TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #178: Jeff Vandrew

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Jeff Vandrew, Founder of The KeyKeeper IRA, to discuss: - COVID-19 - The government's reaction to the virus - Masks as a way to isolate - The media and COVID19 data - Herd immunity - The bubbling Cultural Revolution - The professional managerial class - Elite overproduction - Why this is all a class issue - MMT - much more Follow Jeff on Twitter Reading materials that Jeff mentioned: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/20/reed-d20.html http://communia.blog/why-are-stocks-going-up-when-everything-is-going-awry/ https://nationalpost.com/opinion/peter-turchin-how-elite-overproduction-and-lawyer-glut-could-ruin-the-u-s Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. Another in-person interview. Had Jeff Vandrew swing through town, swing through my back deck. We sat down, talked about a bunch of things that I think you freaks are going to enjoy. Very, very dense conversation. Always a joy sitting down with Jeff and talking through these subjects as he has one of the most unique perspectives that I've ever come across in my life. This episode of Tales from the Curts is brought to you by our good friends at the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. They'll help you stack sats.

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Owls Lacrosse. Owls Lacrosse. owls across download the cash app use the code stacking sets and enjoy this long conversation with jeff andrew you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the

victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt sitting down wednesday morning in person second in-person interview in the last three weeks i'm very excited for this. This is somebody who's been on the podcast twice before, and considering the climate in the world right now, I think this is the perfect guest to have on right now to build on our prior conversations. Welcome back, Jeff Andrew. Jeff, how are you? Great. What an intro, man. It's great to be here. Well, I said that earnestly. I think you are actually a perfect person to be speaking with right now, especially considering the last two conversations we've had

on this podcast i think yeah the climate in the world right now uh is just a perfect setup to build on those conversations yeah absolutely because you know as as i think we've talked about even just online and before we started recording a lot it's a lot it becomes a lot easier to understand the sort of wild series of current events that we're passing through if you look at it from a perspective of class and of political economy i think whether you agree with With anything that, like, prescriptions that I might have talked about in the past, my goal, or not, my goal is that sort of giving people tools to look at this from a class perspective, from a political economy perspective, if for no other reason, that they'll understand it better. Yeah, and well, there seems to be a lot of confusion, so if we can help people understand. Yeah, and well, that sounded kind of arrogant on my part, by the way.

I don't have all the answers. I can just give you my, this is my one guy's perspective that I hope you find useful. Well, all right, so let's start with COVID. obviously we haven't spoken since the virus uh started taking over the world uh so we've had the virus spreading which is one thing and then we've had the state's reaction to the virus spreading and uh people's reaction to the state's reaction uh in the beginning at least from my perspective it was you take the precautionary principle right you overreact when you don't when there's so many unknowns and then as the data rolls through you should make better decisions

And in my opinion, just watching all this, it was bad in the beginning. I was scared. I locked down, moved my family down to South Jersey to get away from the city, which I think was a good idea. And I'm not going back to the city now, which I still think is a good idea. You had to get out of there anyway. Yeah. You can't live in a 750-square-foot studio apartment with an infant.

It just doesn't make sense, especially during lockdown. but it seems like as more data is rolling and we know who this virus is is attacking and potentially it's the strands are getting weaker it doesn't seem like the states where the state is loosening up their grip on on the lockdown what's your perspective of this whole thing well yeah there's i think a couple things to think in mind when you look at the lockdown first is who is benefiting and who is not and this is important to look regardless of whether you think the current actions are warranted or not warranted what your opinion is on the science on the virus i still think it's important to look at who benefits and who doesn't because that's going

to tell you where potential biases come in you know things of that nature so when you look at a virus like this i think there's a giant misconception at least in popular media not maybe not among listeners of this show per se that if you are opposed to the strict the more strict lockdown uh procedures etc that you're sacrificing grandma for the economy right i think that's something you hear a lot right like you're sacrificing sick people weak people etc for the economy and that if you have that belief your frame must necessarily be one where you care primarily about profit you know things of that nature that's a there's a lot of problems with looking at things that way first of all i really don't like this idea particularly in modern times

that we've that you can even say something is good or bad for the quote-unquote economy versus individual actors and i think that that this is really come to the fore in the covid response because i'll give you an example the economy quote unquote is apparently terrible right now right but jeff bezos mark zuckerberg these guys are richer than ever we've seen news stories that their net worth has skyrocketed the stock market's in good shape uh you know so it's certainly not a problem if you're a goldman sachs partner right the this particular injury to the economy has only hurt very specific groups of people um working class people of course being one of those groups but even if you want to set them aside for a second i mean it's only specific parts of you

know the business owner or capitalist class that that's been affected you know think about how different this is if you own a gym versus another type of business or a restaurant i think you know or you know an even better example landry's is like a giant restaurant chain they own like a million of these different restaurant chain brands they're struggling but netflix is uh having record numbers right so i don't think it's useful to look at things in those in those terms it's it's more it's better to look at things in terms of who's winning and who's losing especially and in terms of the stock market what i think is particularly wrong is to say oh like you know, opposition to the lockdowns is driven primarily by people that value the market above

people. And we've seen that that's just not true. The market is perfectly happy with the lockdown because at this point, you know, for reasons that many guests on your show have hashed out, the stock market needs the economy like a fish needs a bicycle, right? Like those are just not... They're not correlated. Yeah, you can do anything with the stock market, you know, if you're if you pump enough money into it. So I just don't think that's the right way to look at the lockdowns. I view it as a huge consolidation of economic power for a couple of reasons. Number one, who can survive the lockdowns the best?

It's going to be the largest the largest businesses, the largest competitors that are going to out survive their smaller competition. right the smaller competition is going to fall by the wayside first and they're done and then when the lockdown ends in the long term that's great for you if you're the larger of your competition and then number two it's it's it helps very specified industries over others for instance the tech industry i mean you have to just be smiling every day i guess if you're bezos when you wake up looking at this because people can't in a lot of places can't go to the store or afraid to go to the store so what are they doing they're ordering online so i i just think it's a very multifaceted problem there and it actually when you look at it through that lens I think it's

more likely that if you want to talk about who you know quote-unquote rich people or powerful people in in the modern U.S. economy what they would prefer it's certainly not a more open economy I think that they're very happy with the current lockdown so I think that's something to consider when you look at you know biases in one in one direction or the other on the lockdown if that makes sense yeah i mean me personally i've been affected my wife was laid off yeah my my parents own a coffee shop and uh my dad does that as well as the general manager at a couple restaurants and yeah around our town and they've they've suffered pretty they're getting shellacked i'm sure they're getting shellacked and then what's the other stat the one unemployment stat

um people have been fired that probably won't find a job again like permanent unemployment i think that stat's been been flying as well and it's weird and there are people cheering this uh you know i mean i don't know if you saw this i'm just spitting out data here right so don't get mad at me if you disagree uh on the the current uh you know i'm not a doctor i guess is the way the way that i'll uh i'll preface this but you know the death rate's falling right i mean we used to think at one point that the infection fatality rate might have been like 10 times what the flu is And now it seems it's more like double based on the the the CDC's best estimates. And that seems to be falling drastically as we speak.

Death rates are going down to the point where we're barely considered the CDC's definition of a pandemic at this point. You have to be more than five percent of all deaths in the U.S. to be considered a pandemic under CDC rules. In the last week where data was compiled, we were at five point nine. so you know we're barely teetering on there for for reference during flu season the flu tends to be between five and seven percent of u.s deaths um in during a flu season depending on how bad that flu season is so you know you'll see that data and then bloomberg yesterday put out a headline that i tweeted that said you know falling death rate is nothing to celebrate and no no like no matter what you think should be going on right now or how lockdowns should be continued not

continued your opinion on masking reducing death is always something to be celebrated you know i think that was a mask off moment that somebody let their let the fact that they're rooting for this to continue for a while longer uh you know slip well that's the one thing where my like alex jones tinfoil hat's been on it's like the and we've had side conversations about this too like the reaction from the government seems like a bit of a conditioning uh exercise yeah there's gonna be that yeah that you touched on something really interesting there and that what what that is is like how much of this stuff are they going to attempt to make permanent on us um either through law or through you know people that have power and influence using their cultural influence

to do so right those are two different sort of sides to to one point yeah two different types of influence yeah you and you and i i think they're more similar than a lot of people um who have more of like a right libertarian perspective might think because and we've talked about this on the last pot episode that i did so i don't want to rehash it too much but the government is really just one way in a capitalist society a government is just one way in which the best capitalists are able to impose their will i mean that's essentially what it is um what they would consider the best way to go and culture is another way of doing that and sometimes one of those tools is more effective than the other they're happy to use both of those

tools well they've both been wielded pretty pretty strongly in the last six months yeah so i was having this discussion with some people last night in terms of like what they might try to do to us you know forever and and levels of success and one thing that sort of came up in my mind is um is the masking right so if you look at it and i don't i to be clear i don't think they can actually get this off i think it'll be too difficult particularly because you'd have to sort of coordinate 50 different states to try and make this work but from the perspective of you know like a of a neoliberal capitalist the masking is great because you optimally what do want people to do in that kind of system you want them to work and consume because those are those

are the two things that are valuable from an economic perspective right the mask doesn't prevent them from working you can still you can make them do whatever you want with the mask on uh the mask you know i'd argue probably increases their consumption in a very um significant way because most of the things that we do with our time that don't cost anything that don't involve consumption are things that uh you know generally revolve around human interaction spending time with your friends your family you have a picnic i mean a picnic technically encompasses some level of consumption but very little just going to the beach yeah going to the beach right all these different things and masking makes all that stuff much less much less pleasant right so masking

there's this sort of idea in the media that people that have apprehensions about masking do so out of some faux machismo or ultra libertarianism or uh you know things of that nature or just even just reckless disregard for other humans i actually don't no matter what people say i don't i'm not of the belief that that's what's driving it i think people just find it extremely disconcerting not to see someone else's face i'd yeah that's yeah like yeah i mean that's being down here yeah if you're outside nobody's nobody's wearing the mask yeah exactly same thing with where i live no one wears it outside people take it off the second they get out of the store and it's not because it's necessarily hot or uncomfortable or they don't or they have some libertarian impulse

it's because they just want to see each other's faces and be part of a society so the more that you can break down those interpersonal uh interactions that we all love so much people have to fill that void with something and they fill that void with you know streaming netflix buying stuff on the internet pornography i guess you know whatever you want to call it stop watching important yeah so yeah i mean in a way it's sort of it's the perfect the mask is sort of the perfect consumerist accessory for uh the neoliberal subject in that way and it's sort of gotten even meta now as there are companies that are marketing masks as a way to show your individuality right like you can get this this custom mask that shows your individuality that's bad stuff that's

like that's for the reasons i just gave there that's almost approaching uh dystopian levels Now, the reason I'm hopeful is because, you know, we got 50 states, the masking regulations come at the state level. They kind of have to, because even if the federal government tried to do masking, it's still got what are they going to send the FBI to go enforce masks like that would be pretty difficult. And as soon as, you know, one or two states start stopping it, it's I think it's going to be hard to get, you know, the rest to keep up. yeah and how do you try to try to force that on states like south dakota north dakota where right it's exactly right so i think what we're lucky in in the in the u.s to some extent is that we're decentralized enough that that would be hard to do there are certainly places where i think you could get that off if the government was so inclined and to do so for the reasons that

i just gave which of course have nothing at all to do with public health one way or the other yeah I mean I totally agree it's it's and that's I think you just described it very eloquently and something I have not been able to like describe in this way is they're trying to break down the interpersonal relationship like Matt O'Dell and I talk about this a lot on rabbit hole recap where he's like oh we get to wear masks it's great for like surveillance I'm like I don't know I don't want to like be walking around with a mask on that's my I like saying hi to people like exactly So and this is going to go into something we're going to talk about a little further in with the pod, with the cultural revolution. And that's when you you know, the more you can break down people's cultural affiliate, anything that doesn't that can't be commoditized.

Right. Like history can't be commoditized. Family is family is commoditizable to some extent, but not not the way that they really want to. Not not to the extent your friendship isn't commoditizable, at least in a traditional sense. any of these things that can't that aren't commoditizable and can't be sold on the market there's an obvious financial uh impulse to try and get rid of those things or tell people they're bad right because you'd rather have them spending their time on things that can be bought and sold yeah consume right get gdp i saw you tweeted last or you retweeted somebody's talking about uh it's me on the right like oh yeah yeah i retweeted somebody so what's funny about that

And this is something I want to go back to when we do Cultural Revolution, too. That photo is from the USSR. Really? Yeah. It's a bunch of guys. Those were, God, I forget the name of the organization, but it was like young Soviets or something like that. Yeah. So, yeah, what Marty is referring to, and you can look at my Twitter, it's a photo.

