The Daily Zeitgeist - America IS Socialist? 7.9.21

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

In episode 947, Jack and Miles are joined by Bubble Trouble hosts Richard Kramer and Will Page to discuss markets, socialism, how business can screw you, and more!FOOTNOTES: Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting through Disruption LISTEN: Loki's Low-key lofi Relaxing Beats to Study Time Crimes To Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. Okay. Or Lacey gets it. Do it. Hello, the internet, and welcome to season 192, episode 4 of Dead Nights at Lee's Ice Geist, a production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into America's shared consciousness. It is Friday, July 9th, 2021. My name is Jack O'Brien, a.k.a.

Yeah, Uncle Joe UFOs come on my house. Let's talk three point shooting. Oh, Cuban race and attack. Don't do nothing about white supremacy. So sit down. Not too loud. I might shout because I'm cute and joogie uh that is courtesy of chrissy amaguchi man laboot scooting boogie uh aka that he said it took him uh a whole week

to to write and uh unfortunately uh i not not really in my range, but well done, sir. And I am thrilled to be joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray! Yes, Miles Gray, but I will just say this, no AKA just, all we need is Buckeye Osaka!

Buckeye Osaka! Buckeye Osaka! Alright, and you know, I know that there are other players on the England national team that don't play for my beloved Arsenal. But for the ones that do, that's you, Bukayo. And when I see you out there, you young man, doing your thing, the three Lions are through to their first finals since 1966. Can you feel the energy?

I can. So shout out to all the three Lions supporters out there. I know it's very happy times for you all. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, Miles, we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by an economist and an independent analyst who hosts the Bubble Trouble podcast, which tells you some inconvenient truths about how financial markets really work. Please welcome Richard Kramer and Will Page.

What's up? Welcome, welcome. Hello. Hello. How are y'all doing? What part of the world are you coming to us from today? We are coming to you from sunny London. Oh wow. And Will, how about you? Where are you coming to us from today? I'm speaking to you for one mile from the Emirates Stadium where your voice is as bones as trash. Oh, my goodness. You love to hear it. We can hear them cheer when they score. And last season, we didn't hear much cheering. No, not at all.

Not at all. Do you support a club in the Premier League? Well, my true club is Hartford Midlothian back home in Scotland. We don't have a trophy cabinet because we ain't won nothing. But down here in London, when you live in Kentish Town, you have to support Arsenal. It's a law. It'd be a felony to go with Tottenham Hotspur.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I can tell you're a self-respecting football supporter when you don't tread into those waters over there. It's not worth it. Richard, what about you? Well, you know, as a nice Jewish boy, I think I'd be obliged to support Tottenham.

Oh, right. For sure. I get that. But you're living in London. Has the football caught hold of you? You know, 30 years on living in London, not really. It wasn't the sport I grew up with. What was the sport you grew up with?

Baseball, basketball? More hockey. Oh, wow. Hockey. So, you know, you've got to. It's similar passions, but less hooligan violence. Who's your team in the NHL? Pittsburgh Penguins. Oh, okay.

Hey. You said the kid and all that. A lot of success. Absolutely. Mario Lemieux. I remember those. There you go. Pavel Bure, didn't he play with y'all too?

No, no, no. Oh, no, no. Who was the other Eastern European guy who played for the Penguins? Jaromir Jagr. Jaromir Jagr. Jaromir Jagr. Yeah, that always messed me up as a kid. And he had number 68 on his jersey, which was a reference to the Prague Spring. Oh, wow.

Good for Jaromir. I always, as a kid, not being completely ignorant of Eastern European phonetics and spelling, I was like, I think they misspelled his jersey. It's a J-A-R. But I was 10 and didn't know much about anything. So there you have it. Yeah. Will is Scottish.

So the England football team is a touchy subject for him. I get that. So the game finished, I think, at quarter past 11 last night. And by 20 past 11, I had bought my train ticket to Scotland on Sunday evening. So I am out of the country. Oh, wow. Should they actually go ahead and win it i just it's too much for the scots to handle there's that close yeah yeah i'm i'm all italian

for the next 72 hours yeah i mean trust me i was definitely rooting for the scottish team because of uh you know kieran tyranny again another great scottish player but also a gunner as well so yeah uh but shout out to hearts you know like i I can't imagine it's easy to support Hearts. Yeah, we had an American play for us, a guy called Perry Kitchen. I don't know if you remember him, captain of the American team. Yeah. He played for us. Yeah.

For some reason, he was incapable of passing the ball forward. I don't think anyone saw him make a forward pass. He was like he confused the rules of rugby with soccer. There's a lot of, I remember a lot of American players end up going to the Scottish Premiership like sort of the first place Americans who are too cowardly to go

too far afield. They like to dabble in the Scottish Premier League. I noticed that. Yeah, be a big fish in a small pond. Right, right. Exactly. That's why Landon Donovan never left. Well, it helped our national team well you may have seen you've seen Billy Gilmore play Billy Gilmore's a Chelsea 17 year old he played for Scotland against England yeah best player best player on the whole championships

and he couldn't play again because he got COVID right in the second and third game and that's when like Mason Mount had to quarantine right because he interacted with him it's amazing how those little things uh can affect so many players at one tournament so we got this joke back home in scotland which is billy gilmore the only positive result to happen scotland's european championship positive result covid okay you get it uh i love it well uh it's appropriate i i hear maybe one out of every 10 words that everybody's saying because my internet connection

is just completely broken. But I would have had nothing to add to that conversation. So that works out. But congratulations on the success of the three lines. All right, guys, we are going to get to know you

a little bit better in a moment first we are gonna tell our listeners a few of the things that we're talking about we are gonna have a have a capitalism an overall capitalism conversation with you guys just markets the rising popularity of socialism uh the whole robin hood conundrum all that plenty more but first uh richard will we like to ask our guests what is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are i search a lot of disco and funk from the 70s and 80s oh before my time but it tells you a lot about who i am like somebody's spent past 15 years at the front of music technology i'm'm always going back. And you worked at Spotify, correct? That's right.

For the best part of a decade at Spotify. And then prior to that, working with songwriters and publishers too. So a balance of the rights holder and the rights user. Got it, got it. And all you can think about is 70s, 80s disco and funk. I like that. Yeah, as far as music goes forward, I keep on going back. That's always been the story with me.

