesn't reflect what what he wants to create in the world and I think in person that's a lot easier to see the the difference between cynically trying to back pedal and explaining yourself in a heartfelt way in text is basically nothing.

There is no difference. The difference between those two things is in the human connection of hearing a voice, of seeing a face, of looking someone in the eyes. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like if you legitimately are wrong, like you're right. The best way to just say it is like, I legitimately am wrong. I will go back. I will think about what I did.

but a lot of times you're not legitimately wrong, but the moment you start trying to, like, as you say, the moment you start trying to explain yourself, the noose titans. I've never seen anybody successfully dig themselves out of a hole online precisely because of the dynamics at play. But I even have that anxiety in the reverse where I feel bad.

Like if somebody says something and I retweeted or I comment and I sort of dunk on them successfully and like people like my rebuttal or whatever, I start to feel empathy for that person. I mean, unless they're like a total. fucking reactionary but for the most part they're genuinely trying to be okay and then I go too hard and I dunk on them

and then I get a lot of props for it and then I start feeling bad and so I feel like I have to go to their page and like like some of their comments or something to let them know like I'm not totally an asshole or whatever I don't know I don't hate you. I don't fucking circus yeah exactly it's a weird fucking circus but I think it's

beneficial to talk about this stuff because a lot of people deal with it and a lot of people feel it but obviously the online environment it is not really conducive to this sort of conversation. So I don't know. It's worth thinking about. I do want to move on.

You mentioned utopianism. But before we get into utopianism, I think it might be helpful for people to understand where you guys are coming from. So even on your show, I kind of find it difficult to really pin you down as far as a tendency or political line. And maybe you don't have one, and that's totally fine. But if you do, like, what is your tendency or what is your personal political line? and like how does that relate to the show broadly?

Do you push it or do you kind of set it aside to do broader things? I guess I don't really have like a specific tendency that I would say I'm a follower of. I have found myself very interested in anarchist, left anarchist and libertarian socialist thinkers. I tend to really enjoy reading those things and agreeing with those things. But I also definitely have like a liberal, social Democrat streak in me. And there's kind of those two warring aspects of my politics and like self-identifying online. I used to call myself a left libertarian a lot, like a fully automated communist or whatever. But then people who didn't like me would start calling me a liberal.

So I started calling myself a liberal. And now sometimes people who are like communists and stuff are like, you're a liberal in air quotes. Or you're not really a liberal air. And you're a communist. You talk about providing everyone with food and shelter and access to education and internet and clothing and like, you know, an abundance of things for everyone. That's not liberal.

It's not being silly. Yeah, like a year and a half ago, Aaron and I thought it was just the funniest thing in the world to just say, like, I am a liberal and then go on from there to say the most radical things that we could imagine, but be like, yeah, it's liberalism. It's a type of liberalism. And it would drive people crazy, and they just totally hated us. And then... Actually, when I listened to the debate you did with a liberal guy that you'd met online. And one of the things that he said that I really liked was that in his estimation of reading the history of liberal thinkers that the best ones that most of them had zero justification for property, for land

ownership specifically. Like you can have kinds of personal property, but it's really hard under liberalism to justify owning land. And I was like, oh, that's totally my kind of liberalism. That's the kind of liberal I am. Yes. And as far as like identification with specific tendencies and stuff like that. My, I've, I've recently committed to like as much as possible just calling myself utopian and like a shoeing being put into a specific tendency because I just feel like it can be really limiting in a social environment when you're dealing with diverse perspectives. And then when you, like the idea of being something like rather than liking certain ideas sort of weirds me out of like, oh, like, I don't know, this idea of like you're

reading a book and then you're like, oh, I got, I think it was on page 648 when I realized that I am a communist. On some of I have become communist as part of what I am. But if I had to describe my, I thought about this, how I would describe myself further than Utopian is a metamodernist, fully automated space, social ecologist with anarchist and Bernie Brosempathies. Woo! Yeah, that's a hell of a mouthful. But I, I, I, I, totally understand like there's two strategies when you sort of bump up against this reality that the moment you declare yourself as something concrete you will you will just be sort of filtered

through whoever you're debating's preconceived notions of what that means so if you say hey i'm a Maoist or hey i am an anarchist depending on who you're talking to you are you are immediately going to be labeled as you know whatever you know oh this just means chaos or that person doesn't anything or whatever it may be and so there is this there's two ways you can go on one end you sort of retract and be like i want to sort of shy away from any specific label because i do not want myself and all my complex ideas and my perpetual growth and development to be confined to what your stereotypes of this tendency are and then the other reaction is just to fucking double down and say this is who the fuck i am come at me you know and i think i see that i see that all the time on the left

people taking different strategies i'm i sometimes feel like I'm more, I'm more, uh, apt towards the ladder. Like, I just want to like double down. Like, yeah, this is, this is what the fuck I believe, like, come at me. Um, but I totally and many times throughout my development have felt that urge to just be like, don't, don't necessarily, I want to have a conversation about ideas. I do not want to automatically be put in this position where I'm defending something that you think this word means, you know? Yeah, yeah. I don't want you to be arguing with the shadow of what you think I am. I don't want you to be arguing with some, Social Democrat you met once that you think that I am because I was like, yeah, Bernie Sanders is

cool. I don't, I want you to actually listen to what I'm saying rather than like putting this identity kit onto me and being like, arguing with this, this manifestation of your map of what a communist means or what a libertarian socialist means or whatever. Yeah, I've also noticed that I have a very real tendency. I think other people share this too, is that I, I tend to agree a lot with the last thing that I read. And so if I'm reading a bunch of different things, like, my mind is changing. And, like, I just, like, I truly don't have a coherent ideology. I hear ideas, and I either like them or dislike them. And, like, they kind of make sense in my head. But, like, I, I kind of doubt that the usefulness of coherent ideologies almost and what one of the reasons for that is