It's a retweet of somebody, a right-wing bodybuilder that I follow. He said, that's me on the right and just my boys marching to take down, I think it was like GDP maximalist slave labor system. yeah because that's what it is yeah absolutely that's what it is and that's yeah how and that's something another thing we've been talking about on the side is like how permanent is this economic damage going to be like how like thinking of like the lower class the the working class right because small businesses there's another misconception here that you know the people in charge would necessarily care about that and i don't know that they do anymore so long as they get a bigger piece of the smaller pie even if the pie shrinks you know what i mean like i they might

be happy with that i'm not a i'm not jeff bezos or bill gates or mark zuckerberg so i don't know the answer to that question um but i have my suspicion that that might be a okay you know the bigger piece of the smaller pie because not only potentially a bigger piece of a smaller pie not only are you richer potentially right depending on how much the pie shrinks and how much your share grows some more influence that was going to be my second part not only are you richer but even if it was let's say wealth neutral for them it certainly makes them more powerful so that's something i would definitely be concerned about in terms of reviewing everything that's going on with covid right now and the level of information that we're getting because

regardless of whether i mean you might be a physician or a biologist or a virologist listening to this podcast and you might disagree with everything that i have to say and that's fine but regardless of your position whether whether it corresponds to mine or not they definitely are hiding information from us because it's out there if you go looking for it right for instance that the death rate figures and the the sort of which is admittedly artificial um line that you have that five percent line that creates a pandemic or not you haven't heard about that in the news right like they won't talk about that and something that we've talked about too is the uh excess of expected deaths it's fallen below right exactly that's the other thing i don't

think i think barely anyone knows right now is that all-cause mortality for uh the last week i believe it was the last week in june which is the last week which for which they currently have data um it might have been the week before that's the most current week whatever it is you can look all-cause mortality is below what it was in prior years meaning even with covid uh we have less deaths going on right now meaning covid has a negative i mean this is a little bit twisted but a negative expected deaths now reasons for that to be honest number one people are driving less all people forget how big auto accidents are as a cause of death um so any additional covid deaths have been overwhelmed by the reduce in auto deaths and then also what's called the pull forward

effect where early on in the pandemic particularly in new york we were giving people horrendously bad care because we just didn't know people they didn't know i'm not blaming the doctors as individuals but they were doing stuff like putting people on ventilators which we know now actually makes them more likely to die in most circumstances all this like horrible horrible care combined with the fact that new york and new jersey just essentially i mean just slaughtered their nursing home they signed a death right yeah so those two things what they did was they took a lot of people that would have died let's say that week in june and they instead died in march or april right that's why it's called the pull forward effect you're taking deaths from one

period to another but nonetheless that is an important statistic regarding the death rate that is just not remotely talked about right nothing's allowed to be spoken about except for the official narrative right which is that this is getting out of control and i'll give you one more example and i won't harp on these sort of medical issues too much because i'm not a doctor but the the on the medical side one of the things you're seeing right now in the past week are a lot of a lot of uh a lot of news that's saying you know herd immunity is not achievable due to the fact that uh antibody tests have shown such low serum prevalence throughout the throughout society that's probably caused at least partially by the fact that we think now

the antibodies probably only last about eight to 12 weeks after you've been infected but what they don't talk about is with other coronaviruses one of the main factors in immunity is not antibodies but rather t-cell immunity meaning every time you get affected your immune system gets more efficient at eliminating the virus meaning the second third fourth fifth time your symptoms will be milder or maybe have none at all you might just fight it off before you get any symptoms at all um there are several preprints on point with regard to this and preprints obviously haven't gone through peer review yet but they're the best that we've gotten a fast-moving pandemic peer review takes a lot of time um that seem to indicate that there is

pretty robust t-cell adaptation when you're infected by uh SARS-2 the virus that causes COVID uh as well as good cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses so the more actually people this is a broad generalization but that have been been infected with the common cold multiple times uh do you get some cross reactivity with SARS-2 because they're both the both the common cold viruses and SARS-2 are different types of coronaviruses this is like important stuff right like that I'm talking about and even if you think the official narrative is still correct uh you know these are scientific facts that I'm giving you here and they should at least be part of the conversation and they're not i mean they're just shot down like you're a kook uh right you

know for for even bringing something up in that regard now the positive thing is i think we're going to see in real time you know it appears that texas and arizona are basically doing the herd immunity thing right i mean that seems to be what they're going to do so we're going to see if their curve ends up matching the other countries that did herd immunity because by the another thing that our media doesn't talk about is when we get compared to other countries it never gets mentioned number one that our death rate is lower than all of europe's other than germany uh like people act like we're doing some terrible job here that's just not true we just ours is still going and theirs isn't because they got theirs first the same reason it's not still

going in new york versus the south new york got its surge first um so that's that always gets left out and then number two numerous countries not just sweden did some variation on herd immunity where they either did sweden did essentially nothing other countries in the in europe did a little bit or they had very very short lockdowns you know etc numerous countries in europe did little to no masking that's another that's another weird uh you know just myth that's floating out there is that americans are particularly resistant to masking europe you're every country in europe is different uh but from just talking to people in europe and looking at the stats the u.s has done probably a better more masking than europe has we've done less than asia but certainly more

than europe and europe it seems in many in if you look at the countries that did nothing or next to nothing they had their huge spike and it burned out uh and then again if you look at countries that did a lot but where it was probably way too late which are you know what i mean to have had any effect they sort of had that same pattern but and that's new york and new jersey too new york and new jersey did these ultra strict lockdowns but it was so late that it had i it seems unlikely that it had any effect and nobody really talks about that like two-thirds of the deaths happen within like the tri-state area here in america yeah exactly and people are going bonkers about florida right now florida this is a great stat florida has more people than new york state

florida has an older population than new york state they should have been way worse situation florida has last time i checked this is going to be a little bit off when this goes to air but it's roughly correct about 3 500 deaths i think i might air this right after record okay so roughly speaking and i haven't checked it checked it literally today but florida had like about 3 500 deaths and new york had like 35 000 so like what are we talking about here and how many of those were in nursing homes uh in new york and new jersey it's about half yeah yeah to the best of their knowledge about half now and that's with the fact that new jersey went back this is pretty shady too and got no media coverage new jersey went back and took several thousand nursing home

deaths and reclassified them from covid to something else really yeah because they said There was no testing back then, so we can't be sure. Yeah, it was like 3,400 or something like that. Yeah, I don't remember the number that that was done. This was done back in, I think, May. New Jersey did that. Well, even in Jersey, it's affecting North Jersey way more than it is down here. Yeah.

It's weird how it's confined up in the New York area. Well, there's a density issue, and I think it's a really good hypothesis, at least, to believe that mass transit had a lot to do with that because what we do know is that the virus spreads most easily indoors where there's no air circulation and that's i mean think about how disgusting in terms of circulation and and enclosed enclosedness that's not a word but you get the point the subway is and people are on the subway for a lot i mean you might be on the subway for half hour you know what i mean you're not in there for it's not like an elevator where you're in there for five minutes or you're not even in an elevator for 90 seconds you know what i mean

it's it's uh you can be stuck between stops for a half hour sometimes exactly right and and we know the disease is driven uh a lot or in large part by viral load so i mean you're just sort of stewing in viral load uh when you're talking about mass transit so these are all things that like don't fit the official narrative and that information just doesn't get out there it's not even discussed it's not even a matter of like oh people are discussing this and then there's there's a vigorous debate back and forth and the consensus in that vigorous debate in the media has been that everything that you and i are saying is wrong no it's been that this information is suppressed and if you bring it up the wild one is that i always get is like if you bring it up

you just care about the market and i'm like man you don't know you certainly have not listened to anything that i've said on whether it be a pot an interview a twitter or whatever because there's nothing i give a shit about less than the the market i mean i like to think that everything that uh when i look at anything i tell my my goal is always how can we create a pro-social environment a society where people are happy they like being around each other it's calm like that's that's always been my thing i've said many times i'd rather be poor and live in a society like that than live in then be wealthy and live in a society with violence and yawning inequality and people that don't get along with one another and don't view each other as neighbors and friends

right so that's just not it at all and i i just i don't buy it all into the stereotype that people that have serious apprehensions about the government's reaction to this whole pandemic fit that you know that sort of i don't care about society hyper individualist category because for me it's the total opposite my um apprehension is driven entirely by the fact that i think that if we don't get this reaction under control it could drive society in an inherently anti-social uh direction to the benefit of you know the largest holders of capital in our society yeah i mean it seems like it's heading that way and it's it's been truly disgusting to watch the media throughout this you just talk about like what you're allowed to talk about what you're

all that to talk about and socially shaming and this whole thing's been fucking politicized yes like everybody's going after arizona texas and florida for being how many people have died because they didn't get hydroxychloroquine early on in their treatment because that was like considered politically bad right and now we know it's good again by the way like that's a whole other ball of wax and again i'm not a physician here but the you know there was some early hope for hydroxychloroquine i mean based on stuff that i had seen as a non-physician it seemed pretty obvious like you have to give it to people early or don't give it to them at all well it's actually funny my cousin has lupus so she takes it every day yeah and she went to her doctor doctor's like

nobody with lupus has gotten this you literally have you're taking viral medicine that protects you right and if the physicians in new york all took it uh when the as they took it prophylactically or uh or i shouldn't say all many of the physicians in new york took it prophylactically when they were treating covid patients in the beginning so you know we knew that it was basically a thing to come out early so what they did was they did a wild study where they way overdosed it they gave an almost lethal dose of hydroxychloroquine it's because they missed they mistook mistook it for a different medicine right and they gave it to people who were the least likely to benefit right who already had severe symptoms yeah exactly and who were who were

already hospitalized really you should be giving it to people before they're even hospitalized it seems again not a doctor but the and i knew this was kind of bs because one of the things i've been really lucky about throughout this whole pandemic in terms of keeping up with the news is and i don't say this to like be a jerk or brag i read three languages right english spanish and italian um varying degrees italian i need a little i need a dictionary with me i need a little more help but uh than english or spanish and you get a lot less bullshit when you're when you read media that's in another language i can tell you that than you do when you read english language media what do you mean is it uh there's a lot they'll just report like stuff that comes out yeah but

is it like a a latin american perspective in america or are they reporting down and stuff i'm reading was from other countries so like the hydro like a lot of the hydroxychloroquine stuff i read was from ecuador because they did a lot of early trials there um and they're the most promising paper out of ecuador i know this is going to sound stupid but the most promising paper out of ecuador was written in spanish it wasn't written in english and one thing i found kind of with the research is this is stupid but if you don't write your your research paper in english no one reads it like it just doesn't it doesn't get anywhere um so you know thing that's one example of like well just to get back to the hydroxychloroquine thing is to finish that really

quickly so it seemed for by reading foreign language media and actually looking at the data it seemed like that was obvious but they instead ran this study that was like the worst design study you could imagine and then we were based on the results of that study we were all supposed to say hydroxychloroquine was terrible and if you even mentioned it you should be shamed for putting people's lives at risk and then up oh lo and behold what was it this week or last week they actually started giving it to people that uh were not like on their deathbed and they were not giving them like lethal doses of it and it's working again so now it's good again you know what i mean so like the whole thing is just so um incredibly politicized and one thing i want to touch on on

the foreign language stuff one of the in terms of getting information about this virus you know quote-unquote weakening which could be from mutation i think it's it's equally as likely if not both factors contributing that it's just increased t-cell immunity in the population as it burns through was from reading stuff in italian just because they got it very early um and i there were just some interviews i read with scientists and when i say scientists these are not even just regular physicians uh one of the ones i read recently was from the negri institute in italy which is like a giant pharmacological institute for pharmacological research this is not just some joe blow doctor and he was doing he did basically an interview where he said look he

said first of all the pcr testing which is pcr testing for those that aren't aware that's where they swab your nose or mouth depending on the type of test you get they put it in a machine that drastically oversimplifying the way pcr testing works here but it amplifies the virus right um so that it becomes more detectable and that's how they determine whether you're positive or negative and basically they asked him they were like well like in italy we're still getting all these cases but people aren't really dying anymore what's going on and he's like well what's happening is the re and he didn't particularly ascribe this to either a mutation or to T-cell immunity or to anything, but what he did say was these infections that we're getting

as time goes along, they're mild. They seem to be very mild, and the PCR test just amplifies the amount of virus that's picked up in the sample to such a degree that you're still going to test positive, but really these cases aren't anything to worry about because the viral load is so low that not only are they not symptomatic, but they probably can't spread at that level of viral load so this is really nothing to be worried about that's that interview that i just sort of summarized for you like that's a big deal right that's like a major health researcher at a top institute in a country that was affected well i don't we don't know how much china was affected so let's put that aside of all the countries where we have a decent idea of the way a country

was affected italy has dealt with this the hardest giving us some really interesting information there now that you probably didn't hear about that at all right i just heard about it for the first time yeah exactly right like that's kind of a big deal in italian media i was like at least able to read that and say oh that's like really interesting this is something to consider when looking at the data looking at the numbers you know etc so that's been really interesting just the difference between reading spanish and italian language media versus english language media on this stuff well i've been falling down the no agenda rabbit hole the last couple months and they've been doing an incredible job of just following the media here in america and it's

truly disgusting how they're framing all this and politicizing all of it and that's one thing like i want well people who have been following it and and diving into uh what the media has been saying and dissecting it and actually spending hours to to dive through this data understand that the media's i don't want to say lying but not telling the whole truth and like i'm i mean my confidence was blown on the media for a while but i wonder if like more and more people start distrusting the media or if it just pushes everybody towards this path of like npc like orange man bad i think it's gonna be like a thing at the extremes where it's gonna it will push more people toward distrusting the media and at the same time will embolden and strengthen the impulses