Are there any bands now that you feel like, what about like Jungle? Are they adjacent enough to get your toe tapping? It's a great one. Jungle's on my mix. That mix on Mixcloud got 38,000 uniques. It'd be Erykah Badu, an LA star in terms of popularity, which is great. But I'll give you one this is a big one for your listeners and i have to spell it out to you because it sounds weird salt now write this down s-a-u-l-t yes that is the hottest band coming out of london right now and it's just

nobody knows who they are nobody knows what they look like they don't do any press they're completely incognito yeah it's just bubbling right now people i love that track new record why why why why that's uh yeah i love that yeah we've actually ridden out on a couple salt tracks because i look spotify they know how to serve me the things i'm looking for and it gave me a heavy dose of sodium or in this case salt yeah no salt's the one for me it's i i'll go on record and say it's the most powerful music i've heard since discovering massive attack and discovering massive attack is pretty much on par with losing your virginity and it's that good okay i like that you had a better experience losing your virginity than me it sounds like

go ahead richard well i will say i'm absolutely right with will on the 70s and 80s funk that's something we're completely in sync on but it's a bit of a trick question for me because i don't have any search history because i am i was one of the early investors in a browser called brave which i'd recommend everybody to be using it is the the privacy-safe browser, but it basically makes sure that you're not tracked when you're using the web. And it keeps all your history hidden away. And so, given my memories fading constantly, for whatever reason, you know, I can remember what I searched for a few minutes ago, but not after that. And I don't have to worry that that search history is sitting there for decades in somebody else's servers. Sure. So you're immune from this question.

Yeah. I mean, I just, I guess every once in a while you want to figure out, hey, what was that that I found? But you realize it's probably really not that important. And just think of the next thing instead. How do you stay organized? Because I'm one of these people who has like 9 million browser tabs open because I don't want to forget things. But the way you're talking, you're like, I don't know, maybe I should say that, but it's all good. Do you have like a tome that you write this stuff down?

I also have 9 million browser tabs open at times. Okay. But then you just got to go through, then you got to go through and cull them. And the point is when you close them you want that history to be gone what is something you guys think is overrated? I can give you

something that's overrated and something that's underrated in the world of sport I think men's football is overrated and women's football is underrated I reckon in 10 years time you're going to see a massive equalization a massive convergence if you want of the two of the two games trust me when i saw 73 000 people turn

up for england women versus german women at wembley stadium it was a day of reckoning so you know you can look at gender and sport and see inequalities pretty much everywhere you look and i think the next 10 years, you're going to see a very, very sharp correction there. So overrated, Mehmet Erçel for Arsenal getting 350,000 pounds a week, twice what Boris Johnson gets a year.

Underrated women's footballers who are still pretty much amateur, semi-professional status. Watch that correct itself. Yeah. Especially the talent in the leagues are phenomenal. I watched the Champions League final with PSG. I really love it. Especially the Arsenal ladies team is stellar.

Vivian Amidama is one of my favorite players to watch. I didn't realize Premier League teams had women's teams as well. Not all of them do but most many of them do yeah oh very cool yeah uh richard how about you yeah i would say the one thing i i feel strongly is completely overrated is pretty much anything to do with social media and specifically twitter which i consider the id of western civilization it's the kind of thing that you know if if i watch you guys walking down the street together and amiably chatting, I wouldn't take any notice of it. But if I watched you

walking down the street screaming at each other, I'd stop and take note. And I think that's the kind of behavior that a lot of social media engenders. And it's just, I think it's the kind of thing that everybody feels the need to show how clever they are, put something out there, but it has so little substance and it's such a distraction engine that it's really wildly overrated. I think there's lots of other ways to see distribution of interesting ideas and content and news. And I think the thing that's underrated is just is sort of the contemplation you get reading a book.

Will just published Tarzan Economics, giving him a shameless plug for that. But, you know, reading and engaging with content, I think podcasts are the same thing. When you feel as if there's a conversation that you're part of, I think that's fascinating and way underrated because you feel a connection. And I think this sort of bite-sizesized constant flow of distraction in social media is really damaging. Absolutely. I can build on that a couple of points.

One, it always reminds me when I hear Richard talk about this of what Groucho Marx said, which is, you know, back then he said, television's a fantastic invention because every time I switch it on it reminds me to read a good book. And I just wonder what he would say about Twitter and Facebook and the like today. And I often look at a lot of that social media as junk food.

And keeping with that food theme, a colleague of ours, Noemi Drew, she said to me once, what Twitter is, is the ability to, you're sitting at a big dining table with lots of guests and everyone's broken off into private conversations. And Twitter allows you to eavesdrop into all those private conversations. I thought, if somebody doesn't tweet, it's a nice illustration of what it might actually mean to us. But then you have to step back and say, well, why would you want to eavesdrop into all those private conversations? Why not have a deeper one with something you can reward yourself from as opposed to all these distractions? Why not have a deeper one with something you can reward yourself from as opposed to all these distractions? So, yeah, it does come across as junk to me.

So I'll ditto Richard's point there. But Miles, something that hopefully you're aware of is that about a month ago, the entirety of UK sport, every sport, rugby, cricket, tennis, football, all said complete ban on social media for four days over a bank holiday weekend because the original sin of Twitter is allowing people to be hashtag raving racist or hashtag, you know, I love abuse. And it's just absolutely shocking. And I say this in all seriousness. I think it is the id of Western civilization. All the things that we, you know, in classic psychoanalysis or psychology, you'd never say to people in polite company, all the terrible thoughts you have in your head that you would never voice directly to somebody. People say them all the time on Twitter. And, you know, you have someone who's, you know, an icon and just deserving of the highest of respect, like Marcus Rashford in the UK with all the stuff he's done with school lunches and so forth.

And he just gets the most unbelievable invective of abuse. And you don't know where it's coming from. And, of course, no one is going to walk up to him in the street and say these things. And yet the entirety of sport, it wasn't just one sport. It wasn't just a few athletes. It was everybody said, this has got to stop. We've got to take a break here because we're not going to contribute to this, this constant bubbling up of of of an invitation to take potshots at us. Yeah, no, I totally. Yeah, it's it's there's the amount of especially of the racial abuse hurled at like the athletes is gobsmacked is the word I would use when I look at some of the things that I read. And yeah, that even forced one of my sporting idols, Thierry Henry, to like deactivate his accounts. And he's saying, I'm not I'm not I'm not going to I'm not fucking with this at all. If this is what people come here for and the companies allow this to just run rampant, what is the point?

Yeah. And that's why I think a lot of, you know, our guests, even who are comedians, come on to say like, like, you know, we can't stand social media because there is a there's a certain level where especially for comedians, like it's a place to get their jokes off. But on the other side of that, it allows for a lot of people to just come at them and say all kinds of ridiculous things that, again, like you're saying, Richard, you would never hear someone say that to your face. And so we've had to like, we've built up these weird calluses emotionally to even engage in social media that, you know, I'm sure resonate in many other ways. So I had a UK member of parliament say to me, you know, how can it be correct that something that you would be arrested for telling someone in the street to their face, you can say every day on social media? And Will will tell you the language that's been hurled at Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party. You know, she gets all sorts of rape threats or what have you on a daily basis.