because of anarcho-capitalism and just what a perfect self-referential logical uh self-consistent system it is it's it's there's an argument for everything and there is a reason um that there's an answer to every criticism that it's just this perfectly encapsulated ecosystem of ideas you can exist within and it kind of scares me and um and i was also really influenced by um zizik's first book like his book where he actually like put ideas out there and was i mean i'm not that he doesn't anymore but he's gotten very edge lordy um lately but the sublime object of ideology that the the basic idea in that book or at least what i took away from it was that the thing that holds ideologies together, these webs of ideas and signifiers and stuff,

is what they leave out, the parts of reality they leave out. Because the only way you can create an ideology, a coherent worldview, is to leave something out, is to be missing something. Because as soon as you allow that in, it kind of crumbles a lot of the other stuff. And that made a lot of sense to me. And I just, I don't know, I've stopped trying to be incredibly coherent. Like, I do try to not contradict myself and not be a hypocrite, but I'm not, I'm not trying to, like, have a systematic worldview in any way. Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's pros and cons to both. And one of the cons of sort of, you know, doubling down on a tendency or an idea is that sometimes, not always, of course, but sometimes it can sort of siphon you away from a more broader

reading or understanding other people's critiques. And you sort of just like, you double down and how can I defend my position as this, as opposed to constantly being open and sort of developing with the times. But I guess on the other hand, like I would just make this quick argument for the opposite side of like actually picking a tendency and sticking to it is that there is something important about ideological coherency, especially when you're organizing. So if, like, you have a situation, like, look at Occupy for all the benefits that it brought to the country talking about class, et cetera, there was a sort of nebulous, ethereal, sort of noncommittal aspect to it that disallowed it from going forward. And when you try to be like, well, let's just all come together, regardless of your exact tendency, and let's kind of talk about ideas, there is a certain sort of inability to move forward. And the most coherent, organized political parties know what the fuck they think and know what they want and move forward in a coherent way.

So, I mean, pros and cons on both sides, but definitely. No, that does make a lot of sense. I think one way to work within that, or I guess what I think a really important thing for a party to have or for a movement to have, like Occupy, something Occupy didn't have was specific concrete goal. because I think it's easier to get a group of people together who all agree on this is what we want to accomplish rather than a group of people who agree on this is the political philosophy that is correct. This is the interpretation of history that is correct. Like there's a lot more going on there than just like, oh, this is what we want to head towards. And like we kind of agree on the steps to take to do that.

yeah exactly yeah i don't know it's very complicated we're not going to solve solve this issue today but it's just i mean certainly something worth talking about i do want to talk about before we move on to like jeff bezos and these capitalist criminals i do want to talk about utopianism you've mentioned it in this interview you mentioned it in your show um for a lot of people the word is used as a pejorative like if somebody says oh you're utopian it's immediately seen as like oh you're naive you're starry-eyed etc so what does utopian mean to you? And why is it important and relevant? When I think about utopia, I tend to think of it as in the opposite of a pejorative sense,

like where it's like a pejorative sense is describing something and then adding this sort of like extra, this extra glaze to it. Like it's this but negative. You know, it's, it's a, it's describing a perfect society in a negative way as utopianism. And whereas I sort of think of it at the opposite is like it's utopianism in the way that I tend to use it is like this sort of inherently immovably good thing that represents a bunch of complex synthesis of ideas that we've come to over time. But I think at its core what it means is a commitment to a type of optimism that is rooted in not denying reality. So like you start with sort of a pessimistic or cynical understanding.

you start by looking at the contours of what's wrong about the world and what is an ideal. And then from there, you can get a sincere sort of optimist utopianism that's like, so from this context, how do we make the best possible outcome? And then similarly with like, I tend to think of utopianism as describing the furthest horizon of what we imagine is a possible good future. or what's the thing that you desire to see in the world? And understand that doesn't come with a magic wand that comes with a lot of really hard-fought, well-thought-out steps where you're weighing different things back and forth,

like say, what's the most important step to take next or what's the easiest step to take next towards that final goal? And utopia is never something that's realized because any time you realize a utopia, you inevitably are going to find that, oh, there's negative sides to the place that we got to as well. And there's new utopias. There's new horizons to move towards. So I sort of think of it as like a very pragmatic idealism that's rooted in the idea of like what's the best possible world I can imagine creating plausibly and like

pushing that as far as it goes. Yeah. Yeah. It's just about that goal. It's about imagining it's like in order to make any kind of change in the world you need to have a direction that you want to head in and directions are defined by the goal that you're heading towards and so even if you know like yeah we're never going to reach this perfect society I've imagined or if we do reach it it'll turn out that it's not as perfect as I imagined and there's new vistas beyond that it's it's a useful psychological tool to imagine the best thing that you possibly can and aim for that and and i think like a lot of what the negative um stuff about utopia surrounds is like on the one hand it's the like yeah you're a naive dreamer you're not you're not dealing with actual reality

you're dealing with this fantasy world you've created in your head and it's like well no we want to try and point at the fantasy but like start from where you are what's this next step from where you are but but the other major criticism of utopianism is like oh if you imagine that you know how to create the perfect society it's it's very easy from that point to justify doing like really awful things to try and make that happen like hitler to go right to hitler hitler had this vision of a perfect Aryan utopia for the future and so like you know how that turned out because it's I think people see it as dangerous to imagine a perfect world because if you believe a perfect world is possible logically there's there's very little that isn't justified

in the pursuit of that so I think it is always important to remember that that it is an unreachable horizon that that it's not this thing that's just around the corner once we behead Bezos and Zuckerberg like that's that's not going to bring about utopia right yeah we uh we recently did an episode which i actually think that you guys would really really enjoy called capitalist realism and we went over this book by mark fisher uh with the lit crit guy and you know kind of unanimously one of our best episodes ever but one of the core features of the concept of capitalist realism was this idea that's embedded in all of our psyches that there is no alternative that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

And so what I think the utility of a utopian approach, as you guys are articulating, is sort of this broadening of political imagination, this forceful, even if it's hyperbolic. The term utopia is hyperbolic by definition. But by bringing it so far to that side and by bringing this very idea to your psyche, you can sort of break through that confinement of imagination and open it up broader. And I think Sean said something that was important, which is, and I think maybe Aaron echoed this, if you ever get to the utopia or on the path to whatever you consider to be utopia, you will always find yourself disappointed in some respects.