of those who are not pushed to reject the media um to trust the media right in other words so people that are into the new york times are going to be even more into it but a larger number of people are not are just going to not take it seriously at all that would be my uh my prediction how much of the fact that this is an election year do you think has contributed to to all this that's a great question and uh that's been sort of bandied about a lot right and i just i because you mentioned it earlier yeah uh we've actually like all things considered compared to other countries are doing a pretty good job yeah in terms of death rate nobody mentions the amount of testing we're doing compared to everybody else way more than anybody but everybody like

conversation there by the way this is one let me interrupt you one thing to keep in mind here too you're looking at cases a lot of countries in europe stop testing like like norway doesn't test uh there's a bunch of other when i say don't test they only test if you're like real sick right um and that's even among states in the u.s you have to consider that i'll give you like a personal example in new jersey like you can't get tested at almost any testing center i'm aware of without having either without having symptoms like if you fill out the little form online and you say you don't have symptoms you can't get a test even the cvs testing in new jersey you can't do that in delaware where i've been for the past several months in delaware anybody can get tested

what delaware did the delaware all the testing is run by the states the small state so the state just bought a ton of tests you don't even have to give your insurance like in new jersey like in most states you have to give your insurance and your insurance covers it but you know like whatever you still have to give it and go through this whole rigmarole in delaware anybody it's all drive through anybody can go through uh it's the mouth swab you don't have to have symptoms you just you just do it right so obviously there's going to be a big difference in cases that you detect even between delaware and new jersey with when one of those states is saying like no we're only testing people that have symptoms and another state says like anybody can get tested so if you

were even like i'll give you a perfect example uh my nephew was in school and one of the teachers had covid super mild her biggest symptom was a headache and it didn't spread to anybody like any of the kids none of the other teachers nothing but i was like well whatever it takes me 15 minutes to drive through and get tested i'll just drive through the the because i was exposed to my nephew i just drove through the drive-thru in delaware and i got tested if i were in new jersey that never would happen because i didn't have any symptoms right so that's a an example of like why it's hard to compare apples to apples even among states let alone countries when their testing policies are so different yeah but donald trump has killed hundreds of thousands of americans it's

and it's his fault yeah and i'm sure that's part of the narrative as well like which with regardless of what you think of the federal response or if they're even you know well this is what i hate about it because i find myself having to defend trump yeah like i'm you know me i'm not i don't like you're not political right i'm not political yeah i've been driven to become more political because of all this because again like i find myself having to stand up for him like hey number one how do you control a fucking virus yeah like it's something you can't see like and everybody goes like oh he fired the uh the pandemic response team that's the number one response and then two it's like is he really doing a bad job like the the initial estimates

for like two million people would die well here's the bigger issue and this is a part of why we don't get real information and people are hesitant to talk about the truth here too um it's possible if what you and i believe and i'm not sure this because i'm not sure yet because i'm not a doctor and this whole thing isn't over yet but you and i have some level of belief that the virus no matter what you do you have a spike and it burns out right and you might need to control the amplitude of your spike depending on what your hospital capacity is but that's sort of what that's that that's where we're headed here regardless of whether that's right or wrong the problem with discussing that is if you even entertain that uh or and it turns out to be true let's say that's

discussed to entertain and it does turn out to be true no one including you and me likes to hear that our job just didn't matter in that case and essentially what you're saying is like public health people it didn't matter what the hell you did what was going to happen is what's going to happen and that's not i don't say that as a knock on public health people that just may and i'm not saying is but maybe the reality here that whatever we did in terms of public health it just wasn't going to matter and that this was it was what it was it burned through and that happened and that doesn't mean public these people are in their research is invalid or that they're idiots or anything like that it's just hell it happens to the best of us but no one likes to feel useless

it's an act of god exactly so i there is going to be a even if you and i are right there's going to be a role that's not the story that's going to be told it's going to be that we save the day by doing x y and z and it might the thing that they may attribute this all to is actually masks which is kind of wild because it doesn't i mean i'm not saying that masks do nothing but if you're not distancing they don't do very much and if you like if you're packed protesting 10 000 people shoulder to shoulder i don't know how much you know the virus is still getting in and around there so the the bottom line is that's another thing you got to consider here is like in terms not only could it be political in terms of partisan voting type politics but political in that you

know if you're in public health you don't want people to draw the conclusion unfairly even that your job is pointless and you know nothing we do in that regard matters does that make sense yes yeah it totally makes sense but even with that being said i think this whole ordeal has proven that some public health institutions like the world health organization and the cdc oh yeah very political yeah very political world health organization especially right like i mean just based i mean hell based on the fact that taiwan's not allowed to be in it right yeah so well we'll get to that later china's trying to hong kong taiwan right now yes they are before we get there though um well you had another tweet where you're calling out experts and experts yeah that was a

retweet yeah that was a retweet so that was a retweet from uh i think that was and this kind of ties very much into what i was saying about not wanting to admit that you you're wrong if you could take that idea that i just took a step further and that was a retweet from amy terese who said like you have to understand like in the status quo the role of experts is to preserve the status quo so if the status quo sucks the experts have to suck because they have to you know maintain that sort of status quo and that's part of this year too right i mean we i just gave a million different motivations that our experts might that that why actually not our experts that our people in charge might have for wanting to make the pandemic out worse than it is we just spent the

whole beginning of the podcast talking about and if you want that message to get across you by definition need experts that are going to amplify that message you know what i mean and that's and that's what it goes to a larger point that i made about technocracy i you know in my own tweet which was like when people vote against technocracy they're not they're not the first thing that always comes up is that mike judge movie idiocracy i freaking hate that movie because it actually draws all the wrong conclusions about everything that's that's going on they're not the idiots that are running the show in idiocracy the idiots are the technocrats you know what i mean they're the ones putting on the circus you know for the people in charge and when people vote

against technocracy they're actually voting against that this entire thing is entirely backwards it's bizarre to make the allegation that we live in a society where experts don't have enough power that's insane like and that's sort of the point of the movie or at least the point that people make when they constantly refer back to that movie um so that i'm sorry that movie is like a big trigger point for me because like as a populist right like you know above above all else i kind of consider myself a populist and as a populist i'm like that movie is literally just made to look to make populists look like morons like yeah the point of it i've never thought of it that way that is true though yeah like everybody they're looking for experts or

they need experts where even the the opening scenes of that movie there's a little infographic the way they explain that we somehow got to idiocracy was that oh these like well educated successful people decided to have less children and it was only the dumb proles that kept that kept breeding and that's how we ended up with this moron society and it's like f you man like you know like that's some eugenics shit right yeah like that's horrible like that's i don't know i get why the movie has become popular specifically in the past decade among a certain set but it's not good make i get mad about it yeah i haven't seen it in a while but no i mean it comes up all the time yeah and yeah it's like who can we trust these days like it's it's getting weird

it's getting weird like with the the protests going on and so the cultural aspect of it all too it's yeah it's like that popped up obviously george floyd's murder was the impetus for for this flare-up but like how how much did the lockdowns before that contribute to the overall vitriol that we've seen that's a really important point right and are the two things combined on some level Right. Were they were they both were they both were exacerbated or inflamed jointly and together to produce a desired result? Yeah. Before we get into the cultural stuff, I did have one thing that I just remembered. Like with all all the censorship that's going on with information that's gone against the narrative, like YouTube taking down the video of those two doctors. Yes. Yeah. Who were physicians like not like, you know, one was from Stanford, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So, again, tinfoil hat back on. Like, are they conditioning us? Like, no, don't. Like, Susan Wojcicki coming out, like, only World Health Organization information will get on. Like, if you're telling people to take vitamin C, we're going to take you off. Well, and right.

And, you know, by the way, just yesterday, and I don't know if you caught this, because this tended to be more circulating around, like, left Twitter. So like I have like an interesting Twitter profile in that sort of like this intersection of people across a very broad political spectrum, as we talked about on the last episode, because I kind of take a lot of my influences predominantly from distributism. And if you're interested in that, you should go back and listen to the first two episodes I did with Marty. But also, like I take a lot of class analysis from aspects of Marxism and things like that. and uh so in left twitter a big deal has been made i don't know if you saw this so it's the first part you probably did say did see jk rowling made some com made her give an opinion on transgendered people and her opinion was basically that she worries with kids that oftentimes kids who might be gay are sort of shunted towards believing that they're not just gay that they're

transgendered and that they get irreversible hormones or whatever the case might be her opinion really wasn't necessarily relevant to this discussion so that came out and of course like people just went ballistic about that right like how can you let her write these things how can twitter allow this to be tweeted etc etc so there was a uh a counter reaction to that and i don't know if you saw this part did you see the open letter in harper's yeah okay so harp the left is eating itself right so it harper's published uh and this goes to the cultural stuff which we'll talk about in a bit but harper's published an open letter which was like the most inoffensive thing in the world that basically said like you know society is better if we have like a spirit

of open speech open debate etc etc it even went out of its way to bash conservatives to try and like eliminate any particular to placate to play right exactly to say because the point that they made was like oh if we don't allow free speech and open debate the right wins you know what i mean like that was that was the point and i kind of get why they did that because they didn't want to get pigeonholed as like some sort of a right-wing thing right this letter you had matthew iglesias sign it gnome chomsky that's what's so funny so they're can't this they're canceling now this is think about how bananas this is they're canceling chomsky for supporting free speech which is wild on so many different levels first of all

he's 92 and he's been he's been whatever you think of his other stuff a lot of people that listen to this podcast are gonna have a negative impression of him because of the things he said about rothbard of course but i think he's made some good points about free speech right and manufacturing consent and all that and all that sort of stuff um you know chomsky is a libertarian and i'm not so i'm not necessarily aligned with his views but he's 92 and he's been promoting free speech for longer than i've been alive he's been writing about these issues how are you people possibly shocked and awed and horrified by the fact that he signed this totally inoffensive letter somebody described the letter as milked us it was it was it well it actually wasn't nearly

strongly worded enough it was actually too mild that was the problem with it and they're just going ballistic on chomsky i mean the other one that people are like salman rushdie signed it i mean you're younger so do you know who salman rushdie is uh not at the top okay so it was a big deal when i was younger salman rushdie uh is a british writer um he's i forgot now i'm bad he's muslim i forget if he's from india or pakistan please forgive me but uh he's british and wrote a book called the satanic verses which had some imagery in it that was found to be offensive to islam he had a fatwa put on his head so he had to live in secrecy for a long time he lives in public now again i believe the fatwa has been rescinded but that's like relatively recent maybe

the past 10 years um he was living in hiding like forever by the way if you if you uh if you're a curb your enthusiasm fan not this season but the season before larry i think puts on a musical about salvin rush i think rush he's in in one of the episodes too anyway like how are you surprised that that guy supports free speech a guy who's been had to live in secrecy for years because of stuff that he published like obviously these people are going to support that it's it's uh it's wild the degree to which they're um they're coming for it and i there's an article and you can if you want to link to it you can check my twitter i i tweeted it i think yesterday um by freddie de boer who basically said like well if you're mad about this letter

then just come out and say like i support censorship because i think i'm going to be the one that gets to do the censoring and that's just my position right like stop the whole stop the whole charade yeah well perfect transition to the cultural stuff it feels like people are trying to being bring like malice china to america like the there is a ton of effort to subvert a certain type of way of thinking free and open thinking and the subvert just open debate in general like if you do and it's actually i've been saying this on on side channels too like the organization black lives matter the end you're speaking specifically about the ngo yes like it is honestly one of the the best marxist psyops that's ever existed like to

hide behind that mantra black lives matter which is obviously true like if you deny that you're you're an imbecile a fucking terrible person but use it to push marxist ideas on the country and frame a narrative where if you're not on our side you're a racist and the word racism and racist is sort of losing its meaning throughout all this but everybody's getting canceled so talking about the cultural side the last two months particularly the cultural uh sort of uh enforcement of law if you will has been much stronger than political yeah enforcement oh yeah way crazy way strong woke capital's been been revved up so this is a really fascinating topic that i have a lot to say about and i think you have to look at it from a class perspective each class's interest in this

cultural revolution and i'm going to kind of take it sort of uh sort of class by class here because i think that's honestly the best way to understand what's going on um and then i think that's going to lead us to a larger discussion about what you actually mean when you say the word marxism because it's a very that's a very interesting discussion as well um so i say marxism i don't necessarily mean what you mean i mean what society what people mean in general and to preface it i'm only saying marxism because they say the two co-founders come out yes in fact they are trained marxist they made it that's a that i love that statement because it's like i'm a trained marxist marxism is just a uh a method by which you can analyze capitalist society that's all it is so

saying you're a trained marxist it's just it's bizarre it would be like you saying i'm a trained austrian you know like it's odd it doesn't really we'll get to that though okay if you look at it in an orthodox way that's sort of an odd thing to say so the the let's start let's let's start with what's going on here the i think the key piece that you have to understand there's a there's a russian-american scholar he teaches i think at university of connecticut named peter turchin who predicted all this quite a while back he has this theory called elite oversupply okay and elite oversupply essentially means that you have a lot of tumult and problems in a society when you produce too many elites and have too few positions for those elite parties because they have to fight