And, you know, you can't callous yourself entirely to that stuff. It's just no one can. But on interpreting it, like when Richard just mentioned it, it was what was inside people's heads all along, but now it's pouring out. That reminds me of like one day, the anomaly of crime stats is a good reminder for how do you interpret all this activity? So it goes like this. If crime stats are up, what do we know that this activity? So it goes like this. If crime

stats are up, what do we know that's happened? Either A, crime is on the up, or B, we're getting better at catching criminals, or C, we've changed the definition of crime, or D, a combination of all of the above. But it doesn't necessarily mean crime is on the up. It means now we're seeing what people had inside their heads all along i think that's an important contextual point about trying to make sense of this madness as well yeah that's a really good point i mean the the neutering uh effect that banning trump from social media had is something that we talk about a lot on on this show but like that's truly that that was a moment when i really had to like sit back and be like wow they we we haven't figured this out yet and like that what he did

the way he used social media like hopefully i'm assuming years down the road like that won't be possible uh in one way or another because it was just so damaging. Now the worry for Scotland is he's kind of done his time in America. Is he going to come back to Scotland and open more golf courses? Because we got rid of him for a few years while he was making a mess of your place. Yeah, maybe. I mean, it seems like the Scots are definitely more united in giving him a hard time than the people of the U.S. Who knows?

If there's maybe a little MAGA contingent in Scotland, maybe he'll find it there. But it seems like Florida is the place for him at the moment. Florida's got better weather than Scotland. Scotland, we have two seasons, winter and June, and that's your lot. Winter and June. I love it. That's amazing. All right, guys, let's take a quick break, and we'll come back and talk about the news.

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you know, we talk a lot on this show about socialism, you know, some of the ways that we feel like capitalism has been damaging to our current version of society. And I guess I just wanted to kind of get you guys, as people who spend a lot of time thinking about markets and capitalism, what are you guys' thoughts on just the rise of popularity of socialism in the modern world and how that fits into the evolution of markets and capitalism in the Western world, I guess? Yeah, if I can take a stab at unpacking this one, I'll draw an example i flag in the first chapter of the book tars and economics which is when people you know sort of frame the debate around capitalism and communism there's often like an axiom underneath all this which is that capitalism kind of removes the safety net and that encourages an entrepreneurial spirit if you win you win big if you lose you lose hard but there's no complacency it keeps you on

your toes whereas socialism that imposes a safety net and if there's no complacency. It keeps you on your toes, whereas socialism, that imposes a safety net. And if there's a safety net, nobody takes any risks. And if nobody takes any risks, nobody wins big and nobody loses. There's a stereotype there of how economies or societies, perhaps a better word, work under capitalist models and socialist models. And what I draw on in the book, Tarzan Economics, is to look at the entrepreneurial spirit in the free market capitalist country that is United States of America and compare that to the entrepreneurial spirit in the very left-leaning socialist economy of Sweden. And I don't see a drought in entrepreneurial activity in Sweden. I see startups galore. iZettle, Spotify, Clara, the list goes on and on.

I see a country that's getting rid of cash next year, switching off the FM radio band next year, one of the earliest adopting countries that you'll ever find. So I'm not sure the stereotypes of what is capitalism and what is socialism work down on the ground. And I just want to toss this back at you guys, which is, yes, I get it. The US model of capitalism encourages risk-taking, encourages reward, incentivizes the entrepreneurial spirit. But maybe, just maybe, the Swedish model, which has this really strong social safety net, which keeps people above the poverty line, provides great maternity and paternity leave, amazing child support, allows you to take six months out of work to study, allows you to take nine months out of work to try a startup even.

Maybe this model, because the social safety net is so strong, it encourages even more entrepreneurial activity. So it's just a way of thinking about, is it either or, or is the line a little bit fuzzy between these two models? I'm fascinated with how Sweden, with all of its safety net, with all of its socialistic beliefs, has produced such a great entrepreneurial success story. But how am I going to want to get out of bed in the morning if I am not scared that I'm going to starve to death. I just, I don't, I don't see it. Or if I, if I'm afraid that I can't give my kids healthcare, that's the only thing get me out of bed. No, I, I, uh, I think that's exactly right. Every donkey needs a carrot, right? Every donkey

needs a carrot. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. And I, I mean, there's so many things I could pick up on there from what Will said, but I think the way you guys are posing it as a complete false dichotomy. And when I look back at where I grew up in the States, but left a long time ago, more than half my life ago, left there, the U.S. isn't a capitalist economy in any sense. There's enormous social support for large companies. And there's- Right, for the wrong things you're saying. I like that, I like that. I think one of the sad things that's happened in the past 30, 40 years is this notion, and it's been a very deliberate notion,

to undermine the idea that there is any value in collective enterprise or the government or what have you. And this is back to the Reagan era of, oh, well, you know, the worst words are that I'm here from the government, I'm here to help you. I mean, and Michael Lewis wrote a book on this just recently, you know, which was basically a love letter to the folks who toil away for relatively low salaries, working on food safety in the U.S., working for the government. We're glad that we have these people doing this in so many different endeavors. And we've kind of, we've had this idolatry of the individual, which looks down on the collective enterprise. And I think what Will's describing in a society like Sweden or Denmark

or other countries which have a higher degree of social cohesion is that everybody's willing to get in it together. And I think one aspect of this that I really take a lesson from is my nephew did a PhD at the University of British Columbia in psychology, and he was studying happiness. And the thing about happiness is once you hit a point where you have pretty much enough of what you want, you get to something called satisficing. And I'm sure Will can go on and on about this. But having more doesn't make you happier. Having more stuff, having more money, and it's almost a psychosis that has gripped people because they've been marketed this myth of capitalism that we have this complete, constant, gladiatorial arena that we're fighting in every day, that we don't find ways to have more collective enterprise and

appreciate the collective enterprise at the neighborhood level or up to the nation-state level. Yeah, I like to wrap that one up by saying some is better than none. We're not advocating communism here, but more is not necessarily better than some. And that needs to be tattooed on our foreheads when we're studying economics or interpreting economic analysis, which is, it doesn't necessarily mean I need that extra dollar as much as I needed that last dollar. I think that's where it breaks down. I just quickly come back to Sweden as well. Another observation is when startups scale in Sweden, and forgive me for picking on one of a handful of Scandinavian economies with similar models, but in Sweden. Now, forgive me for picking on one of a handful of Scandinavian economies with