Like there will always be new problems. And this, in my opinion, reflects the Marxist dialectic. Like with every thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, there's a new antithesis that arises. And so there's always going to be conflicts and contradictions that need to be worked out as you move forward. And as technology progresses, as environmental catastrophes mount, I mean, fuck even an asteroid headed towards Earth, whatever the situation may be, aliens arrive. I mean, I don't know how far you want to look into the future, but who knows? All of these things pose new problems that regardless of how good your society is and any given moment in time, there's always going to be new things to overcome and move past.

How do you guys think about that? Oh, yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, I agree 100%. And there's one more thing I want to say about utopia and the choice of that label is that I love how it consciously, I love how there is the association between utopia and naivety because I feel like one of the things that's toxic about like leftist political discourse, but also it's not just leftist political discourse. It's the sort of culture of neoliberal capitalism being reflected in leftist political

discourse where there's nothing that is more horrible to be than a naive who asks a stupid question. There's nothing more horrible than not already knowing everything, not understanding all the details of Soviet economic policy from 1918 to 1926. What a crime that would be. I don't, sorry, I don't remember Soviet economic policy of 1924. I'm so sorry. Um, like we, there's this, there's this cultural thing of like being naive is like this,

this horrible, horrible thing. But then also a 100% of people are naive about if not one specific thing guaranteed like 95% of everything that it's possible to talk about. You don't know about. Like that's just the reality of it. Um, and so like being able to have that association with naivety and then be like, yeah, it's like, it's a beautiful naivety. We need it to win. We need it to have a society that functions. Like, we need that naivity in order to transition to a more just society that takes care of people and doesn't alienate us from ourselves and each other. Like, that naivety is needed. And the sort of capitalist culture, like, the neoliberal culture of, like, you've got to be, like, cool and disaffected and, like, never put yourself out there. Like,

I like that it stands up against that. Absolutely. That is, like, what you just said could have been like taken out of our discussion with the capitalist realism episode because we talked about irony earlier and one of the points that I made in that episode I'll make again is that this retreat into sort of barbed irony is precisely the fear of sentimentality because sentimentality sort of implies naivete and by being by having an ironic distance to everything you you armor yourself against the sentimentality that could bring on the accuracy. accusation of naivete and so I think that's in part why you know irony has dual purposes it can be negative or it can be constructive and I think I've laid out why I think your guys's irony is ultimately

constructive but there is a very negative irony and I think the ironic impulse is precisely to avoid the charge of naivete that comes with sentimentality so I think that's just perfectly said and an extremely important aspect of all of this all right now let's go on to the second part of this episode because I do want to talk about Jeff Bezos specifically. We're covering a lot of ground, but this guy's just been getting on my nerves and nobody's talking about him really on podcast, so I think it's worth kind of diving into. So sort of let's just get into it. You know, Bezos is someone who exemplifies all the stereotypes of like crude capitalists. He's a multi-billionaire. He makes the median Amazon employee salary every nine seconds and he treats his

workers like shit. So let's talk about him. Who is he? What are some of his most egregious behaviors and what should leftists basically know about him generally? Well, I mean, like you said, Jeff Bezos earns, at least this year has earned $28,000 and a half thousand dollars every nine seconds, which is too much to earn in nine seconds, no matter how hard you worked. I'd really be curious to see what nine seconds of work is legitimately worth $28,000. Like, I don't want to be close-minded, but I'm pretty sure that's fully fucking impossible. Yeah, that he'd in those nine seconds produced as much merit to proportionately be rewarded for another person's one year of work.

Yeah. Seems unlikely. The thing about Bezos, really, is that he's the richest person of the modern era. He's just, he's the richest man on earth. and like that is such a horrible role to have no matter who you are like Bezos could be the nicest most generous coolest guy in the world but if you have over a hundred billion dollars while other people's like kids died because they couldn't afford medication or because they don't have clean water or because people are dying because they don't have like a bug net

over their bed like it's it's horrifying and so like it could be Bezos it could be anyone else being the richest man in the world is just dehumanizing to everyone on earth. Like, there shouldn't be, we need to destroy the edifice that produces hundred billionaires while other people are like, uh, on the streets or starving or whatever else. Um, but like, I mean, if Bezos was my nephew and he started earning hundreds of billions of dollars, I'd be like, good for you, man. Like, good for you. But like on a societal analysis level, it's just abhorrent and inhuman.

So as far as like the behavior of Bezos, like at his company in Amazon, they've got some pretty brutal, they've got a pretty brutal work culture. In Bezos's own words, my main job today, I work hard to help maintain the culture at Amazon. So he's saying the main job, the reason he gets paid $28,000 every nine seconds is because he's being paid to primarily maintain the culture at Amazon. Well, what's the culture at Amazon like? It's actually a horrifying dystopic sort of like... Social Darwinist nightmare. Yeah, it's like social Darwinist mixed with Scientology or something. It's like they have this sort of like cult of working way too hard and working long hours.