right and because they're elite they they have the ability to sort of drag a lot of other people into their stupid jockeying and fights and things like this he predicted amazingly specifically that the 2020s were when this was all going to come to four and he predicted that based on the fact that we so drastically expanded higher education back in the 90s that we would never be able to these people would be graduating with degrees feeling that they're entitled to a position within what i'm going to call for purposes of this discussion the professional managerial class right elite is a little too broad because what does elite mean bezos or does it mean like some guy that works you know in hr for amazon right there on some level they're both elite one of

those the hr worker in my example is sort of professional managerial class right so these people all graduated college and they think that this is something that they're entitled to and they're getting out there and they're finding out that there aren't enough jobs that pay enough in that regard right even if they can get one of these pmc jobs well the cost of maintaining a pmc lifestyle has gone up like private school for your kids college for your kids if you want to be in a country club the fancy house or if you're an urbanite and you want the apartment in in manhattan like this has all gotten a lot more expensive and that pmc lifestyle is sort of getting out of reach because we just have the supply and demand of jobs for these people is

such that the jobs are either hard to get or if they're not hard to get though the pay is too low right so you have a group of people that feel like they've been slighted okay because of this elite overproduction how does this manifest itself number one excuse me and everything i'm about to talk about and how these people manifest it a lot of this is not necessarily conscious a lot of this is subconscious right but they they feel like they've done everything right they went to school they worked hard they did all this they do not want to feel like they are a part of the working class right that's like the last thing they want and if they can't financially distinguish themselves from the working class if that's becoming harder and harder to do one thing that

they're going to do is they will start trying to culturally distinguish themselves from the working class and one very convenient way to do that is to adopt just wilder and wilder for lack of a better term cultural positions that your average working class person is going to find weird like just take maybe distasteful maybe disgusting or maybe just plain weird um because that provides some distance between you and those other people and provides a sense of superiority right in other words i'm not like you're seeing this play out on instagram so hard right i'm not like these other you know i might not be rich but i'm still not like these other bad people that have these beliefs i have my beliefs which make me superior so that's one part of it that's the

emotional rather than material part of it okay that that you're seeing going on with what's really driving this very hard right now because the as we're going to find out the driver of this cultural revolution is the professional managerial class it's funded and manipulated sort of by the hope bourgeoisie for their own interests and the uh working class gets screwed and the lumpen proletariat gets used as pawns so we're going to address all uh all parts of this so that's how the pmc is on an emotional level on a material level the these belief systems are a way to get the old guard out of their PMC jobs

to free up more slots, right? Because you could say like some management... God, I don't even remember where he's working right now. Do you remember like a couple weeks ago there was a guy that had to step down from an executive role and I can't remember the corporation right now

but because he's a veteran and in 1987 he wrote an opinion piece just opposing women in combat. Do you know what I'm talking... I forget where he worked. I remember the story. I forget exactly where he worked, too. I forget where the guy worked.

But, like, that's an example, right? Like, that got rid of him, so some new guy that holds all the new beliefs got his spot, right? So it's also a way they sort of weaponize these beliefs in order to get the old guard out of the way so that they can get their positions. It's disgusting that they'll go back 20, 33 years. There's actually, did you ever watch, it's been off the air maybe two or three years now, there was a show on FX. It was a dark comedy called, well, You're the Worst. I think I caught a couple episodes of it. It was interesting because it was a romantic comedy, but a dark romantic comedy.

That's not a combo that you see all that much, right? So there's actually an episode where the female lead in the show, Gretchen, me-toos her boss solely. So she's portrayed in the show oftentimes as being basically amoral. just solely because she just wanted his job so like that's the gag on the show she just she me-tuned her boss for absolutely no reason made up the story he gets fired she gets the job the office calls her a hero and she just goes about business like this is a normal way of advancing up the corporate ladder in that that was probably in 2018 or 2017 right that that show was

made and that's a lot of what's going on right now too not only are you forcing out the old guard but forcing these corporations to make even new positions centered around you know you need a chief diversity officer you need more hr people to train you in this new well how about what's going on in seattle and just right yes so that yeah there's an example right that there's consultants that actually teach all this stuff to you know private and public employers so they've this is a way well in seattle but this is where like they're dividing people right because in seattle we're gonna get there okay that's that's a separate part of this but yeah right now i'm just talking about from the perspective of the pmc so from the pmc's perspective you've

created this it's a jobs creation program for them right both by forcing out old people from existing jobs and creating new jobs it is a way of creating more of solving that sort of elite overproduction issue on some level for them so that that's from their end why this is going on Now, so they create this. Why are we seeing, and this is going to go to the point you just made, why are we seeing, for lack of a better term, the haute bourgeoisie, right? The wealthiest of the wealthiest. The Bezoses, the Zuckerbergs, Tim Cook at Apple.

Why are we seeing all of these people? So not just accepting it or making just the bare minimum overtures toward it. This has been a lot different. Like, this is not 1968 where, like, there was a certain level of acceptance as to what was going on, but, like, people weren't going out of their way to promote it. But that's not what we're seeing now, right? Like, we're seeing just out-and-out blatant promotion of this cultural revolution. Why would we do that? Well, I mean, they see this – people in that position just sort of recognize cultural trends, and they pick and choose the ones that are most beneficial to them in terms of going forward, and that comes into the whole division thing, right?

From the perspective of the people at the top of society like that, it's very beneficial if you can divide people based on racial lines or cultural lines rather than class lines, right? And the reason for that is, especially in the United States where we have an ingrained institutionalized two-party system, you can have those two parties differentiate each other on class. that's bad for them right because sometimes the working class party's going to win if you had that and they're going to institute stuff that effectively is going to get more money for their their patrons um their constituents you know what i mean which is by definition bad for the people at the very top right creates a more even distribution which is what they don't want So, whereas on the other side, if you inflame racial, cultural tensions to such a degree that the differentiating factor between the two parties isn't really class, but is more so like, hey, I got to protect either other people of my ethnicity or I have to protect the fact that I'm allowed to have a family or basic either racial or cultural issues like that, then they can just keep doing whatever they want with the economic side, with the political economy. and they create a country that is more akin to india let's say right where or or even if you

want to take it a step further to lebanon right you know what i mean something like that where that's the way the political system rotates around those racial uh cultural issues and that's why not only do they support it but they fund the hell out of this stuff you know they uh you know you talked about black lives matter and like you i'm just going to make clear that i'm not talking about everyone that says that slogan i'm talking about the actual formal incorporated organization the ngo i mean that was founded with 100 million dollars from the ford foundation right like the ford foundation is not funding uh any organization that is going to promote things uh against its against its own interests right like that's not against the interest of you know wealthy people

that just doesn't happen so that's where why on that level you're seeing this and this gets to your point when you mentioned the term marxist right there's been a long-term project throughout the west and now throughout the globe now that there is no more there is no more second world there is no more warsaw pact or soviet union um to create a situation where you want to move leftism toward these cultural issues for the reasons i just gave you want to focus on oppression based on culture or race or whatever the case sexual orientation whatever doesn't matter anything other than class so what you'll find is people that are in these organizations will say things like i am a trained marxist right but if you like had a gun to their

head and you could get an honest answer about what they would prefer to do enforce their like deranged crazy uh cultural agenda or like ensure the material security of everybody in the world they would choose the former uh absolutely 100 they would absolutely choose the former in this situation because the type of people that would choose the latter and there are people that exist obviously that would choose the latter they're not the ones that are going to get funded right like that it's just that's just the matter of how this works so it's all it's all just a ridiculous show and this has been going on in the u.s since the 60s right i mean there's there's an old uh saturday evening post article by a uh a cia agent it was written in 67 or 68 and the guy's

name is escaping me right now where he actually talks about this he's like yeah we funded all these different leftist organizations to try and move things in the direction that we wanted to uh during that time and that's all sort of coming to roost now right it's it's not even necessarily the government that's doing this anymore it's it's private enterprise but it's the same the same sort of concept yeah and i saw a sam hyde clip the other day um and he made a really good point like just heuristically like if all these corporations are are behind this you know you're not a part of a real revolution or yeah right it's it's ridiculous yeah yeah and that's not even to say that that there are that there aren't people that are tweeting about the stuff

that don't have real concerns but you're you're in some weird you know like i it's not even a controlled opposition it's a controlled uh it's a controlled takeover yeah yes right it's just a it's just this oddball thing and one of the most disconcerting parts about it by the way this is a little bit of a sidetrack before we before i get to sort of analyzing this from the perspective of the working class and even like the lumpen proletariat is like one of the funny like side like things about this is like we're getting propagandized right really really hard right um and part of that is for all the reasons i just gave and part of it is because and this goes to a little bit of the face masking discussion they're year zeroing us too they're using this

to year zero us meaning getting rid of our history our customs in this in this country our our culture you know anything like that it makes us to get rid of that why because when you on more people from those things they become better consumers right like if you if you destroy one of the side effects of destroying say the nuclear family is like the nuclear family in today's times is actually not really a commercial uh primarily a commercial relationship at least as compared to other relationships you might be in right you care for your family not because they pay you you care for your family because they're your family right so the more you can break down people's families you break down their sense of history anything that can't

be commoditized they replace that with things that can be commoditized you know so there's another there's a huge benefit in year zeroing people in that regard um and i think that's part of this as well and one of the more interesting parts about this year zero sort of this year zero psyop if you want to call it that is in the warsaw pact this was done right you you what particularly actually forget the warsaw packet journal the ussr the ussr not for capitalist reasons but wanted to eliminate the individual cultures of the individual constituent republics right they didn't want you to be they wanted you to be a soviet rather than a turkman or a kazakh or a ukrainian or a russian or whatever they wanted that unified soviet identity so they

propagandized too of course right but at least they got their propaganda one of the things that's interesting about the current propaganda is their propaganda even though it was all bullshit was still at least it was not dysgenic it was aesthetic and it was pleasant right like look at are you familiar with the new soviet man uh no okay so it was a major piece of propaganda throughout the entire history of the soviet union the idea was to create this identity of a man again who was not like you know a kazakh or a turkman or ukrainian or whatever but were russian even but was a soviet right but when they wanted to create this identity they held him up as this just like they tried to make it out like the coolest thing in the world the the new soviet

man was always muscular and he worked hard and he took care of his family and he engaged in self-sacrifice for the good of his people like it was this very like if you looked at it detached from what you know of the history of the soviet union you would say like hey this is like a really this is kind of like a neat thing i i could you would say i could understand why people would be so into this admirable yes parts of it were admirable again i'm not saying it wasn't all bullshit but at least the propaganda was trying to propagandize something admirable and not disgenic and gross and terrible so much of what we get now like in our propaganda is actually like the opposite it's dysgenic and disgusting whether it's like uh the acceptance of clearly unhealthy

lifestyles like morbid obesity yeah like the calvin klein posters right like stuff like that like it's like jesus this is a side point but like jesus christ if you're going to propagandize us at least make it pleasant right you know like it like why do they have to make it like what kind of hellscape are we moving so damn and i have a theory about this by the way as to why they that doesn't have to be pleasant anymore in the cold war on both sides you had to make your system look like rad because you had to be afraid of defectors like defecting was like a real thing and it really did hurt when you had a lot of it going on um wild story so a guy i know we didn't grow up together he didn't grow up in this part of the country but the guy he's like he's a few

years older than me but not much like four or five kid he sat next to a middle school didn't show up for school one day and they just kept didn't showing up for school and then he read in the paper that the kids parents they were apparently scientists defected to the ussr and this was in the this was in like in the late 80s yeah it's like this was like a thing that happened you didn't want people doing that right you didn't want people working because we we both had you know if you watch a tv show the if you're younger you can watch the tv show the americans to get a feel for what things were like in the 80s and this was it wasn't even just the 80s i mean it was the 60s 50s this has been going on all along i mean these countries really did have

agents in each other's countries trying to you know infiltrate to promote their own system in that country right the soviets were doing it here to try to move the u.s toward communism and we were doing it in the ussr to try and move the ussr toward liberalism right so you you didn't want that so you had to like at least make it look good even if it was bullshit right you didn't want it to look like this awful like dysgenic unpleasing thing right you couldn't get away with that back then but now there's no ussr anymore right our only main systemic enemy is china and like no one really wants china isn't really trying to force their system on the u.s they just want their they have different goals right like they just want their system to thrive

in their part of the world and for them to be successful with it at least that's my reading of the china situation i don't think you know when they try to steal secrets from the u.s i don't think they are trying to promote communism here per se i just don't think they care um one way or the other that's just my reading maybe i'm wrong but regardless of whether i'm right or wrong about that we don't at least perceive in the u.s to be a major threat of native-born americans like you know uh being traitors to china that's not really a thing that we've seen the way that we saw during the cold well yes we have the harvard professor like all these professors throughout all right you're right you actually you know what you're right on that point i still will hold that whatever

the situation might be the pressure is not as as intense as when the ussr was around and that's why we can we can get away with this china is not as much of a threat i have a lot of problems with china it is a different not not as much as not the right word it's a different kind of threat because we cooperate economically with china in a way we did not with the us i don't think we should i think i don't think we should either that's a different discussion i don't think we should be either but when you have that economic cooperation it allows this sort of i think it allows that infiltration to be more successful yeah okay all right potentially we'll put a pin in yeah in my theory as to why that happened next podcast we'll we'll expand we'll talk about that or your next