similar models, but in Sweden, when you see startups scale, they scale fast in their own country. It was Spotify launched in late 2008. By 2010, a large chunk of the Swedish population was using Spotify and America had never even heard of streaming. So it scales fast. Now, I just wonder whether you've got a social safety net and a greater deal of equality in your economy. If one person has a good idea, it can spread to all people a lot faster than in a strictly capitalist economy with a bigger gap between rich and poor, where you might have one good idea, but it can't reach to all because a lot of people are priced out of the bargain. priced out of the bargain so it's worth just you know playing this social safety net argument out not just on the creator side but also on the consumer side all people can win when ideas scale sure and i'm curious to think like just with this you know as you're saying richard like we we definitely have social safety nets for these large corporations and that there's like this the emphasis is to always, it seems like if just

speaking very narrowly about the United States, that if there is some kind of crisis that an industry is facing, the first thing is to make sure that the business owners themselves are the most sort of protected, while there's really not much consideration that goes down towards the workers who are actually keeping the businesses alive. Is there any way to because I think what you're saying, like, you know, there's this idea of more and more and more that it's almost seems like unending, that can it can, you know, people who are dealing with, you know, and big supporters of free market capitalism arrive at a point to say, is there a limit? Because at a certain point, if we're too obsessed with growth and we look at just the huge gap between incomes from the people in the C-suite, middle management down to just, you know, maybe hourly workers for a given company, how that can equalize in some level. Or is that just completely runs afoul of how maybe these business owners think?

Well, and I think you raise a key point, which is how people understand the world. And certainly, the level of concentration in the media market in the U.S. is fairly extreme. And while it's fragmented or splintered with the Internet in the past few years, it's still largely controlled by a handful of companies who are going to give a very certain message. Now, I'll take another example of a different country called Japan. In Japan, they realized a long time ago that roughly, well, they have no oil. They have relatively few natural resources. It's an island. And they, I believe, deliberately engineered a zero-growth economy with the idea in mind of sustainability. And they deliberately leave something like 70% of the arable land in Japan as forests and leave it fallow. And they have people live in megacities. The Tokyo-Sakuenagoya corridor is 60 million plus people. It's half the population of the country. But they realized if they just cut down every tree, they'd end up like Easter Island, which, you know, we know that the people there, we believe that the people there effectively extincted themselves because they overused their natural resources. And there's nothing wrong with accepting no growth if, when you look at all sorts of surveys,

generally Japanese people are incredibly happy on a global scale. They don't have the tremendous inequality between the rich and the poor. They've long ago had debates about what the appropriate multiple of the lowest paid worker in a business should be paid versus the boss. And they have a very rigid, very collective oriented culture. Now, it's very unique. It's not something you could extrapolate. But the message there for a very long period of time was to preserve resources, not to overconsume. And everybody bought into the program. And it's not some hippy-dippy utopian community. It's a country of 120 million people and one of the top five or 10 economies in the world. Yeah. Yeah. I'm half Japanese. And philosophically,

there's very much an idea of if you can do something, do it well and have a business that can do it for as long as possible. That's why Japan has the highest concentrations of businesses that have been around for over 100 years with the sort of same philosophy of we don't need to open multiple franchises or things like that. We do this one thing. We do it well. The business is consistent and that's what we're interested in, you know, culturally. But just to kind of come back to the U.S., I'm curious, you know, because now you've been living in the U.K. and things, and I'm sure you have a very broad perspective on everything that's going on. Do you think that

at a certain point, the stakeholders of the large corporations in the United States could arrive at a realization that eventually says, is this actually sustainable in the long term in terms of if we keep hollowing out the middle class and end up with a large chunk of people who are completely impoverished and don't have access to things like the most basic things, is it at any level? Do you think people in the C-suites there think there's a responsibility or that's just a that's like a fantasy world that doesn't exist? I would hope that they do. But then it's the seriousness of the commitment. would hope that they do, but then it's the seriousness of the commitment. And you see this, every single Fortune 500 company will make the most charming, glowing promises about sustainability, just as last year they made incredibly sincere promises about racial justice.

But then the proof is in the pudding. And it's always easier to request that somebody else in the organization takes hold of that or as long as it doesn't eat into my comp package. You know, who suffers for that or who is relatively disadvantaged for that? I won't say suffering, and look at the debate in the U.S. over the tax structure. And, you know, I think tax deductibility of interest, in one respect, has been a tremendous incentive to people to take risk. But for a lot of other people, it has been an invitation to exercise enormous inequality and irresponsibility. And a college friend of mine, Jesse Isinger, just published some phenomenal work in ProPublica, which I'd recommend everybody to look at, covering the tax contributions, if you want to call them that, the tax income from the 15 wealthiest Americans. So now Jesse's point, which I think is very valid, is these people did not do

anything illegal. Right. We're not saying that they broke the law, but is this the kind of society we want where if you have a lot of money, you have all of these legal means to ensure that you literally never pay tax? And if you don't have a lot of money and you can't hire tax consultants or trust fund trustees and so forth, you're stuck with everyone else, you know, paying the taxes as you expect. And the question is, what sort of society do we want to have? And then the question following that would be, who gets to decide that? And I think, I'm sure Will has a lot to add on this topic, but we did a, we're looking at doing this as a topic for Bubble Trouble because it raises the question of, are you allowing people to accrue two big pots of wealth relative to everyone else?

And therefore, in a biological sense, you're narrowing the gene pool of what's likely to happen with all that capital sloshing in the system. Yeah. Yeah. If I can drop one transatlantic observation, if you want, about this, it rolls up to leadership as well. Yeah. There was an election campaign where Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama, I believe. I can't place a date on it. And Mitt Romney said on record, he said, I paid 12% tax last year and not a penny more. And people cheered. Now, they cheered. If somebody running for prime minister or president in a There's a backstory to that, which is on that campaign, he actually wanted to get rid of capital gains tax.

And somebody said to him, well, what would the poor people say to that? He said, oh, they don't vote anyway. I mean, that's a potential president of the United States talking like that on the record to his proposed electorate. And it's just really interesting to zone in on that as a simple observation and say, have you said that in Sweden, if you said that here in the UK, you'd be off the campaign, not on the campaign. For Americans, you celebrate it. For us, we criticize it.