And like there was this New York Times article in like 2015 where they interviewed 100 former Amazon employees from like all up and down the supply. like the administrative chain, like the management chain. And they said like the culture at Amazon, the culture that is Bezos's main job to maintain is that workers are encouraged to work long hours, attack and criticize each other's, report on your boss to your boss's boss directly. Amazon would tell employees that Amazon has unreasonably high expectations of them. There's like an anecdote of a woman saying that she wanted to take

some time off following a miscarriage and they're like, well, the work is still going to be there. And, you know, like, if you're really focused on this family stuff, maybe this job's not right for you. They also have, like, mandatory firings every year where they have, like, a certain amount of people that they fire to, like, coal the stock and only allow, like, the purest, most Darwinist, like, successful Amazon employees to move up the chain. It's super dystopian and fucked up and weird. And I don't actually think it's like the root of why he made all the money. I think it's just something fucked up. He added on top of having this like monopoly, this tax evading monopoly. What was the thing you told me about how many

packages, people working in the warehouses have to do it like? Oh, yeah, yeah. So there was a recent article, I think, um, it was in a UK paper. They did an investigation, uh, where they spoke to workers that like worked on the front lines at factories like doing, uh, doing fulfillment. Um, And they, they were expected to package 300 items a minute, which is one item every nine seconds. And nine seconds is every time Jeff Bezos makes $28,000. But also they, their restroom breaks count against that. So they were like telling this newspaper that they were peeing in bottles. So they didn't have to like leave their station, go downstairs, take the time to pee, wash their hands and go back up.

Because it was going to affect their totals and that they'd risk. of being called, they'd have a risk of being culled from the workforce were being too inefficient. And yeah, 82% of the people that they talked to for that investigation said that they would not return to working for Amazon because of the horrible work conditions. So, the bottles of pee everywhere. Yeah, but then on the other hand, like, it's pretty convenient to shop at night. It's pretty nice to get something to arrive directly at your door. And like, yeah, yeah. Can't lie, Amazon is like from a customer service. standpoint, you're just like, you have a problem with them, you get, you get online on that

chat, they're ready, willing to help you. Oh, we'll send you another one. We'll refund you. And you're like, oh, if you can be that nice to your customers, like, I think they called it being customer obsessed. He has a philosophy about this too. It's like, why can't you also do that for your employees? Like, why is it being nice to one and really horrifyingly terroristic to the other? It's hard to understand. understand why he's just he's a I think Bezos is just like a true believer in competition he's like a true believer that by pitting your employees against each other by encouraging them to spend like by literally encouraging them to spend less time with their family and more time working and encouraging

them to meet these like impossibly high targets like he just believes that's the best way to do it And he's, like, eating his gold-plated lasagna, not lasagna, eating his gold-plated, his, I'm thinking of a animal, it's a lizard, gold-plated iguana. He's eating gold-plated iguana. Is that I don't think gold-plated iguana? No, but he does, there's a picture of him eating iguana. He looks super creepy. Oh, yeah, that's weird.

But he could afford to gold-plated it. It's like that new, that new, I don't know if you guys seen it floating around, that new, the chicken wings that are dipped in gold and they're sold for. $1,000. Have you guys seen that little bit? Flight around Twitter and Facebook? Yeah. It's a travesty against society, and I think we shouldn't send people who eat that to the guillotine, but we should mention the guillotine to them while they're eating it. I think that's the moral middle ground there, hashtag centrism.

Yeah, that's a nice centristism. That's a centristism I can get behind. Um, there's a, the, the Oxfam organization recently came out with a prediction that they said in the next 20 to 25 years, Jeff Bezos is on track to be the world's first trillionaire, trillion with a T. So already, like there's a critique of obviously capitalist society, which we all make all the time, which is a society that has both billionaires and homeless people should never exist. But now, you know, neoliberal late capitalism is bringing it to the point where you're going to have homeless people. and trillionaires, trillionaires. They say that Bezos makes more money in one minute than the average millennial makes in a year. $36,000 is how much he makes per minute based on his most recent yearly income tax.

So this is absolute brutal exploit. This is a parody of capitalism. Like if you had to create a capitalist and a anti-capitalist communist machine, of like, how can we make the capitalists look as bad as we can possibly make them? Jeff Bezos would pop out the other end. There is an interesting dichotomy. There's an interesting contradiction, which is the contradiction between employees and customers.

And before we started airing, I was talking to my sound guy and his wife about this, which is, you know, we all, more or less, we all use Amazon. But the thing becomes, would you be willing to wait an extra day or two? Would you be willing to pay a couple bucks more for every book you buy or whatever you buy to make sure that every worker in Amazon's warehouses were treated right, had the ability to bargain for higher wages, had good working conditions, had a way to move up and we're not treated like rats in a cage? And I think almost everybody with a heart and a mind would absolutely say yes. So the small sort of benefits we get as consumers going through this bullshit Amazon system,

I think most of us would easily discard in favor of. of treating the workers fucking right. Yeah, and like, I don't even think we as customers would have to lose out on that much. Like, yeah, they bump up prices on everything a little bit, maybe prime costs a little bit more, a few things cost a little bit more. But like, really, they're such a huge organization now. They sell everything that you could ever imagine. They're making so many, like, the cost of having decent working conditions,

could easily be absorbed by that organization. Like, it's totally possible. And people, from a user end perspective, probably wouldn't even notice that much. Like, I don't think it's like some question of, like, oh, you'd have to pay way more. I think that it's just a decision that he's made because he thinks it works well, I guess.