podcast or later this one we can talk about that more but my point still stands about the type of profit for whatever the reason the type of propaganda that we're getting as opposed to what we got in the old days american propaganda same deal was always to make american history look great it was to make everything look look fantastic there's uh if you're in the mood for just a lot to take a look at something dumb and slapstick that'll very quickly brighten your day there's this um it's there it's a three panel comic strip that ran in the hungarian people's republic which was the communist hungarian republic uh that ran from the 40s all the way up until 89 right it ran of course in the only official humor magazine that was allowed in

hungary because you know that's how the warsaw pack nations worked um called joseka and it's this just silly slapstick funny little comic and there's a twitter account that tweets out one of panels every day because it ran for like uh 15 years i think in the 50s and 60s it ran for like a really really long time it was very popular and obviously like everything that was running in an official state publication i'm sure this thing was propaganda right but like look at it if you look at it the the protagonist is like this hot like 60s modern girl who's like going out on all these like dumb adventures and has a million boyfriends and is like doing all this fun stuff and getting into kooky situations like at least that was like interesting right it was

designed to make hungary look good right like i'm sure it was bullshit but it was designed to make you feel good about living in hungary at the time like you were living in a modern fun society and we're getting like i think that's just an interesting as an aside how propaganda has changed since like i was a kid to now yeah like what the future that the left and the mob and yeah those who want to push this cultural revolution or pushing looks terrible right exactly now i will say but which is why i think it's important and i'm going to finish up my little class analysis here thing why i think it's important to look at it through a class lens because you can understand why it's happening if you weren't looking at it through a class lens i

think it'd be very confusing as in like why would these people push just such an unpleasant disgusting ideology they this can't make them happy but i think like if you understand aspects of it like say the elite overproduction theory right like that you could see why the motivation would come into play here yeah is it is it all ego like i need to i need to justify my degree and my my perceived eliteness well like i said i think there's the two parts to it there's the emotional side which what you're calling the ego side and there's the material side um there's always a material side you know that that's involved in in these sort of in any sort of movement like this So I think it is material as well. And then from the side of the people that are funding it, the real elites, you know, the people above the PMCs, on that side, it's entirely material, right? For the reasons I just gave. The year zeroing to make better consumers, plus the dividing people to prevent class-based politics going on. Those are all material needs.

now the interesting part about this is is there a point where the people at the top pull the plug because it's gotten a little beyond what they're willing to tolerate yeah like the harper's letter maybe like the first i don't know i don't know that anybody in that that wrote that sign that harper's letter is like important enough you know it's got to be like but it's a sign that like even some people on the left are riding the ship or like well yeah but like what are we doing that's true but i don't think they matter it's it's more so like the the the very wealthy people that finance this stuff and like that promote it like is apple gonna keep promoting all this stuff once it gets a little too far like where do they pull the plug you know because apple did a lot

of promotion for all this stuff um there's a lot of violence are the money ngos eventually going to dial back if it gets too far out of hand are the corporate donations eventually going to dial i don't know where that line is i truly don't can they like well they can i mean they can pull back they can pull back the financial end they can't get rid of the movement per se but what they can do is they can redirect its energy somewhere else and i'll give you a concrete example of something they could do and i'm not saying they'll do this they may run with this cultural thing for a while longer um but they could pull the plug on this and redirect everything towards climate change say instead right which regardless of whether you think of that as a topic that is an another

cultural another movement that can be easily used to make them richer to use just sort of crass basic terms here you know what i mean and it it's a movement that fits all the requirements i just gave it helps the pmcs feel morally superior it gives them justification to maybe get rid of some of their old bosses for their you know your company's not doing enough for the environment and it's very easily we know obviously environmentalism is very easily manipulable to use against working class people to the benefit of their employers right i mean that's that's an obvious one we've that's not even it's almost tautological or something at this point that that that's how uh climate change works so we'll come november if trump wins again

i think that'll be the shift yeah that's possible they you know i knew a lot of people that before the before the a lot of really smart people that i respect that before the uh floyd protests began thought that that's what was going to happen that covid that after covid settled down and whatever whether trump won or lost or whatever uh that they would make the shift to climate because it seemed in the beginning of the whole covid thing that the identity stuff was dying down like there we actually got a little break from that for a little while um so they thought that that was going to be the shift now that still might happen further down the line we just don't really know or maybe they got something new who the hell knows uh that's that's gonna that's gonna sort

of bubble up through the professional managerial class and be recognized by the people on top as being you know beneficial something they want to support something that they would rather energies be directed in for a class thing worth noting by the way um black lives matter right this time this big surge let's say in black lives matter um popped up right right after the economy uh for working class people at least tanked due to coronavirus right this this time when was the last time it flared up big time right after occupy wall street so you could make the argument that these flare-ups are timed pretty well to drown out class-based movements right because whatever Regardless of whatever you thought of Occupy Wall Street, it was a class-based movement.

And there definitely you could see in the wake of COVID a class-based movement started bubbling up because you had a situation where the effects of both the virus and the reaction against the virus by governments was very uneven on a class basis. Yeah, the Jim Cramer meme. The NASDAQ at all-time highs, 21 million unemployed. Right. Right. So, you know, there's, I can't prove that, but the timing is sort of interesting there. It's very interesting. In how this, in how this works. So I think there's, there's probably something there. And the rioting after George Floyd's death seemed very coordinated.

Like, yeah, it certainly did. Right. Why were people in Sioux Falls and South Dakota? Correct. And there were a lot of riots that were not covered by the media at all. and you know you follow michael tracy right online yeah i love michael tracy yeah yeah michael i'm trying to get you on the podcast for listening yeah answer my email that's another one where like you got if if you get if you get mt on i definitely want to be involved in that in some capacity one way or the other i love that guy he's in jersey too yeah fucking dm i was like dude you're in atlantic city i'm not too far from you um so uh any at any rate so he's done a really

good job of just in a neutral way just covering these protests just their existence in places where you never would have thought they were the degree to which they're peaceful or not they're both right i mean i i there's people that have legitimate grievances here but yes there's that's being lost in all this which is very much lost because they're just pawns that's yeah i'm going to go back to that in a second but um the he's covered a lot he's like he had some photos i think like a week or two ago of like green of like green bay yeah like places where you would never expect it just showing the damage like how much stuff was messed up just not covered i mean i was in wilmington delaware for the wilmington riots when they happened they got within about

six blocks of where i was staying right and that was covered by the am radio station i don't like that's part of the philadelphia media market i don't think it made philadelphia news at all which is weird wilmington's the second biggest city in the whole market um or at least made second most major city let's say in that market that they just like didn't talk about that it's like it never happened it's weird it's like very very weird yeah well um and like how much does the again going back to year zero destruction of property and the disrespect for property rights how how much is that like is there a coordinated effort by people who want to bring socialism or communism to america to to do this well it's not socialism or communism right i think for the

reasons i gave because that the people that are in charge of this stuff on the ground are the people that are much more corporate overtake yeah they're more they're more interested in this sort of bizarre social agenda right that they use economic the economic talk is just sort of used as a subterfuge to to sort of smuggle in this weird social agenda you know what i mean i don't i don't think this is any sort of what you describe is in fact the left as it stands in the west today it's not the left i guess in the hypothetical or if you know ideological way but it is what the left has become whether anybody on the left likes it or not is is sort of what we've been describing you know throughout this podcast which is sad but that's unfortunately

what it is they know how to wield the mob that's for sure yeah right and it's it has it is backed by corporate america i mean this was someone referred to these as state-sponsored riots which was kind of true right like you had the police were told not to do anything and the and the uh dude in philly it was like yeah they were fucking ghost riding police cars down the street and setting them on fire what the fuck you know corporations weren't were condoning it rather than than condemning it right you know what i mean so it was it was a wild situation it very much was let me finish actually i want to finish something here first too well okay i'll roll into it here i want to keep my thought flowing so it very much was and i'll explain what i mean by

this a riot from above to below right and i want to finish that by talking about the other two sort of classes that i didn't mention here how they play into this so you have a working class in the united states who's not going to get anything from this this is terrible for them their little family-owned businesses which family-owned businesses we can talk about whether they're working class or not they are workers man i mean they're working they're not really making their money by exploiting labor i mean they're they're a lot of these businesses in these inner cities like a bodega like they're putting in the majority of the labor right there yeah my parents are at the coffee shop right now working exactly right so the at the end of the day um those people got

screwed the people that owned all those small businesses in most of which were minority owned by the way uh as michael tracy's done a great job pointing out they got screwed they're they got wrecked um people that live in those neighborhoods are screwed because there's not going to be any additional like a lot of those stores aren't going to come back corporate america's not going to come in and fill the void so this has materially reduced their quality of life um for work the working class people that live in those neighborhoods so they got wrecked by this like this has been uh undoubtedly bad and then you know you have sort of the lumpenproletariat which are people for people that aren't familiar with that term that's people who aren't even they're actually

below working class they they don't have any sort of work or if they do it's not steady work or or if they do have work it's criminal work right so uh criminals would be an example of lumpen proletariat traditionally they would talk about people who are surviving on alms which nowadays i guess would be like welfare something people that aren't working at all um that just aren't capable of doing so uh or you know people that just just sort of bounce from thing to thing and just don't have any sort of steady employment and when you call when you use that term that's not a condemnation of those people as people right it's a uh it's descriptive you know what i mean it's just saying it's it's not like trying to demonize for instance people that collect government

benefits it's more just descriptive of their situation right so i you know i'm not like a marxist but i tend to look at that analysis sometimes through that lens and if you look at the traditional old-fashioned orthodox marxist analysis of this mars considered them unorganizable right like you couldn't they were just too desperate in other words to be able to have any sort of class consciousness and just even beyond what mark's specifically said about it i mean they're just they're just so desperate that they'll do anything right because they're only looking at and this is not assigning blame it's just a unfortunate uh description of the situation as it is they're like looking one day at a time like you know so if they have the ability

to loot a store they're going to do it you know what i mean because they can't afford to think about the long-term effects on their neighborhood the way say a working class person might you know you know that's the bottom line so if you look at who's participating in the riots it's the pmcs and the lumpen proletariat that are sort of participating in this in this situation because and the lumpens are just pawns right they're just being used because they're desperate people looking for anything that can better themselves whether that be looting well this was or this played out in minneapolis like you saw like and they described this on no agenda it was like three phases of it you had the the peaceful protest like during the early morning afternoon

and then you had the pmc class who wanted to drive this cultural division they came in they broke the windows they didn't loot and then at night the lump in proletariat would come in and loot right exactly yeah yeah and that's that's that's how it broke down tracy by the way has a good youtube interview with one of the guys that participated in burning down the police police station i haven't watched it yet it's been on his patreon yeah yeah yeah yeah you should check that out uh so it's it's just fascinating so the best um visual signifier of this is was it the new york city police budget i think was last week um when they when they defunded the police in new york or they or they cut the budget big like did you watch any of this no i didn't i

didn't catch okay so new york had a vote uh on their police budget you know obviously there's a big defund the police movement right now uh which is pmc driven primarily abolish the police right right right yeah both abolish and defund the police are primarily pmc driven movements because they don't have to live with it right the the consequences um so if you uh anyway in anticipation of the vote which did end up panning out i think they cut one billion of the six billion nypd budget so there's gonna be some wild stuff going on as we've seen already with new york policing reduced how murders of skyrocket yes so that aside the best visual of this whole visual descriptor of this whole cultural revolution is there's a video of the protests

that were going on in anticipation of the vote it was like the night before i think they were out protesting like all night because i think i guess the vote was the next morning and there's a gentleman in a dress at the front lines oh my god yelling and yelling and screaming yeah tits too yes yelling and screaming at an african-american police officer and the crux of the insults were around the fact that the police officer did not attend college where it actually not even did not attend college i think circle didn't attend enough college i actually think he didn't he didn't even i don't think imply that he didn't go to college at all i think if i remember the implication was that he only went to like junior college like he didn't actually have a bachelor's

degree that's wild so that is very clearly a rep uh you know a and he that person is a like exemplary personification of the dysgenic disgusting correct aesthetic that you were describing earlier yeah it is it is and that's and by the way and i know you don't mean it this way and i'm gonna clarify for myself too that's not i'm not bashing gay people this guy was just an ugly guy like yeah like ugly personality he's an ugly guy he was an ugly man with an ugly personality saying ugly things to an african-american police officer who was just trying to do his job called him black judas i believe yes black judas yep yeah black judas and then went on and on about how the guy didn't have uh you know didn't have uh the appropriate level of education to be able to

i guess not only have an opinion but even be able to supposedly do that job so drawing that line between the pmc and the working class right exactly and they'll counter so if you talk to someone that's a police defunder i mean they'll counter this by saying uh police aren't workers right because they enforce the the evil system right which is i'm going to tell you why that's bullshit for a couple different reasons number one police are workers what the service that they they work and they provide a service and that service is security um because regardless of what else they might do in addition to what i am saying they absolutely provide law order and security for you and your family no matter what social class you are at some level now do they