I think that goes hand in hand with leadership and the concentration of people who are able to access things like the media and even have you know deploy their lobbyists to make sure their interests are protected legislatively we have a very conflicted system plus i think on top of that americans are probably the most propagandized people on the planet when it comes to like you're saying every other person would be like get the fuck off the stage with that. We're fucking dying. And people are like, yeah, man, don't pay your taxes because I've been I've created this like weird class, false class solidarity with billionaires because I'm holding out for this one day chance that I could be a millionaire. And I don't want to spoil that moment if it arrives by, you know, backing progressive tax policies. of spoil that moment if it arrives by, you know, backing progressive tax policies. And so, yeah, like we're in a very unique situation where at every level, you know, as you say, with leadership,

there's a revolving door from business to government back to business again. And even my time lobbying, I've seen how all of the moneyed interests work to specifically undercut legislation or keep people out of office because it's at the end of the day like we've allowed a lot of people the tools to meddle and if you have the resources you can and that you know unfortunately reverberates down the entire uh you know down to the bottom from the top to the bottom and yeah i think that's what puts us in a terribly unique situation one thing that brings me out in a rash is general consensus. And I feel we're all in agreement here. So I got to challenge the group think and just

throw an observation about America to show where you might see collectivism. And collectivism is about where do you draw the boundaries? You know, we all have our little niches, our little echo chambers, maybe we find collectivism there. So let me pivot from American football to the American fiscal transfer system. Hold this in your head for a minute. So in American football, you've got the college draft, which essentially says the worst team in one season, period one, gets the best draft picks to hopefully improve their performance in the next season, period two. What a great model of socialism that you have in sport, right? I remember sitting with Freakonomics, Steve Leavitt from Freakonomics,

saying we need to build this for the teacher system so the best graduates from teacher training colleges are sent to the worst schools. So you have this self-correcting model. You could learn a lot from American football, not European football, American football. But then you look at the fiscal transfer system in America, which essentially says in the 80s, if New York is booming and California is bankrupt, I'm going to transfer a fiscal surplus from New York to accommodate

the fiscal deficit in California. That's an interesting model of collectivism, which holds United States of America united. It holds it together. My point being, we have the European currency here, but you don't have fiscal transfers. You wouldn't have Germany transferring its wealth to the Spanish economy. Oh, you absolutely do, Will. You absolutely do.

No, you don't. You have Germany buying bonds and basically owning half of Europe, but you don't have transfers of wealth. There's a difference. I can save your ass or I can buy your ass. Which one do you want to pick? The funding of the EU budget for poorer countries comes from the wealthier countries. Right. And just in the same way, you have states here that are helping fill these gaps in states that aren't able to sustain their own programs within the state, like Kentucky, for example, they rely on federal subsidies that states like where I'm from,

California, pay into. But I think where the disconnect happens is despite all of that money moving around, the actual end result for the constituents, for the people who are just living, those are not really felt. There's's a certain point where it fails to, you know, famously trickle down to those people and they can get caught up. And again, I think this is why we have a lot of failures of leadership from the state level to the municipal and a lot of rigid thinking on how people should be supported and things like that. So I think.

But if you go back to a very simple phrase that comes from Thomas Jefferson, which is representative democracy, I think it's a travesty in the UK, the first past the post system, because it ensures that one group that has 35% can constantly be in power over two other groups that are split between 32% each. And in the U.S., you have every single senator being a millionaire. And how is that somehow representative of democracy? for sampling on a representative basis 100 plus 435 people that would represent the totality of America, you certainly wouldn't come up with a group that looks like the Senate or the House of Parliament. And, you know, the Jeffersonian ideal was that every citizen would, and of course at that time he was excluding a lot of people that we would, you know, don't include women or blacks or what have you. But, you know, every person that he saw as a citizen would at least have really quite ideally the people who they are. And it doesn't really represent the wider populace or and equally it doesn't represent because it's all on such a very short cycle of thought. It doesn't encourage countries to have and this is what they do have in Japan and they don't really seem to have in America, a 30 to 50 year plan. Where do you want the society to be in 2050? It's 30 years away. I think right now the thinking is, where do we want people, America to be in 10 years? Not talking about slavery or critical race theory. That seems to

be a lot of like sort of political capital being spent on really not talking about history and things like that, rather than do we want to actually help create some form of upward mobility for many people? Yeah, things like infrastructure take decades to build. And you need a 30 year plan to say, what are things going to look like in 2050? And how do we work backwards, instead of fighting over what's going to happen next week or next month or tomorrow on social media? It's down to our obsession with individualism and this idea that you make it on your own without any help or social safety nets. The thing that is causing those people to cheer for Mitt Romney, it's so thoroughly written into the DNA, down to a cellular level of of like the individuals in america that i i'm just i'm very encouraged that we that there's a generational change happening where it seems like for the first time in a long time that is kind of being unwritten like decoded out of our out of our like kind of uh societal dna like that we're growing more and more open to it but it seems like the the mitt romney generation the baby boomers and stuff are just so thoroughly um bought into to that idea of of bootstrapping like to the point that when a billionaire releases their book they rewrite their story so that they never got any help from anyone and it's a lie that has been like part of america's dna for so long that i think we we're going to need to overcome

to to fix really any of the things that we're talking about. Because I think a lot of the younger people are seeing that we're dealing with the effects of this kind of reckless way that corporations operate in the United States of just hoarding a lot of wealth, not considering what happens to the entirety of the nation. And so you have a lot of people growing up looking at their situation and it's completely

different than their parents. Like in the 80s, like people just could be like, yeah, man, you can get a house and for nothing and just do what you got to do. Start families. It's all there, right there for you or for most people. And a lot of people like myself graduating college in 2007 and looking at the recession and everything's going on, I'm like, oh, this is a completely different game. I don't have the same access to the kinds of employment that would immediately put me in the middle class, immediately put me in a place to be able to obtain real estate or that's a traditional form of wealth accumulation for people in the United States that that game is like, oh, it's like I feel like I pulled up to a different party and it's still over. And I think a lot of people, especially

millennials, have found themselves thinking like, well, how do now we got to ask ourselves, how do we how do we get here and how do we end up in a place where we're not worried about the most minute things that we didn't think we had to worry about as kids, which is like, am I covered medically? Or do I, do I know that if there's a pandemic happening that I won't be evicted from my home because everything was shut down and I have no means of, of, of actually generating any income. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and continue this conversation. and prizes to four finalists. But the prizes disappeared. And what started as a video game promotion became one of the most controversial moments in 80s pop culture.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And yeah, during the break i mean this is this is going to be sort of a an abnormal episode of tdz uh where we don't really get into the stories but this conversation is just super interesting and we want to continue to have it because it is a theme and and sort of the subject that is written through basically every story that we cover on The Daily Zeitgeist. But during the break, you guys were talking about Thomas Piketty as somebody who has sort of some interesting ideas. He wrote Capital in the 21st Century, which was kind of a massive, successful book that I think came out of nowhere. A lot of people were surprised by how

successful it was. And I don't know, it was a critique of a lot of the things that we've been talking about as kind of poisoning our various societies. I'll mention one thing that I really took from Piketty, and then I'll turn it over to Will to talk about quantitative easing, which is, you know, just such a sexy topic. He can't stay away from it. I mean, to me, the point of Thomas Piketty was really the way in which if you start with some money, it's easier to have much more money. And that money has been accumulating in the form of bank accounts or sitting in cash, which doesn't circulate in the economy.