Or I don't know. Like, he's ruthless. obviously and like the only way for someone to get to that position of being the richest man in the world is to be ruthless and that's the way our society's designed so it's like this weird gross contradiction where where he's built something that like honestly is actually kind of beautiful this website that you can go on and get whatever you want it's all in one place it's so easy it's so convenient, shows up at your house the next day, two days later, maybe a bit longer for some things. But like, that's a, that isn't a real achievement. That's something good

that he did. But because of the way society's designed and because he's got to make, you know, like stockholders happy and he's got to, like, the people who are going to succeed doing that, the person who did succeed doing that is this person with, with these, horrible flaws and like and we all have flaws but when you have billions of dollars your flaws matter way more than everybody else's flaws and your flaws affect way more people than everybody else's flaws and uh you uh should be criticized for your flaws way more than everybody else should yeah i i even think the way that we're taught to talk is this sort of way where we like as as you say and as I think we all just kind of fall in the habit of saying is like, you know, Bezos built this thing.

Bezos has this thing that he does that's really good. But in reality, and I think once we talk about this, everybody realizes it as true, the workers make it happen. You know, Bezos made it came up with the idea. He might have had the capital to invest. But the actual fact of how do we get these products, you know, organized and distributed in a really coherent way, it was 100%. there is no Jeff Bezos without an army of workers and an army of consumers. So even on their own terms, even talking about these social relations inside the confines of the system

we actually currently have, it's still a misnomer to talk about Bezos as if he does anything. I mean, he runs an organization, yes, but that organization is premised on workers and consumers creating and buying the products. But I do want to go into this article that Salon wrote that kind of lays out just a part of this horrible conditions that Amazon workers have to operate in. So I'm going to read, it's a little lengthy, but I think it's worth talking about. The Salon article says, there is an Amazon's treatment of its employees, a pervasive culture of meanness and mistrust that sits ill with its moralizing about care and trust for customers, but never for employees. So, for example, the company forces its employees to go through

screening checkpoints when both entering and leaving the depots to guard against theft and sets up checkpoints within the depot, which employees must stand in line to clear before entering the cafeteria, leading to what Amazon's German and Union employees call break theft, shrinking the employee's lunchtime from 30 to 20 minutes when they barely have time to eat their meal at all. Other examples include providing UK employees with cheap, ill-fitting boots, they give them blisters, relying on employment agencies to hire temporary workers whom Amazon can pay less, avoid paying them benefits, and fire them virtually at will, and, in a notorious case, relying on a security firm with alleged neo-Nazi connections that, hired by an employment

agency working for Amazon, intimidated temporary workers lodged in a company dormitory near Amazon's depot at Bad Harrisfield, Germany, with guards entering their rooms without permission at all times of the day and night. These practices were exposed in a television documentary shown on the German Channel ARD in February 2013. But a singular image of Amazon's ruthlessness, ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon Center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer weather, there was no air conditioning in the warehouse, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening up the loading doors at either end of the warehouse for fear of theft. Inside the plant, there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures

rose to more than 110 degrees. On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, aka OSHA, to report that the heat indexed had reached over 102 degrees in the warehouse, and that 15 workers had collapsed. On June 10th, OSHA received a message on its complaint hotline from an emergency room doctor at the local hospital saying, quote, I'd like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Foglesville. Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat-related injuries. On July 25th, with temperatures in the warehouse reaching 110 degrees, a security guard reported to OSHA that Amazon was refusing to open garage doors to help circulate air and that

he had seen two pregnant women taken to a nursing station. Calls to the local ambulance service became so frequent that for five hot days in June and July, ambulances and paramedics were stationed at the warehouse all day. Commenting on these developments, Vicki Mortimer, the general manager of that warehouse, insisted that, quote, the safety and welfare of our employees is our number one priority at Amazon.

And as general manager, I take that responsibility seriously. To this end, Amazon has brought 2,000 cooling bandanas with which to give every employee. That is just a splinter of the entire article that talks about systematic abuse

after systematic abuse, it is, it is, it's unbelievable. Yeah, it's insane. Because you would think that an efficient warehouse, like, you would think that a warehouse would actually run more efficiently if people weren't passing out from heat stroke and needing to go to the hospital in an ambulance. But like, actually, maybe it's not. I, because I trust that these number crunchers at Amazon, like, figured it out. And they're like, actually, no, air conditioning will cost us more.

more money than having ambulances on call and having some of our workers pass out from heat stroke. So that's the better profit decision. Like, they're probably right by the numbers. You know, it's an inhumanly monstrous calculation to even be making. But, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to imagine being in that mindset. They actually call it inside the company, they call it scientific management, which is exactly

that sort of neoliberal. technocratic analyzing of data and stats to see how much productivity we can get out of the worker and what costs are associated with that. And you're absolutely right. They crunch the numbers and they come to the fact that that's more, you know, that's better than than providing them with paying AC all day in a huge ass warehouse. So it's just really crazy. One more thing I'm going to say before we move on or I'll hand it back over to you guys to say anything else you want to say about Bezos. But when speaking of his $112 billion net worth, which in the meantime has increased, so it's actually more than that now. But talking about his net worth and his rocket

company, Blue Origin, Bezos said, quote, the only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource, meaning his wealth, is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That's basically it. So he talks about colonizing the solar system, and he frames his arguments in terms of Earth's limited energy resources. And this right here is a neoliberal delusion that we can escape Earth. We can trash Earth, right? We will let capitalism continue its way and inevitably it's going to ravage this planet

but fear not because we're putting, Elon Musk and Bezos are putting money into space travel so one day we'll all be able to fly into the skies and leave this trash can behind. We're going to make sure there's sorry, we're going to make sure there's a bunch of

ambulances waiting in space. Space ambulances. I just want to say that like, I understand Bezos couldn't think of anything else to do with all that money. But if anyone from Amazon is listening to this right now, Sean and Aaron, we got some ideas for what to do with all that money that don't involve space travel, that help a lot of people. So, like, we're totally open. You can email us, a contact form on the website. Just totally hit us up. Bezos and anyone associated, like, if you need help brainstorming, which

clearly you do uh we're we're totally willing to offer our services for free because i can think of like an infinite number of things other than space travel you can do with uh 112 billion dollars like one of which is is stopping unnecessary baby mortality like that's on the table bezos yeah i saw an article saying that he could uh purchase a new house for every person in america at the current median market rate and still have like $20 billion left over or something. Not that that's a good way to do because lots of people already have houses and things, but just like the scale of what's possible with how much money he has is like enormous. And I don't know.