maybe unfairly and unjustly harass certain people all of that may be the case but that doesn't take away from the fact that they do they do in addition to any bad things that they may do provide that service right now the perspective you'll often get from police abolishers and police defunders as well really what police do is they incarcerate people that are sort of part of the surplus population that don't fit into the economy correctly to sort of get them off the street i'll even concede that that's true but if that's true the issue is not with the police the issue is the system that creates those people that are sort of disjointed and can't fit you know you follow what i mean that's a systemic issue that has nothing to do with the police

that will go away if you deal with the larger economic issue that creates that class of people right i mean that's that's the issue you have to deal with they're not the fact that the police are are or are not getting them off the street that's a that's a really ass backwards way to deal with that problem and it's the most disconcerting and frankly disheartening point of this whole thing everybody's so fucking confused and they're swinging at the wrong problem right because it's like here's the bottom line you could create an economy well i don't know that you could but let's say hypothetically you could create an economy that ensured material security for everyone no one was precarious everyone had food everyone had their needs met

you would still need police like you might need less of them right but you absolutely would still need them because some people are just freaking crazy right like i mean some that and that's been since the beginning of time like would domestic violence be reduced for i'm going to use that as one example if the hypothetical i just gave existed absolutely yeah it absolutely would would it go away no some people are just cruel and misogynistic or whatever and would still beat their wives like some people would continue to beat their children even even without those economic pressures on them right like that that would still exist and still be a thing regardless of how much it may be reduced in a like a hypothetically perfect economic yeah and what

does abolishing the the police what does that solve like what who's gonna what vacuum is gonna be created there and who's gonna step in here's the thing if you want to get if you want to if you want to get material about it and say who benefits right remember so this is kind of goes back to this elite overproduction theory right who if you look at what the police abolishers want oftentimes they want a situation where like you're in a hairy spot you call the police right and the cops come out and they uh excuse me the cops don't come out you call 9-1-1 say it's not the police so you call 9-1-1 and they want social workers to come out right but who does this materially benefit it creates more pmc jobs right because you're going to need a bunch of

new a bunch of new social workers and like all these other people who can coach you through the problem right exactly so even if you don't get to that abolish the police level and you just defund them look at the police defunding that's happened whether it's in new york or minneapolis or whatever uh los angeles they're diverting the money to ngos to community groups this creates uh this creates those pmc jobs right like this this helps deal this is one way of dealing with that elite oversupply problem so one thing i think we got to really look at one thing that may help us is i have a real hope and i could be wrong about this could be a false hope that covid's really going to slaughter higher education i hope so too because a lot of these problems will go

away in the event that you can really get rid of this sort of elite overproduction issue yeah imagine this year will be the test right like kids like hey fuck it i'm not paying 50 grand for a zoom class i'll go find a job or yeah learn to code right teach myself right right and that's good for two reasons one it gets us out of this bad cultural revolution stuff and number two you can have more of a working class politics at that point because if these people don't go to college don't get that sense of entitlement to being elite they'll identify they'll become more conscious of their own status as working class and that's creates a larger pool of working class people to act in their own interests that's so fucked the university system's fucking everything up

yeah it is in large in very large degree i mean that's that's what we're getting at here right Because if you didn't have this university degree that made you feel like you were entitled or better than a plumber or a janitor or whatever, you might be like, shit, I have more in common with those guys than I do with Bezos. We should be like, you know, we're all barely scraping by, you know, we should be sort of unified together in the way we approach politics or economics or whatever, whatever the situation might be. Maybe we should get we should look at things like unionization or whatever. Whereas by creating this elite issue, you know, what the degree does is it creates this level of separation where those people aren't conscious of their shared interests. Yeah. Well, that's why I love being here. Right. On this island, particularly, yes, there's a lot of vacation homes and homeowners that live in Pennsylvania, mostly. Yeah. March, April down here with the working class down here.

and like it's just normal people just yes a lot of normal people yeah i worked out with my former boss at the hot dog stand we've been he's big surfers we've been surfing a lot and doing workout circuits and like his life is perfect he wakes up gets rolls delivered to his house does the hot dog stand from 11 to 4 hard working job and is able to relax and chill with his family what we've lost in america is there's too few people that are able to make that choice you know what i mean like there's the everybody this is all right how do i phrase this and i hope that didn't come off wrong like i think i'm better than i am in that i didn't take professional general class and like oh look i'm meddling with the working class right right now i understood what you meant and but that

should be an option like what you the way you describe your boss's life for everybody if you have a job and you're willing to show up from nine to five and do it like you should be materially secure that's just the end of the story like that's just the way like it doesn't mean that i'm not even talking about eliminating all inequality like i'm not even going that far i'm just saying like if you it doesn't matter whether you're a butcher or a plumber or a janitor if you are willing to show up 40 hours a week and do that job you should be live in a society where you are materially secure you know you're not worried about like barely getting by or any like crazy stuff like that you know what i mean regardless of whether or not you're in the richest

you're the richest person in the world and that's kind of the way you describe your old boss's life and that should be available to everyone and right now it's not right like if you work for if you work in the service industry right now it's just not available to you you know what i mean like you you probably are going to have to work a lot more than just the one job and not be able to just sort of uh hang out and and uh well hang out's not the right word but enjoy time with your family and have your basic material needs met like you're just it's not gonna happen that's what really scares me about the long-term effects of these shutdowns like is it too far gone at this point like have too many people left the workforce

permanently that we can't pick up the pieces it's not like left the workforce permanently and it's i'm more concerned about people that are going to be forced into precarious work as a as a as a result of this so the the expansion of the gig economy versus like secure employment you know employment on demand basically um that's very worrying to me we may have a new wave of low-cost outsourcing because once they've once your employer has figured out that your job can be done remotely which a lot of them have figured out now they may figure out like shoot like if it can be done remotely from home in america then it can be remotely done by a teenager in the philippines probably you know what i mean like i think they're we're gonna see some of that going

on and i don't know how quick that's going to happen if they'll actually like i don't think i don't know that they'll want to just like massively lay people off but they it may be a thing where like when a guy leaves they replace them with a filipino teenager instead of uh instead of another you know middle-class american worker yeah so what are your thoughts on this whole h1b b1 uh i here's my hot take on h1bs i think h i think someone should sue stating that h1bs are uh unconstitutional indentured servitude contracts under the 13th amendment why is that well because you're stuck to your one employer uh so i think there's a strong argument there that that makes it unconstitutional like because it is an indentured servitude arrangement right

Like if you leave your job, you have to go back to your country of origin. So what it does is it creates this class of people who like have no leverage over their jobs at all. And that drives everyone else's wages down. So, yeah, H-1Bs are bad. That's a very good point. I never heard that take. I like that. Yeah.

And there's this sham that like, oh, well, we only use them for jobs where we can't get, you know, we have to attempt to get domestic employment first. But have you ever seen, like, screenshots of some of the job ads that they use? What they'll do is they'll be like, such and such job, master's degree required, pay is minimum wage, or something crazy like that, right? And then they can post that and leave that up for however many months to prove that, you know, they couldn't get an American to fill that job. And then they go get an indentured servant to fill it. And, yeah, no Americans would be, like, minimum wage with a master's degree. Right, no one's going to take that job. Right, exactly.

So that's they try to make the job as unappealing as possible when they post it because they don't want applicants so that they can get someone, you know, an indentured servant to do it. Jeff, are you racist? It's it's not. Well, the funny part about people when they make that accusation about if you oppose H-1Bs or something like that is really if you want to improve minority employment in those fields, then you should. like instead of getting some h1b hire an underprivileged person and train them a lot of these jobs don't need you don't really need a master's degree just go out find a smart promising person uh hell even if you're i mean if you want to do it on a straight up affirmative action basis and you only are going to hire someone of color that's still better than like an h1b situation

Right. Because you're taking an American, you're creating an American job, you know, with someone who is you made someone's life materially better. Right. So you're making my point that I was trying to make there very inelegantly is if you care about material improvements in the lives of people who are racial or cultural minorities, H-1Bs are not the answer to that. The answer to that is go hire an American who, because of their situation, may not have the appropriate qualifications for that job and train them to do it. Yeah. No, they need to go through the university system. They need to get indoctrinated first. And then we're going to offer the minimum wage. They're not going to take it.

Right. And then they're going to go burn police stations down. Right. And tell you that you need to look at this Calvin Klein poster and believe that's a beautiful person. Right. It's horrible. like the whole thing is it's uh you know it's it's disorienting and it's it's bad but that's the situation where unfortunately you know we are today could this potentially be like uh

the night is darkest before the dawn situation like you said hopefully the covid situation yeah dissuades people from going to university and like could this move people to more distributists like i could see a potential balkanization of the united states happening over this decade well the problem with balkanization though is it won't be it won't it won't just it won't be like a decentralized governing thing it would be more like everyone fighting for control of the central authority you know what i mean because that's kind of what they want and and you know why they're doing this so that i'm not particularly uh i'm not particularly optimistic about that side of it um

in terms of does it decentralize governance for us to some degree what i think has been a positive about with regard to all this is that the covid response actually has been pretty decentralized right unfortunately we've had you've had the ability of the media to sort of scaremonger some places into doing things they didn't want to do but we have had a decentralized response there hasn't the response has been very regional either state by state or in many states uh county by county or city by city right like even something like masking regulations in a lot of states that's not a state issue that's a city issue or a county issue you know what i mean depending on how they want to manage their specific hospital capacity what

you know number of infections they're willing to have at a given time for a variety of reasons right how they want to handle it so i guess that's one positive um that i can see out of this whole thing uh the biggest the biggest potential positive out of the covet thing i think is the university thing if we can really drive the universities down university attendance down a lot of these universities start to go out of business uh etc that could be the one silver lining here out of the whole thing and it could also by the way the other part that could happen is i don't know if they're going to do this but if the people on top decide hey like a lot of these pmc jobs are pretty unnecessary and we don't need them and they start actually getting rid of more of them

that could go one of two ways one it could make the whole elite oversupply effect that i just gave even more extreme or two it could actually break it the oversupply could become so great that they have no choice other than to accept the fact that they're working class now people have to humble themselves yeah and i don't know which one of those two directions we're going to go well yeah that and then even trickling down further in the education system like homeschooling people getting getting people out of the public school indoctrination system yeah we'll see your homeschooling or you know cap homeschools catholic schools things of that nature um the only reason why i don't know about that is uh just the financial aspect people are going

to be in a tough financial spot and i don't know that they're going to be able to yeah no that's a good point such a weird time it's been such a weird year 2020 man it has it's been uh we're halfway through do you think it gets worse or better you know i think it all depends on like the next month or so because if if things really do burn out in texas and arizona and uh if things just sort of burn out and and when they burn out and continue to burn out the minimum the minimal regulations that are in place in texas and arizona go away right so in texas the main thing is basically just that there are no bars and you have to wear a mask now so if it burns out and they get rid of the masks and the bar uh restrictions or elimination of indoor bars

and that and it stays burned out that's a good sign because eventually other states are going to have to follow that whether they want to or not because the evident like people will just be like what the hell like i can go to this other state and uh party right and it's not just texas and arizona that are taking this approach but they're the two biggest states i guess they're and they're under the microscope right now right they're taking this approach for instance new jersey's never going to loosen up until something like that happens right like it's going to take something like that happening before like a state that we're in here in jersey for that to ever for our regulations to ever lighten up yeah or a vaccine i suppose right

they could they could go for that as the as the end game too but but that even if a vaccine does come out that would be like end of fourth quarter 2020 from what i see so as to whether to your initial question with whether the second half of the year is better or worse if we have to wait for a vaccine it's not going to get any better um i will not be getting anywhere near that vaccine i can tell you that for sure on the other side if it's the burnout effect then it could potentially be better right i mean it could i'm not saying this is the case but like let's say in the best case scenario this is done by the end of july then that's possible right the things could get better in the second half of the year yeah then they do they turn up the cultural stuff until

the election and then maybe maybe that's a good question i don't know they gotta worry they gotta to worry about that too you know like this at what point do you go too far yeah um and it there's a boomerang effect there so i don't know yeah and i don't know that they know i don't know that people are telling pollsters the truth about their opinions on a lot of these social movements because you're told at work you get fired right if you oppose it so you're gonna even though you're anonymous to a pollster you're just you're used to just saying like oh this is something that i support or that's or whatever how crazy is that people are getting fired for having an opinion like is that even legal yes it's uh it's at will employment so it's uh the the default rule in the

united states in every jurisdiction is at will employment meaning you can fire people for any reason or no reason now there are modifications to at will employment in every state and even some at the federal level that protect people as they should but for their race uh their religion their ethnicity their their immigration stat well not their immigration status as in legal or illegal but immigration status as like are you an immigrant or are you native born um all those things are all protected classes under federal and state law as they should be but that's the exception not the rule um you don't have to protect any in the united states anyone's opinions now there are people that believe that employment law should adapt to say like anything

you say outside of work should just be protected speech and you can't be fired for that right and that's obviously that's uh i'm sympathetic to that position um it's certainly not a libertarian position right the libertarian position would be at will employment in all cases if you don't like what someone says outside of work you just be able to get rid of them um but i think that there's you know i'm not a libertarian so i see that there's some merit uh in fact that position that people just shouldn't be fired and i mean it just that's another reason why employers like all this stuff too it just kind of makes people easier to fire if you want to get rid of somebody i mean even though it's at will um it's still nice to have a cause to fire somebody because it just