When money sits in the bank, it's not doing anything. And I think one of Piketty's key points was there have to be greater incentives to circulate that money in the economy. And one of the things that really breaks my heart in London that I hate to see is in the past 20 years, certainly under Boris Johnson as mayor, you've allowed all these developers to build these super luxury flats. And they're all bought by offshore buyers, whether it's from Asia or from the Middle East or Russia or whatever.

It's a subtle form of money laundering. We can discuss the debate that. But the problem I have with those flats is they're all empty. So you go buy one of these luxury developments that's in the middle of London in my neighborhood, a beautiful spot, and you can see up 10 stories and there's no lights on. And that money is not circulating, that resource is not circulating in the economy. That would be a wonderful place to have nurses live or teachers live. One of these developments is right across from a primary school that my daughter attended, you know, but the teachers could never afford to

live in these luxury flats. And my idea for that would be you should whack a great big occupancy tax on empty flats. And they shouldn't just be accumulated as an asset for offshore buyers that doesn't contribute to the local economy. Because when no one's living there, they're not going to the off-license, they're not going to the local restaurant, they're not sending their kids to the primary school. They're just leaving the flats empty because they think they're going to be worth more in five years. And you need something that gets those flats circulating in the economy that makes it so painful to sit on that asset that it's worth letting it out to somebody and actually having someone that lives there as a benefit to society instead of as a fallow asset sitting in the middle of town. Will? So, I mean, I like how Rich is using that word

circulating. Where does all this money sit? You know, Who's it percolating through towards? Who feels the impact of that cash? Is it the few or the many? And there's a way that you can go from Piketty to a real life example, which is if you look at the response to the financial crisis 2008 onwards, and you're still seeing this today, you're still seeing central banks around the world, especially in the Western world, deploy quantitative easing as a way of holding up the financial sector's balance sheet. Now, there's two points I want to make here. I want to dive into the technical details of quantitative easing, but I want to make a macro point about where is it and a micro point about what impact is it having. So at the higher level, if you think about where is it, if you look at the UK economy, and I'm pretty sure the same

numbers check out for the US, around about a third of the stock of debt this country has, we owe to ourselves through quantitative easing. It's essentially an IOU between the central bank and the treasury function. Last time I checked, a broadly similar figure applied to the United States. So you think about how countries set policies, if they have a towering stock of debt, they might opt for austerity to reduce the stock of that debt. Well, is there not a case for a debt jubilee when you owe a third of that debt to yourselves? This is not pure modern monetary theory here. It's just a different way of thinking about what is money. If that huge, towering stock of debt that's clouding over my fiscal policies is making me more risk averse about you know you're building a social safety net if a third of that debt i owe to myself well

why don't i just wipe it off and allow more fiscal stimulus into the economy allow more spending not such a radical proposal moving perhaps a bit more of a radical proposal, one that I've always argued ever since I got my head around quantitative easing, is if you're going to have quantitative easing increase in the economy by X percent, then how about this? You increase the minimum wage by Y percent to pull the money through. Let's go back to what Richard Cramer was saying about circulating, just money washing around and nobody's feeling the benefit.

Not a bad example is quantitative easing. I'm going to increase quantitative easing because the banks are under stress. Great. So let's balance up their, you know, back up their balance sheets. All that's happening is you're getting asset price bubbles.

If you increase the minimum wage by a similar degree, it would help pull money through from Wall Street to Main Street, as you Americans like to say. Again, not that radical a proposal, given the alternatives to what's happened. A, we have huge towering stocks of debt, which B, we owe much to ourselves, and C, all I've done through policy is create asset price bubbles, which benefit the very few as opposed to having any impact whatsoever on the many. And that's, I don't want to sound like a radical here. That's, that's the facts. Right. And I mean, I think that's what a lot of people

think is that it's just inflating asset prices that just benefit, just enriching the wealthier. But I think, but for people who want to look at that with rose tinted glasses, they'll say, well, then maybe it'll trickle down to everyone else because of that. And I think, yeah, it's true that this is where this is where it becomes interesting, because, again, raising the minimum wage, right, is something that's massively popular with people in the United States. of commerce that are lobbying actively senators that they're calling out and giving bipartisanship awards for their part in being a no vote in increasing like minimum wage and things like that. And, and it's, it becomes very cynical because you're at the end of the day, we're thinking what, what we already look at what it costs to live in a given city. And most, most places are unaffordable with one job or the subsubstance wages a lot of people are paid. So at what point, that's again, this is why

we find ourselves in this terrible, terrible place where I think it's whether it's radical collective action, which I think is what it's going to take for people to see what the potential is for some kind of equitable share in this country. But on the other side of it, yeah, a lot of people who are just so exhausted by merely going through the grind of surviving in America, not really ever able to take a moment because everyone has to work. And because of the one moment we had in the pandemic where things stopped for a second, it really did give people, you know, the opportunity to take a breath and look at where their energy is going, what they're receiving in turn for their labor, and how that squares with what the realities are of their given city. Yeah. And again, I know it seems radical to do this,

but I think it's because we have, there's these patterns or momentum that we have with certain monetary policies that suddenly any tweak to that is considered just like, oh, goodness, like this is, I can't fathom what that would mean and what that would mean to, you know, what I'm going to say on an earnings call if I had to start paying hourly people more and then analysts might be asking interesting questions about what that means for our business. But there is an open question about why companies need to have a certain level of profitability. So once they have, I mean, if you think of a traditional, and this is where the current markets are really unmoored from history and from the traditional way of thinking about

investment. And I was explaining this to Will on a run we were taking. I've been training Will how to run for the last year. Slowly, slowly. Yeah, he goes very slowly. My training is going very slowly for him. He goes much more slowly than I do. But, you know, the original idea of getting together as a stock company was that the company itself would be able to have some sort of collective action that would produce profits and pay back each of those stockholders a dividend, a portion of the profits over time. And now you have to ask the question, since many companies don't pay dividends or don't plan to, but they seek to generate huge profits, but they sit on them. And again, back to Thomas Piketty, how can it be a good thing when you have some of the largest companies in the U.S. sitting on cash piles of $50 or $100 billion? That money is simply not circulating in the system. And it just doesn't, you know, these huge accumulations of wealth, while they're certainly justified by the law, you have to ask the fundamental questions