Oh, that kind of reminds me you mentioned before how we might become a trillionaire in the future. And I think Bezos might be the guy that allows us to make this argument and have it resonate to say, no, we're not going to have any trillionaires. We're putting a cap on wealth. And, you know, up to 200 bill, we're going to let you have 200 bill, Bezos. But as soon as you get to 200 bill and $1, 100% taxation rate. I say 2 mil, but all right, all right. Yeah, no, that's a very generous, like, that's me being very nice to Bezos, looking for that middle ground, that hashtag centrism.

The other thing actually also that's relevant to his enormous wealth is that, there's estimates there's estimates about the amount of taxes that Amazon has avoided and I read today that by not paying regional sales taxes so for a long time Amazon didn't have like the legally mandated typically but there was sort of a loophole that you could not have regional sales taxes and it was actually I think the consumer's responsibility to just go and like contact their tax department and pay these taxes which obviously no one ever did

So they, between 1994 and 2015, in the United States specifically, they avoided over $20 billion in sales taxes, which I think we should just take off the top of his wealth and just be like, sorry, you're in second place for a while again, because... Would that even put him in second place? He'd still be pretty close to the top. Yeah, I think second is just under $100 billion, if I recall. I don't have the info in front of me, but I think it would put him down to second place for another couple months, which might be the slap on the wrist he needs. God. Yeah. And I'll just say this is one last thing is like he also,

they also implemented a program where they put satellite like navigation pieces on their workers to track their every movement. And so like in real time, the management at these warehouses know where the workers are and where they're going. And if they use the bathroom, they will be reprimanded and possibly fired if they use a bathroom further away from the closest bathroom. So if you have to take a bathroom break, And they're watching your monitor and you go past the closest bathroom to a further bathroom, you will be fucking called out.

And it's like this, it's all the worst stereotypes that capitalists have about communism, all the 1984 dystopian drab fucking fears of what communism means about belittling the individual and all you're doing is slaving away every day for a faceless fucking entity that you don't have any say in. That is being realized right now. Yeah, every movement tracked, encouraged. to snitch on each other, snitch on your superiors, just this, this atmosphere of total, um, like social, uh, uh, um, paranoia. And it's, it's, it's Amazon. Yeah, Amazon is the communism that we, we were all warned about. Exactly. All right, well, let's, I want to, I want to just address sort of what role they play in our culture and maybe you guys have some insight here. So often in our culture, capitalists like Bezo or Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Bill Gates or even Warren

Buffett, they're held up as job creators, they're held up as heroes. And often, even by liberals, they're held up as geniuses, as like these people that we should look up to as these brilliant people of our times. So what is it about our culture that so consistently produces and glorifies these types of people, in your opinion? I've got a couple of thoughts on that. I mean, one thing is that if someone, you one's not nice, then an easy compliment for them is calling them smart. So, like, if you're, if you're not able to, like, make the point that, like, Jeff Bezos is a good guy that you should like, then you can, you can retreat to, well, he's very powerful and successful. So he must be a

genius. And being a genius kind of obscures the, like, the more complex description of a human being in their role in society and the effects of them being in the powerful position they are and stuff like that. And I think also the other thing is that people really want to stay sane and the idea that we live in a world that is so unfair and where the board is so tilted against decency so much of the time, it's a hard thing to like bear. And so there's a very, like, easy, there's, there's, there's, it's, it's, it's like a very easy and tempting thing to say, oh, well, society is meritocratic and proportionate. So, like, he must really create $28,000 of value every nine seconds. Like, that, that makes me feel a little better about my horrible position to know that at least he's great. Like, yeah, at least I don't deserve what he has or something like that. Um, I, I think it also goes to, like, what you were, talking about with, like I had said, oh, he did build this great resource, this website, this service that's very useful to people. And you were quite rightly mentioning, well,

you know, he started it, he founded it, but like it was built by tons of people. Like all of the organization is filled with workers who do the actual physical actions that make that organization run. But nevertheless, he is the CEO. He's the figurehead. He's the top decision maker. And so he becomes the avatar of that thing, of Amazon. And so people see Amazon in their day-to-day life as something that's positive, as something where they get great deals, where things come to their house very quickly. And so there's a positive association you have with Amazon, and it's very, very easy to carry that on over to Jeff Bezos, the human being behind Amazon, the guy who is Amazon in our heads. And I mean, like, one of the things when

we were researching is we found all these articles about giving advice, like Jeff Bezos loves giving advice. Yeah, like if you Google Jeff Bezos advice, there's like 30 or 40 different articles that are like, Jeff Bezos, incredible advice. for what to do if your dog doesn't eat a treat when you want it to. Yeah, there was handstand advice. There was his advice, his advice for what to do when you're making hard decisions that the article described as incredible was, it is really incredible advice.

Is to look forward to when you're an 80-year-old and make the decision that will leave you with the least regrets. Mind blowing advice. Incredible Bezos. Yeah, try to avoid regrets. Wow. Your wealth must be really proportionate to your, the merit, the value you put forward for everyone. Today on confirmation bias news, the Jeff Bezos approach to handling criticism is a good rule everyone should follow. As the richest man on earth, Jeff Bezos has faced a lot of adversity.