you don't have to worry about lawsuits later on it just it gives you good cover with the with the other employees for morale purposes so if you could just search their social media and uh you know pull something out of context and go after them you know i'm very thankful for where i work and having this podcast yeah we're all lucky we're all lucky in a lot of different ways one of the ways that like i look one of the things that i think about when i think about political economy too is like i think predominantly the position that i'm in which is very fortunate is like luck um i'm not saying like that i never worked hard or never did anything good but i think there's like a massive luck factor

so i always think about it like if i didn't have the luck factor like man i really would hope that i'd be able to uh you know go to work break rocks for eight hours go home not have to think about it and be materially secure right because i would never want to just like there's no way i would ever work as like you know even if i could in like a corporate executive position where that sort of becomes your life and there's this like weird inter-office politics and all that sort of stuff i would just never do that right i'd rather go just just do labor eight hours a day and not think about it um and i don't say that because i i don't mean to imply that those sort of jobs are easy because i certainly don't believe that they are um you just don't want to deal with the

bullshit i mean not in this bullshit of corporate america exactly and you should just be able to do that whether it's physical labor or any other kind of labor that you're providing just show up do your job go home not think about it and and have material security i mean that's the bottom line does mmt get us there oh you want to transition to the mmt discussion i think that's a good transition yeah yeah sure so as i told marty you know before we started recording uh i recently read stephanie kelton's book which just came out like at the i think june 6th that came out i actually pre-ordered it because i was very interested in it so i got it right away and read through her book on mmt that's a hell of a lot of background noise we got there the noon bell

yeah um so it's a it's a for anybody that was considering picking it up uh it's written for a general audience like you definitely don't have to have like any level of economic knowledge to understand it um it's mostly written for an audience that doesn't understand most people listening to this podcast probably understand the concept that the government can print unlimited money right that the federal government cannot for instance default on its debts you know with fiat currency that's not a difficult concept for readers of this podcast i mean listeners readers of the podcast listeners of this podcast probably understand however the book does spend a lot of time on that because that's not something that regular people understand like she spends

time contrasting the situation of a country like the u.s or japan that has control of its currency versus like greece in other words we could have an economic disaster in the u.s but it's not going to be the one that greece had because greece doesn't control uh its own money supply so i mean that's a big part of the book and then it just sort of it sort of goes into how mmt works which is not that hard to understand i mean the idea is basically that right now when we want to control money supply the federal reserve does this via a non-political mostly or supposedly non-political process that involve that mostly involves controlling interest rates right whereas in an mmt system you move this whole money supply expansion contraction thing to the fiscal side

to the government itself where uh when things get bad you know the government just starts directly spending money on you know whether that be unemployment benefits welfare anything you could you could possibly imagine infrastructure investment anything that you could theoretically imagine in that regard and then when it wants to reduce the money supply it either cuts back on some of that let's say infrastructure spending or whatever or it raises taxes right so that's sort of it's a different way of attacking the the fiat currency puzzle there yeah raising taxes is their way of contracting the supply right it's raising taxes or cutting spending so one way part of it self-regulating in that she envisions uh eliminating unemployment benefits essentially

and replacing them with a federal jobs guarantee which her benefit she did recognize would be best uh carried out at a decentralized level so it would be federally funded but your local municipality would determine how the money's spent so like if you had a litter problem people on the jobs guarantee might be picking up litter all day for instance right like whatever the case might be and that's what in large part self-governing because what's going on that piece of it because obviously spending on the jobs guarantee goes up when unemployment goes up and uh spending on the jobs guarantee goes down when unemployment goes down automatically right because when employers are hiring so long as they're paying more than the minimum wage which

the jobs guarantee would pay the minimum whatever under that system you feel the minimum wage should be um they're going to leave their jobs guarantee job and go you know go into private employment so that part's self-governing however stuff like infrastructure spending there's a lot of other pieces to this that would not be self-governing and would require a lot of political will on the part of politicians to either stop them you know at certain times or to on the flip side raise taxes in order to drain money out of the money supply because the when you're looking at things through an mmt lens like they do taxes have two purposes it's not really to finance spending they consider spending is done by just creating money the uh the the purpose of taxes is twofold

number one to create demand for the currency so they they do the whole chartless thing right uh where that's how you create demand for currency by requiring the taxes be paid in that currency And then number two, to reduce the money supply when necessary, to drain money out, to prevent inflation from going crazy. So the bottom line with the system is I think a lot of people that are hard money advocates I think tend to go hard against MMT almost as if it's worse than the current system. But I don't think that's right. I actually don't think it's any worse than the current fiat system. it in fact in a sense might be better in that it's so much more transparent it's it's much more transparent than the federal reserve just you know it's all of its its actions and it does

create the different winners it doesn't change the losers right so people are who are who are trying to save and get ahead are still losers for all the same reasons that they're losers in uh a in the current fiat system but it does at least change the winners instead in that instead of like the cantillon effect sort of works backwards instead of the people at the top of the economic period pyramid getting the money first and therefore getting all the benefits before the inflation kicks in typically speaking at least to some extent in an mmt system at least how they envision it uh well i guess i should say as the as most mmt advocates would prescribe because they do make this point she does make this point in the book the mmt is really just a descriptive

mechanism more so than prescriptive they do make prescriptions based on viewing money through the mmt lens so if you look at mmt how's it yeah how's it prescriptive it's never been enacted well it's how is it prescriptive or descriptive excuse me well it's it's a description of the way the fundamental nature of money that's what they would say in other words you follow what i'm saying in other words yeah it's uh i kind of mixed the descriptive and prescriptive parts there when i explained it which was in elegance on my own part but it's more so that mm the idea behind mmt is really just the idea that taxes don't finance spending that money creation finance is spending that's really mmt and then most mmt advocates having that frame move to a set of

prescriptions which involve instead of targeting interest rates and doing all that stuff that you control the money supply fiscally through taxation and spending um sort of uh you know etc in that regard but anyway my point was in most of the policy prescriptions that mmt advocates used to make while it doesn't change the losers it does change the winners to some extent the at least the people at the top aren't the only winners they are winners to some extent right because when that money gets spent it's getting spent on favored businesses and areas and things of that nature but it does allow at least people at the bottom to partake in some of the cantillan the positive effects of the cantillan effect right because they're for like the jobs guarantees are

good example like if you're taking advantage of the jobs guarantee you you are one of the beneficiaries of the of the can't tell an effect because you're getting the new money first yeah in that particular instance yeah yeah and what uh the best critiques i've seen of this to date is that they're tying whether or not the expander contract this money supply to inflation to the cpi which is historically a pretty terrible metric right and that's not really different than the current system right no yeah it shares all the same flaws of the of that's that was the thing that i came away with most by reading the book it's a quick read by the way like if anybody wants to go wants to check it out and understand mmt better even even if your reason to understand

it better is that you think it'll allow you to make sicker burns on twitter you know rather than than just sort of the very superficial uh you know magic money tree criticisms of it uh but yeah uh it like i said the main takeaway there is that it changes the winners at least to some extent not the losers yeah in the system yeah and again just from a heuristics complex system standpoint it just doesn't make any sense to me because it's they're trying to allocate capital even more granularly which i think more so than the current system yeah i mean they're giving it out yeah i guess you're right right because if you're increasing money supply in the under the current system right the the banks are actually allocating capital in sort of a market uh and sort of in the

market is allocating it to some extent right like the banks are getting all the benefits but the government's not telling the banks who they have to lend it to yeah exactly So the government is just trying to push it to certain sectors. Yeah, that part of it doesn't bother me so much because the bet – you're right. I mean it does create – it's still artificial capital. And just the fact that the banks can allocate it usually means that it creates even more of an equalizing effect. So if you had a gun to my head and you said, hey, we have to have a fiat system where we're going to be expanding the money supply, which way do you think is better? i do think that like stephanie kelton's way to increase the money supply is probably better

um in at least at least in a vacuum than the current system that we have now that's not me knocking hard money obviously i'm on this show but uh like if you had to have one of the two systems i'd probably rather have the stephanie kelton system than the uh than the current one yeah but how how uh i'll be the mmt well yeah take the other side antagonist here um yeah like so how how would they enact the the contraction and expansion of the money supply they'd have to do it via taxes right and how do you get congress to agree on what yeah i mean that's gonna be tough but i guess my counter it would be partially automatic with the jobs guarantee but you're right you would have that's the the big issue right now but here's the thing

um we kind of have this problem now with interest rates look how look how politicized the setting of interest rates has become and all the pressure that uh is on the fed to like i don't know that they're ever going to really substantially raise interest rates what do you never do i'll never yeah they can't they literally i don't know that we're any worse so i don't know that it's any more likely that the fed would contract the money supply by raising interest rates in a significant way as opposed to congress either raising taxes or cutting like things like infrastructure spending i don't know the answer to that question i i i think i view those both as equally difficult politically yeah and how would you do this handoff from a federal reserve

system to a monetary system based on well i mean you would just i don't think it actually requires much of anything they could the government would just start spending and telling the treasury to credit its account i believe that's that's that's it that's simple yeah but the fed go away no i mean they would but they would have a much reduced role they would literally just be acting as the federal government's bank yeah i don't know if i like that it's too much government power well right you they wouldn't be i guess independent anymore well i mean i guess they really are they would be independent they really aren't independent right now they just wouldn't be emerged with the treasury during this whole thing yeah that's basically

correct too yeah yeah ah so many problems what are your bitcoin thoughts you have any bit it's a bitcoin podcast should we talk about bitcoin yeah it's pretty boring these days yeah well i mean there's a lot going on right so it's uh it's i'm gonna talk about a big i'm gonna talk about a slightly larger topic that's gonna funnel into that okay i like this i'll go with that so one of the things i was thinking about this past week is in terms of the covid stuff have we hit an inflection point now Now, one of the criticisms I got, when I say criticisms, not a criticism as in, like, screw this guy, he's criticizing me. But I think a very valid criticism on the last episode that we talked about, and this was from Connor Brown, who we both, both of our friends, said that he thought I was doing a little bit of a Neo-Luddite thing.

Right. In other words, where I was kind of taking the, you know, not full on Kaczynski, but like taking the position that we may have reached the point now where technology is no longer beneficial to humanity. Right. On the whole, there's always been situations where individual technologies have not been beneficial to humanity. But we have we hit that inflection point. And when he said that at the time, I actually said that's not really an infallible criticism. uh i don't i don't think that's wrong i i i think about that a lot and i don't know the answer and this has pushed me a little more into that luddite camp you'll see how i get it to bitcoin in a second because bitcoin is of course a technological innovation right so i don't think we could have done the covid response that we did if it weren't for technology part of the reason you were able to placate people to keep them in their homes and docile and all this stuff

is that you had you were feeding them netflix and you were having them zoom with their family which as we've discussed i'm not zooming with family i'm gonna go visit you you know what i mean like that that's how this works it's just there's something wrong with it i don't know from a human perspective it's a pod yeah it is you get to speak from your pod this is living in the bugs living in the pod and eating bugs right like this this is there there's an aspect of that to all of this um and the the the pod bugs future i think is requires a certain level of technology that we have now that we didn't have before and as a thought experiment i've been thinking about where is that if you believe that and i'm not saying that you necessarily do marty but i'll

let you kind of chime in here too where do you think that inflection point was at what point like like a rough year not even you know it's like an exact year but like roughly where do you think we hit that point where we're doing more harm than good now social media social media 2005 2006 yeah yeah and what's interesting about that i don't think my answer is substantially different i'm gonna give mine in a second but i was thinking about like bitcoin which we all view in a tremendously positive way right and and i think i'm gonna take a second here sometimes when i do these podcasts i get because i have sort of a weirder twitter presence um i get people that might not understand what i mean by that uh and and maybe didn't listen to prior episodes so i'm

gonna take a quick second here to explain what i mean in that like i don't view bitcoin and if you want a more thorough exposition on this you should go listen to the last two episodes i did with marty but i don't view bitcoin as a uh from the typical libertarian perspective right i view hard money as much more of an equalizing factor um which i think even libertarians do as well um but i don't necessarily take the whole the whole i'm not the typical like ron paul gold guy i guess is the point i think you can make a very solid case from a populist or even if you're uh if you consider yourself uh a straight up leftist on economic issues for hard money and i'm going to take i'm going to shill something let's put this in the show notes i'll give you the link um uh

nuevo curso which is a uh they're somewhere in latin america but they they write in english and spanish they they're a marxist organization like straight up like that um very much so but they recently wrote like a really good article on how the soft money system is manipulating the current economy in the united states and all the negative impacts of that so i think that would be interesting i think for a lot of regular podcast readers to check out yeah we'll definitely share that link yeah so at any at any rate um going back to the technology question um we're all hopeful about bitcoin whether it be from a libertarian perspective or in my case not from a libertarian perspective um about bringing some sort of positive change to society in general i don't

bitcoin if you think about it really ain't all that technological right you don't need very much it's a it's math really right so you could run people smarter than us i hope actually will debate what i'm about to ask right now in the maybe in the twitter uh replies for this episode like what would like how good could we get bitcoin in 2005 or even like 1999 right and i'll give like some of my like ideas on this right like i think like you would have i think the problem would be like you'd need you could still be pretty damn trust minimized but probably not quite as trustless as it is today like that would be probably my thought and the reason i think that is you'd have an initial block download problem right like well that's already a problem we have like the amount

of time if you just want to set up a node in your own home it takes to do initial block download i think you'd see a lot more of like james o'burn type solutions right um in place which i don't think are necessarily the end of the world if enough people are out there posting in there should people be relying on that right now in current technology all the time no i'm not saying it isn't but in our in our thought experiment i'm going to assume utxo stan uh the whole chain state loads in the background like if you're willing to wait weeks like you're fine yeah so there you go right so let's say you know solutions like that would become far more important and you'd be spending more time in that assumed status right where you're where there's some

level of trust it's not total trust on a single third party right because you'd have to have multiple people signing signatures you'd have to have multiple people signing and you could even have somebody like that you know really well be one of those people that sign off that everything's right right there's nothing fishy going on so i like you do not i'm not i like assume utxo and i think no matter how fast bandwidth gets we're we're gonna see that um it's inevitable a bigger part of bitcoin right so that becomes like far more important right how much time it would take to actually catch up particularly like say like in 1999 it might have taken a really long time to catch up but you could still process new blocks they're they're a megabyte or i get