like my friend Jesse Isinger is asking about the tax policy, is, is this the best outcome? Is this what suits the long-term interests of society best to allow these huge accumulations of wealth in these pockets where they aren't being used to help others? who are the people that would make those decisions. Do you think those kinds of proposals for people of that wealth class of just that astronomical bracket, could they come around to that idea to say, yeah, you know what, I do have entirely too much because it seems right now there's a very it seems like a minority of the hyper wealthy are willing to sort of outwardly say, like, there's more that we can be giving back. We do have more than we'll need. But it also seems like on some level, you do need the buy in of these these billionaires on some level for this to happen, because on the other side of it, it'll be like how Exxon Mobil has a playbook to say, like, oh, yeah, we're all for a carbon tax while aggressively like lobbying as much as

they can to take stuff out of infrastructure bills, but outwardly have this persona of like, oh, we're absolutely all about this. It seems like there's, again, from your firsthand experience, do you think that is a sellable proposition to someone who is at the helm of a multi-billion dollar company? If I can kick it in with just an outsider looking in, a non-American looking at America, and somebody who's absolutely fascinated with America, an American political junkie. But one thing that fascinates me with the American approach is the belief in the philanthropy model. So if you've made a ton of money, it's your duty to give some of it away. That would be seen as generous. But there's a real issue I have with that, and I think a lot of people in Britain have with the way that philanthropy works in America, which is you may think that you want a beautiful modern art gallery in your hometown, but the government might think I'd rather pay the teachers a livable wage. And who should have the choice?

and who should have the choice. And that goes right to the heart of what we're discussing here, which is, hey, I made that business grow, I made that buck, and I'll decide what I'm going to spend on it. I want a butterfly farm, the biggest butterfly farm on planet Earth, right here. Fine. But had you paid your taxes, that money could have been allocated differently.

Maybe back to Richard's point about having money washed up in one cul-de-sac, how do you get that out to filter down different streets and different lanes? But I'm saying about that idea, right? Let's say you go up to Bezos or anyone who is... Warren Buffett is a great example of someone who doesn't pay taxes so that he can give all his money away, supposedly. Right, but how would a conversation go? Let's say they're all getting together. I'd sound, because based on how the lobbyists for their respective companies move, there's no interest for them to pay those taxes.

So there's like this active fight where everyone has the same refrain of like, well, I'm not breaking any laws. And I'll acknowledge maybe very narrowly that there's this level of inequality because of the tax code here. But also, like, I'm not really interested in paying that. Like, let's be real. I don't know if that is going to be accepted because you see the resistance that comes out as it plays out through lobbying, because that's how, you know, that's how these corporate interests are

able to maneuver and sort of have these like double speak moments out loud. So I'll give you my perspective on this, which is, you know, the language of business, which is probably not talked very much on your podcast, but we live, I live day in and day out is, you know, our companies, if you're assessing companies, you're looking at them and saying, are they good capital allocators? If they have a pool of capital that's handed to them, let's say they raise a bunch of money in an IPO, are they good at allocating that capital such that they'll generate a return? You know, you'd think fair enough if you gave your buddy 100 bucks to start a lemonade stand, you'd like to think he didn't go down to the pub and drink away 80 of it and then forget to buy lemons. And he's claiming that he's only got 20 bucks

left and he doesn't have enough to buy cups, ice, and lemons to start his lemonade stand. So you want to know that people are individually in companies good capital allocators. The problem is that individual companies themselves aren't going to allocate capital to do things like build schools, roads, bridges, all of the public goods that Will can go on for hours about that we need in society. And one of the things that gets skirted over by those who say, yeah, I'm going to make a lot of money, not pay tax, and then choose to give it away is, well, who built the roads that drive to your mansion? who maintains the environment, who, you know, there are all these externalities that are looked after, and you choose to opt out from supporting

them. And that's, in my view, it's somewhat irresponsible. It's, you know, acting in, if everybody's acting in their own individual self-interest, there will be no society, there will be no collective self-interest, there will be no society. There will be no collective self-interest. We won't have infrastructure or health care. And I can tell you I've been delighted to live in the UK. And, you know, I've had my children born in the National Health Service. And I pay a higher rate of tax than I would in the States. But we have all of our health care provided by a fantastic National health service that, you know, which unfortunately doesn't pay its employees nearly as much as they really deserve to be paid. Yeah. Maybe wrap that one up by saying, look at the state of San Francisco and then look at the state of San Francisco airport.

It's a good example of the gap that exists between the public service and the private sector well then i guess from your perspective like how could you like because you're all very well aware of the inequality and able to like articulate what is what the sort of dysfunction is and the pathology of certain parties involved how would you you know knowing the language of people who are maybe focused more on like the business of side of everything. What is what is the conversation that can be had? Because I think on one level, people like, well, radically X, Y and Z needs to happen. It needs to happen yesterday. Whenever those sort of legislative policies are introduced, it fizzles out immediately. Is there any way that those

people could actually find or how could you solve? Like, are you saying that you're advocating for the government to figure out to say like, no, this is not how we're doing it. This is all how it has to be. Or do you think that people deserve the agency to be empathetic? Because it seems like when you give people the agency to do that, they're absolutely not interested in helping anyone except for themselves. So what is the how do, how do you solve that? And I think there are very, there are

many different ideologies around how to solve that, but from, because you are seeing the dysfunction, how would you propose that works in a way that is a equitable, most importantly for those who are missing out on, you know, all of the wealth that's being siphoned out. So maybe drawing on a very brief period of my career as a government economist, working for Gordon Brun, our Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, but in economics, you always have a cost-benefit analysis. In layman's speak, it's just a debate. I believe I'm right and you're wrong. You believe you're right and I'm wrong. We're perhaps disagreeing about the balance of the costs and the benefits. So if I go back to that Swedish example,

social safety nets have costs. Yeah, it's understandable. If you look at where America is today and you were to move to that model, that brings with it costs. If you want to get somewhere, you wouldn't start from here. But it also brings benefits. And I alluded to some of those. The entrepreneurial spirit in Scandinavian economies is as high as anywhere else in the world. The number of startups coming out is sky high as well. There's a lot of risk-taking happening thanks to that social safety net. And you go back to your point about the minimum wage, it's interesting to think about the cost of the minimum wage that's bad for profit margins, could create unemployment, etc., etc., but there's benefits too. Alan Kruger, a dear friend

who tragically is no longer with us, but he famously wrote a paper of Card. Card and Kruger looking at the minimum wage and how it can boost productivity boost labor market participation there's other benefits to consider and i again as the non-american on the call i would just like to see america have a bit more balance when it weighs up the costs and benefits of either option i think that could be like just a small step forward in the right direction it's just to get that balancing point right. It's not just a one-way street. You've got to consider the benefits of these models as well as the costs.