Throughout it all, Bezos has said his approach to criticism and what he preaches actively to Amazon employees has always been this. Whenever you've received criticism, all you got to do is look in the mirror, take a good look at yourself in the face, and say, are my critics right? And if they are right, that's when you change. That's really brilliant, real advice from Jeff Bezos. No wonder he's the richest man with advice like that. Yeah, to look in the mirror. I always just assumed all criticism was accurate. Sounds like you need some visas.

That's a lot of merit that he just threw out into society. No wonder he's being proportionally rewarded for it with all the money he gets. Oh, a follow-up headline here. Apparently his employees said, thank you for the advice, boss. They send a nice message like that, and people criticize him for how he treats his employees. It's like, oh, I just got some really great advice from the richest guy on earth. He says that if I want to know whether or not to eat a meal, I should look in the mirror, and I should ask, am I hungry.

And if I am hungry, I should get a meal. Thank you, richest man on earth. Your brilliant wisdom is really making this poverty not so bad. That's such good advice. Good advice from a man who has more money than anyone else, period. Thanks for listening. This has been Confirmation bias news. We are your notes.

We read the news and back to you, Brett. I think Jordan Peterson and Jeff Bezos need to come together and make a wonderful self-help book that we can just hand out to every American and we can fully learn how to be a great human beings from these two geniuses. It's kind of a microcosm, like what Bezos does and what all these other, you know, capitalists do. It's this microcosm of American culture where you see these relatively, relatively high standard of life. for whatever. And when you start arguing about communism versus capitalism, reactionaries and liberals will come on and be like, well, hey, hey, hey, look at all this wonderful stuff you have. How could you be a socialist tweeting on your iPhone or doing all this? Like capitalism has produced all this wonderful things. And America is the best country in the world precisely because we believe in

freedom and liberty. And that's why we have all these amazing things. But that is just an ideological facade to hide the hidden brutalities, exploitation, injuries, and injuries and death that this system is rooted in and perpetuated by. So on a microcosmic scale, wow, as an Amazon customer, it's pretty nice to get your book the day after you order it right at your doorstep. That's awesome. But you never, ever are confronted with the fact that to get that book meant the destruction of countless people's days and months and perhaps lives.

They've had injuries they can never come back from. They've missed crucial time with their children. You know, they've come back from a pregnancy and couldn't. spend time with their child because they were demanded to come into this factory. And when you zoom out and look at the macrocosmic version of that, it's like, hey, look at this American society, you have TVs, you have nice couches, you have cars you can drive to and fro. Isn't that wonderful? It's a product of liberty and freedom and all of that.

But in reality behind that curtain is centuries of brutality, of rooted in genocide and slavery, perpetuated by imperialism, dropping nuclear bombs on the head of Japanese children to cement your place is a superpower in the world, the forceful and systematic extraction of wealth from the global south to the global north. I mean, these things are what's behind the curtain. This is where the sausage gets made, if you will. And from Bezos to the entire American society, there's this ideological curtain that's drawn over our eyes.

And the most important thing we can do is sort of pull that curtain back and look behind it to see the real costs of our comfort. But on the other hand, two days to get that book. I ordered it in my underwear. That's pretty good. No, but yeah, you're 100% correct. It's a... Yeah, the one other thing I want to say about, like, hailing Jeff Bezos as a genius is that, like, he probably is.

I mean, like, not that, maybe not a genius. He's definitely a very smart and competent person, but, like, intelligence and competence aren't that rare. Like, we're all intelligent people here having this conversation. We're all competent people. Everyone listening to. Yeah, all the listeners, everyone. Every single person.

There's geniuses everywhere. But the thing that sets Jeff Bezos apart, the reason that he's at the top of this giant company that runs this way isn't because he's competent. It's because he's ruthless and a lot of other, you know, negative adjectives we could apply to him. but it's it's a better story to talk about what a genius he is than to talk about what a ruthless asshole he is at least if you know you have a certain agenda behind what kind of story you want to tell yeah another reason people probably think he's a genius is because he's a shareholder and business insider and the owner of the Washington Post which both regularly publish fawning articles about his

incredible advice that have changing lives. Yes, extremely important point. Remember that. He owns the Washington Post and the business insider. That's crucial to understand. Next time on Revolutionary Left Radio. The year is 2100. The world has fallen into permanent civil war. In this hellscape, one fulfillment baron rises above the rest. King Bezos and the Amazon empire welcome everyone it's great to see such a chipper bunch of recruits you guys all clearly need jobs the desperation is wonderful now working here isn't for everybody some people love it some people hate it we do have very high standards sometimes we joke they're unreasonably high standards they're obscene they make no sense whenever you hit a wall well

find a way to climb over it the work's still going to be there And, of course, you will be tracked electronically at all times, and it is not uncommon to see grown men and women crying in the hallways. So, just going to pop in this instructional tape. So I'll just wheel this out here, and I'll pop that in. Welcome to the Amazon New Employees Instructional Tape. Part 1. Bathroom Policy Now, as you may know, there's high demands of our workers on the floor to fulfill orders. That's what you're paid for.

That's what we expect. Think about how long it would take for you to walk all the way to a bathroom and pee there. And then reach under your workbench. What's there? A Bezos bottle. A standard one and a half liter plastic bottle. You're fulfilling an order. You're going from one place to the next, grabbing the pieces, putting it together in the package.

And on the way, you're going to use that Bezos bottle. That's two birds with one stone, you're going to hit your targets, and you're not going to get cold. Let's take a look at how two of our best employees, Sean and Aaron, handle their bathroom needs. Okay, well, she ordered a pencil shoproom. Can I? Could you hand me my Bezos bottle? Oh, yeah, you got a whiz? No problem, man. Oh, thanks. No, that took time out of you fulfilling your orders.