They're, I guess, bigger than that now. They can be two megabytes or, you know, depending on a lot of other factors, with segregated witness. But that was not, every 10 minutes, downloading that much was not an incomprehensible task, you know, even then. And maybe you couldn't have done segregated witness,

I don't know, and gone to that larger block size, you know, in 99 at least. You probably could have done it in 05, right? I'm just curious, were all the cryptography, was all the cryptography that's used? See, I don't consider that technology because that's like that's just human knowledge so like what i'm saying is like if we got frozen tech not in terms of i know this is sort of a weird distinction i'm making but like if the

internet couldn't get any faster and we were frozen in technology today from either 99 or 05 and those are two different situations i see what you're gonna but we still all the advancements in math were still being made right like you know because math is always there so the point you're trying to get it is like at what point could the internet infrastructure have ossified in the past that you think would be sustainable for us in the future yeah and just sort of uh saying tech in general is like a weasel word but just sort of like what we generally would think of as tech if it had ossified because i consider that sort of relevant to the inflection point conversation because like you know if we had a a technological state and this is a thought experiment because

technology doesn't stop right but if we had a if we could have a technological state that stopped at some point in the past which would have prevented these lockdowns from being as severe as they were and definitely would have prevented them from things from lingering long past any sort of medical uh justification right because you wouldn't have had zoom and you know all this other crap could we still have had bitcoin i think that we can i think it would have been different uh but you certainly could have still had on-chain bitcoin i think with the initial lockdown being an issue download being an issue i think you would have had something more along the lines of like assume utxo stuff i don't know i you nor i are uh technical enough to know how

long that catch-up period would have been taking how long people would have been relying on that sort of i get you would you call that distributed trust because you're not trusting one third party you think that's a fair term i think so yeah yeah so you're sort of relying on a distributed trust model there the big change would have been that uh i don't think you could have done lightning right like i think i don't know that you could have done lightning in that and and i if i'm wrong somebody more technical could certainly uh note in the comments you might have had a more federated system you know what i you know what i mean of like uh why can't you do light isn't built on c plus plus or at least well it is but i don't know i don't know that lightning

is a lot more complicated so i don't know that we'd be able to do we would have the processing power for normies to just have that running in their house latency yeah yeah i don't know any but there's lightning people way smarter than us that will probably answer this question and i'm kind of interested to know uh on twitter if if i if that if i'm wrong but let's assume that i am wrong and you couldn't have done you couldn't have done lightning uh you probably would have had like a federated type thing you know maybe it would have been something like um liquid thank you i was like it just like it jumped out of my head maybe it would have been something more like liquid rather than lightning um but again i don't know is lightning better than that system yeah i'm

not this should not be interpreted as me like uh you know arguing against lightning but i i don't know that that would have been fatal to bitcoin that still might have worked we still might have been fine yeah and that's kind of factors into my thinking in terms of like where we uh where that inflection point is and i assume there's a difference between the technology i think there's difference between 99 and 05 too like i i don't know with lightning specifically i would be more confident as a guy that's not smart enough to make this statement with any confidence at all i would still feel more confident in saying that in 99 than 05 yeah well i don't want you to be a luddite i don't want you to be a neo-luddite like what's the problem is this or the problem is more

social or is it technology is i think the technology amplifies the social yeah the technology brings out i think like a lot of the our most anti-social qualities i think that's the problem it enables them yeah like you could always but would it could it amplify better qualities if the class structure was a different way like is the pmc class using the technology oh absolutely there's a chicken and egg issue here or you know i there's uh there's always a chicken and egg issue is not even the right word there's always a an economic underpinning here in terms of what what the it's not even necessarily the

PMC class it's really just sort of the elite classes what technology enables them to do that they wouldn't have ever been able to get away with in the past because in other words there were always people on top there were people on top in the 80s the 90s the 70s but they weren't

there are certain things that technology has enabled them to sort of inflict upon us cancel culture the blue check mark cancel culture yeah there you go I mean that's sort of an example imagine if we didn't have the uh the elite overproduction yeah and these people were using these tools for good right yeah exactly yeah so it's it's it's more of a factor i guess the technology you're right it's not the technology itself it's the way that people use it um and what it enables yeah yeah i mean that is certainly true i will say i do like the island

life like waking up working out leaving my phone here going surfing not tweeting as much yeah it's uh it's good to take a step back and hanging out with family on the beach like it's incredible because you're all work from home now well you were work from home even before this hit yeah like my transition has been pretty smooth but yeah my cousins who are up in new york they came down here they've been down here since march and we've been hanging out and we we quarantined for for enough time your time yeah and then uh but no yeah go to the beach and probably do that after we wrap up pier i post it and go down the beach for a couple hours and then just chill with my family and come back here it's a great way to live i mean you know i've been living at the shore my whole life so

it's a great way to live man it is it really is like in this summer particularly it's uh very interesting there's a lot i i was like in april may i was like oh it's gonna be dead summer it's not gonna be anybody down here island's been packed really yeah i've noticed that too uh like in my town the shore has been really busy yeah well it's like people yeah i got nothing else to might as well go to the beach exactly that's my i'm tired of being tired of being inside for so long yeah i haven't taken polls on this that's what i'm assuming though like yeah well and a lot of other activities uh recreational activities you're not allowed to do like you're allowed to go to the beach you can't go to a bar you can't go to a restaurant in new jersey uh well you could

do outdoor dining in new jersey but you can't go to a bar you can't go to a bowling alley you can't go to uh you know yeah yeah the outdoor stuff's been great here um what i want to end it on is try to end on a positive note like how can we not me and you and i don't know if you can even answer this question but again that's the most disheartening thing of the last six months is everybody's striking at the wrong problems they're being divided on on race and whether or not they want to wear a mask or not instead of focusing on the class issue how do we shift the conversation back to the class issue it's a great it's a great question how do we just get shake people like it's like the whole really i hate that race is being brought in like obviously

there are racists out there there are some definitely some problems in police forces there are definitely some problems in corporate boardrooms with this shit too but it's not i don't want to get canceled but like it's not the core of the problem where the problem's a class issue right the core of the problem is is always a class issue it's always material right i mean because at the end of the day that racism is all is always and everywhere if you're talking about like institutional racism it's always a superstructure based on the base of economic

relations right always and everywhere that's always the case so if you deal with the economic relationships that's where the situation has to begin right I mean I just said some nonsense there that's where the solution you know

has to begin honestly I think it's just a matter of there's going to have to be a certain number of people that are willing to talk about it in public. And you're seeing that to some extent on both the right and the left now, which is to some extent hopeful. You know, at the time when we're at like

an all-time high for cancellations, you're also seeing people speaking out against it. Tucker. Right. Whether that's, yep, that could be Tucker Carlson on the right. It could be Angela Nagle on the left. It could be, you know, Michael Tracy somewhere in the middle or, you know, or Matt Taibbi. Right. You know what I mean?

In terms of that stuff. By the way, if you're listening, Taibbi's sub stack is subscription, but he posted a free one. Right. The one I'm thinking of, I think, was free. It was like two weeks ago. It wasn't the most recent one. it was the one before um that's definitely worth checking out that that addresses uh a lot of the issues that we're talking about um here today um i'm trying to think if i'm gonna i'll give people a little bit of homework is that all right like if they want to read it from differing perspectives

right i mean marty mentioned tucker carlson i think everybody's familiar with him already um in terms of like some lesser known uh stuff if you want to understand a lot of like stuff from people that are much smarter than me that i talked about today in terms of some class issues in the most recent american affairs uh angela nagel and michael tracy wrote a piece that was specifically about how the bernie sanders campaign fell apart but really touches very well on a lot of these issues and how they play out um in terms of modern classes american affairs i think two issues ago american affairs is fantastic by the way uh and it's a quarterly publication so when i say two issues ago it means i think like two quarters ago it was julius crime wrote an article

called uh the real class war um that was very good um another one that i recommend looking at strongly with regard to all these issues is um adolph reed who's a professor at university of pennsylvania um on the left uh actually for this is sort of a wild situation we should talk about this briefly so 1619 project has been actually was sort of the precursor to this everything we've got going on now it's a historical it's it's i mean regardless of whatever if you want to think its aims are good or bad it's just a historical it's not true um and the organization that actually organized the sort of group of historians

to come together and sort of point out all the historical inaccuracies in the 1619 project was World Socialist website which is the online publication of Fourth International literally the global Trotskyist organization

they were the people that only people that were willing to like stick their necks out and I believe they referred to it as a racialist misclassification of history um you know obviously they're looking at this from a left perspective they did an interview uh with adolf reed on their website which is wsws.org that goes into essentially uh reed's theories on all this and how you know the intersection between race and class and all a lot of the things that we talked about today not that he

would agree with everything i said but i think that he's definitely uh worth reading on this topic as well um those are the ones that like really stick out in my head right now in terms of things you can read in terms of other podcasts like if you want to get if you want to listen to some perspectives on this stuff from people that are way smarter than me um what's left particularly the last few episodes they've done that were like a panel with uh amy terese oliver bateman um malcolm i can't pronounce his last name he hasn't uh i apologize and angela nagel those were all very good uh and then one other one that i'll recommend that talks about this stuff from a sort of non-left perspective populist wise is uh good old boys which i retweet those guys all the

time yeah um if you want to kind of hear where i get a lot of different ideas oh and peter church and we'll put it in the show notes there's a good article on elite oversupply that i can that i'll give you marty you can check out yeah put it all in there but my point was before i got into all that different stuff um uh i think like understanding what's going on is honestly the first step because like i i don't i don't think i understood this always and for the beginning of time i think it's something probably within the last five years that i've been able to figure out just by reading stuff written by people smarter than me um so i think reading it understanding it and being able to say it publicly at this point i mean that sounds like stupid like what else can you do

but i don't know what else you can do right and then oh and then of course live your own damn life and you know the uh raise your family the right way and do all the things that are always important no matter how bad things might be in the public sphere that's probably the most important thing i agree i agree that's why i love being down here it's really drives home that family especially yeah um i'll let you it's easy to live here not get distracted by a big city or something like that i hear you man not today elite overproduction i really like that concept and i think it does do a good job of describing some of the the conflict that that we're seeing play out right now yeah i'm pretty amazing that he even was able to like back into the or figure out the fact that

it was the 2020s where it was going to boil over in the u.s i mean 2020 on the dot yeah the most interesting year of my life yeah i guess you could unfortunately yes yeah well jeff it's always a pleasure it's always been fun man i uh thank you for coming and doing this in person i love that we can do that yeah me too it's a million times better it's great and i'm sure um we'll catch up at some point this year too and add to this conversation absolutely i don't think any of this is going to stop anytime soon. I always have a ton of fun doing these, man. Dude, so do I. Any last notes or anything? Well, I guess I got to shill my own bags, right? So my day job, how I actually am able to earn a living is, you know, most people listening

to this podcast probably are interested in Bitcoin. If you have a retirement account that you would like to roll over and invest in Bitcoin while being able to hold your own keys, that is my day job keykeeperira.com check that out if that sounds interesting to you uh there's no it's not like the competing all offerings where they're custodial and they hold your keys or they charge markups whenever you want to buy or sell you have your own regular exchange account on a regular exchange you don't pay any i don't get any vig on your purchases your sales there's no storage fees you know nothing like that you just pay the setup fee and uh 150 a year as uh you know an annual fee and that's it you're good to go it's a pretty good deal pretty good setup that's what i'm trying to

do man tax uh beneficial as well tax beneficial yeah exactly you can uh if you have an existing retirement account that you want to move into bitcoin you can roll it into this if you don't have an existing retirement account you can make annual contributions to something like this and And then, you know, when you retire and your Bitcoin's worth 100 times more than it was when you bought it, you don't have to pay any taxes. Awesome. I've got to set one of these up. It's not hard, right?

You just set up a couple LLCs or something like that? Yeah, it's not hard. I mean, we take you through the whole process. You're usually good to go within two weeks of starting the whole process. All right, boss. Well, Jeff, again, it's always a pleasure. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.

That's all we've got this week, freaks. Peace and love. Take care.