And tying that up on minimum wage, I hope, Mike, you can dismiss this as fake news. But when minimum wage was being debated in the American economy, there's a Republican senator who said on record that when I waited tables as a student, I was earning $6 an hour and I was just fine. I got along just fine back in the 70s. And that Republican senator had failed to factor in something called inflation into his analysis. But yeah, if that is the standard of debate your leaders are having, A, that's woeful, but B, let's get balanced. Let's go back to that card Krruber paper and think about the benefits of these safety nets as well as the costs and yeah sow a seed and maybe it can take

root one of the things miles that you're kind of alluding to and and is is one of i have to throw it in because it's literally my favorite quote and will has heard me say this dozens of times but it's wrongfully attributed to Mark Twain, but really from Upton Sinclair. And it's never expect a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. I think that goes a long way to explaining the willful blindness. There's a brilliant book written about this about people's willingness to suspend disbelief and i just want to raise one quick point about the great interesting test case we're going to deal with here which is climate yeah i'm sorry i don't know i don't care

how many billions you have you are not going to be able to completely insulate yourself from a heat dome over a thousands of miles radius area of the country that raises temperatures beyond the point at which human habitation is possible. going to be able to shield yourself from the externalities of climate. And if one does not contribute to some form of solution, if we all do not amend our behaviors in some way, we know how this is going to end. And especially the people who are presumably best educated because they have the money to educate themselves and their children, there's no amount of money that is going to save Miami real estate on a 50-year view. And we certainly are not planning on a 30-year view as one would need to, to build the infrastructure that would potentially save the value of that real estate. And yet, you know, if people want to take an ostrich-like approach to it, I guess you can't prevent them from doing so. But that's going to be a super

interesting test case to see how all these people who have billions are contributing or not to solve what is clearly a very intractable problem right now. Yeah. Interesting test case. now. Yeah. Interesting test case. It'll be hopefully the final, perhaps the final test case. Well, you tell me where, you know, what, what, what lands are going to buy, where it's not going to be affected by climate change. Right. Exactly. Well, that's why we're looking at space folks. Well, guys, it's been such a pleasure having you and such an interesting, fun conversation. Where can people find you and follow you and hear you?

Well, we have a podcast, Bubble Trouble, produced by Magnificent Noise. And that's wherever you find your podcasts, Spotify, Apple, across the board. That's up and running. And Richard represents Aret Research. And you'll see him getting quoted in the media. A fantastic video of him on YouTube with him and Scott Galloway. I definitely recommend people go and check that one out. Really entertaining.

Myself, I got the book out. It came out on the 18th of May in the US, and that's Tars and Economics, and the book and everything you need to find about that book, about the eight principles and pivoting through disruption. That's up on TarzanEconomics.com. Nice.

We normally ask our guests what's a tweet or some of the work of social media you've been enjoying, but I'm guessing that's not something that you guys have. Listen to Salt. Yeah, listen to Salt. There you go. you guys have listen to salt yeah listen to salt there you go there's one on linkedin which i really liked which was just how shit are all these polls that are springing up in linkedin in your opinion is it a really shit or e b even bigger shit and even really shit is 25%. So those polls are really shit. So any poll about which tweet you found

interesting is really shit. And I would definitely say for anyone that spends a lot of time on social media, there's a fascinating article in The Atlantic by a woman journalist who got her tech-savvy son to make her take a 28-day hiatus from it.

And under no circumstance, it was a great quote in there saying, you know, giving it up 98% is hard because you always think you can go back. Giving up 100% is easy. So for all the people that obsessively check the Twitter before they go to bed or can't wait to see how many likes they have on Instagram, go cold turkey for a solid week or two, and you'll probably find yourself a saner, happier, more balanced individual. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll take like a couple of days here and there. And then I'll be like,

ah, I just got to see what's going on. Really? A couple of days, really? Or a couple of days, kind of like, oh, I didn't do it that much today. Oh, no, fully. No, I mean, this is, yeah, this is, I'm in therapy and I'm like, they're just're just like you know have you thought about not using that because it sounds like a source of anxiety for you i'm like yeah you're right so get off the social media as a form of self-care y'all yeah miles where can people find you what's a tweet you've been enjoying find me on twitter and instagram ae at miles of gray also the other podcast for 20 day fiance check that out on twitch.tv slash 420 day fiance a tweet that i like first one is from mike gin at shut up mike gin tweeting 39 year old producer who has tinder age range set from 21 to 24 years old dating in la is so weird just how all these people talk wild another one is from sarah

lazarus at sarah c lazarus i really love this one she tweeted there should be a post-pandemic full-service doctor where you just lie down for a three-hour appointment and five people swarm around you and fix you like a race car um yeah i that would be good. Just a quick health pit stop real quick. Yeah, complete with the... Oh, yeah. High power screws. Red Bull racing outfits. Tweet I've been enjoying,

at L was a mistake. Tweeted, Gotta respect the longevity of Microsoft Word. Nothing about it works, and it's still the standard. Wanna move an image? Go to hell. Edit a PDF? Edit your expectations. Ignore a spelling mistake? How about suck my dick? That'll be

$150. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fan page and a website, dailyzeitgeistist.com where we post our episodes and our foot notes where we link off the information that we talked about in today's episode as well as a song that we think you guys should go check out miles what song are you recommending people go check out today okay actually uh this is uh this is a bit of a parody and it's a 22 minute youtube clip if you

remember lo-fi beats to study to that was like this channel on youtube that would just have this like running animation and like lo-fi hip-hop beats secret cat yeah we're a friend of mine uh fantastic writer comedian just overall creative person alex sergeant he uh over on his youtube page the layman he's created loki's loki lo-fi relaxing beats to study time crimes too uh because of the popularity of the show loki so it's the not only the god of mischief but it's loki lo-fi and his cousin did some of the beats on there and they're really good so if you're a bit of a marvel fan and you like some lo-fi hip hop, this YouTube clip is for you.

And it's fantastic. It's some great stuff to get your head nod to. All right. Well, The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's going to do it for us this morning.

We're back this afternoon to tell you what's trending and we will talk to y'all then. Bye. Bye. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams.

Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Thursday. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. For some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns and church. Voila! You got straight away. He tried to save everybody.

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