Oh, yeah. That really goes against best practices. You trying to undermine me? No, no, no. Of course not, man. We're friends. Oh, Mr. Bezos is coming. Oh, quick. Should I turn away from him? or should they turn towards him? When Bezos visits the fulfillment center and you're using a Bezos bottle,

always turn towards him. Hey, Mr. Bezos, look at me. I'm being very efficient. Oh, thank you, Mr. Bezos. Did you hear that, Mr. Bezos? Yeah, I heard it. I don't think it's that impressive. Part 2. How to Get Ahead.

Now, a lot of companies come in right out of the gate, drilling into your head, teamwork, teamwork, teamwork, teamwork. Here at Amazon, we say, cull or be culled chaff need not apply we try to maintain a war of all against all the more people are worried about their employment

the more that they're competing with one another the more packages are fulfilled and the more we're able to displace local businesses which might cut into our profits let's take a look at two of our strongest employees stepping over the bodies of the week hey man I think I'm going to go

accidentally dump my Bezos bottle all over Chris Oh, nice. Man, I hate that piece of shit. Did you see Heather crying in the hallway? Yeah, I think her husband was hit by a train. Oh, man, that is awesome. It's time to strike. It's an opportunity for us, for sure. Sad, obviously.

Yeah, no one wants her husband to die by a train, but at the same time, mourning your husband in the hallway is not one of Bezos 14 leadership principles. I'm totally going to talk to HR about her. On the fulfillment floor, there are no friends. Only temporary alliances between enemies. it's easy to be paranoid in this environment. Yeah, I don't know if you know why Heather's husband was in front of that train, but you shouldn't ask me if I know why he was there.

I'm just saying. Part 3, Keeping Cool. Now, the Amazon fulfillment centers don't have any central air conditioning. It's somewhere between desert or mild oven. Sometimes it's a bit too much for people. The first tip is to be resilient. Don't get tired. Don't overheat. Don't pass out. At a certain point, it really is on you. Many of our employees have learned to control the core temperature of their body through sheer force of will.

It certainly can't hurt. The second tip is that during the hot months, twice a day, you can visit the Employees Lounge to receive a string with three ice cubes on it. We're told by our employees that this is very refreshing. These are just some tips. Our employees come up with a lot of creative ways to stay cool. Let's take a look at how Sean and Aaron do it. Man, you're spot on with this tip. You look your hand and then you blow on it. It feels so nice.

Staying cool. I'm staying, actually, I feel a little bit nauseous. Like, oh shit, he fell down. You gotta do something about it. Get my phone, shoot a picture of him. email to the supervisor. I just thought I should let you know. Sean said,

Ha ha, going to sneak a quick nap. Don't tell anyone. He definitely does not need any medical attention. He's just showing that he is one of the weak. I would be proud to testify in favor of his culling. Winky face. Aaron. Ah, okay.

Glad I got that taken care of. This concludes. the warehouse workday. Please collect your Bezos bottles and queue at the dumping point. All right everybody got your bottles. Line up. Open them up. And pour. Poor, everyone. Poor. And that's our tape. Any questions, anyone? No, nobody has any questions.

Crystal clear. No questions. Crystal clear. Yeah, you totally get what you're in for and you're up for it. Awesome. Awesome. Okay, great. So I guess that wraps up our course.

everyone just grab the Bezos bottle under your seat and we're all going to be going to the dumping point so yeah everybody ready hold up your bottles uh three two one door well we're way when i made this outline i was like oh there's too few questions i'm scared we're not going to have enough time to talk about everything. I feel like we're going to not have enough things to talk about, but you guys have totally surpassed expectations. This has been a great episode. Thank you both so much for coming on. I've been a big fan for a long time and I'll continue to be a fan and I really hope people go and check out the seriously wrong podcast. And it's just, it's fun, it's interesting, it's intellectually invigorating and it's totally, totally something that people

should check out. But before I let you guys go, can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Well, our website's S-R-S-L-Y-W-R-O-N-G.com, SeriouslyR-O-N-G.com without vowels and seriously, it's a naive choice we made early on. But also, you can find us on, like, Stitcher, you know, any place, any decent place that has podcasts, you can find us. And, yeah, definitely what he said, we're really good, check us out. And thanks for having us on the show.

This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for inviting us on. We appreciate it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's an honor to have a discussion with you guys. It's been something I've been looking forward to. So anytime you guys want to come on, we can talk about more of this stuff. I think we touched on a lot of really interesting things, like a lot of nuances of online engagement.

We talked about, we covered a lot of ground today. So I really appreciate you guys putting in the work to coming on this show and talking about such a wide range of topics. And I really appreciate all the work you guys put into your podcast because listening to such a well-produced, complex podcast, that makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you think. It's really, really important stuff and keep up the great work. And let's keep in touch and let's collaborate in the future. Yeah, definitely. And actually, similarly, I want to say, like, the stuff you've been doing with Rev Left Radio,

I think it's something that's, like, really needed, and you're doing it really well. So, like, really, really enjoyed you doing. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. staring at a screen playing with the lighter in the pocket of my jeans

Let's start a riot Let's start a riot Let's start a riot Let's start a riot I'm tired of trading hours For so little in return Don't want to take a sick day man I want to watch it burn

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Let's start a riot. Oh, light it up! I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. and I'm going to be I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm

I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. We're gonna have a party Everybody who just lost his job We'll be mixing up some cocktails My favorite is the line top Well here's what they don't tell you But how grown up will be

The crashing way to bored of that responsibility Let's start Ryan Let's start a riot The Star Riot! The Star Riot! The Star Riot! The Star Riot!