Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 259: Blocked, Cancelled, Rebuked, and Denounced

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Support our investment fund: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty This week we tackle an age-old issue: what would it look like to buy capital stock in a human's life?

well you said you're reading go for it no you go for it now go for it i was a little premature anyway i i just wanted to make sure that you knew i had a sneaking suspicion that perhaps you forgot or maybe you never knew it's really awkward that i've got to tell you this live on the air. On national TV. Yeah, I hate to do this to you, but I think you've forgotten that you can't be pro-insurrection and pro-cop. I think you may have forgotten that. Why not? You can't be...

Why are those things too incongruous? You can't be... Why are those things too incongruous? You can't do it. You can't do it. Well, that's a new one on me. I'm going to have to sit with that for a while. Is there someone that's pro-insurrection but anti-cop? I'd say there's plenty of anti-cop guys In that crowd Is there anyone who's

Okay so I guess anti-insurrection And pro-cop would just be liberals Yeah They're out to brunch And then anti-insurrection It sucks so bad that the word insurrection A word that I have admired For years And then anti-insurrection. It sucks so bad that the word insurrection, a word that I have admired for years.

It's a beautiful, it rolls off the tongue. It feels good to say. It does. It's got double R's. If this was any other language, you would, insurrection. Insurrection. Insurrection. It sucks bad it sucks really bad that like my only place in that schematic is anti-insurrection anti-comp it's just it's just like the worst assholes had to do an insurrection

we're gonna take the word back let's take it back might take a while we'll take it back let's take it back we might even start putting that french and spanish inflection on when we say uh-huh do you think but yeah someone was sitting in their living room and saw joe biden say that and they like bolted upright and they're like by god he's right well that's he's talking about Well, I'm pro-insurrection and pro- What did he say? Wait. You can't be pro-cop and pro-insurrection. That's correct, yeah.

Okay. A lot of pros he's throwing out. I would venture to say that almost everybody that participated that day would beg to differ. Would beg to differ? Nah. We beg to differ would beg to differ yeah we beg to differ mr president he had like you can't be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy you can't be pro-insurrection and pro-american just three things i fucking hate cops democracy and america fucking hate cops democracy and america just awful place awful awful place dude it's weird out there i just got back from food city the the scene at food city whitesburg is definitely strange um outside they had like two tables set up.

One was pro-cop and the other was pro-insurrection. They're just giving each other the stink eye. Uh-huh. All the tables. One table was a local youth youth group a local church group it was like rock hill community church or some shit i'd never even heard of and they were like that's that they were like fucking trying to box me out just walking in and the guy was wearing like camo cargo wearing like camo cargo shorts that is a i mean people people talk shit about cargo shorts but but a whole other realm of attire is camo cargo shorts yeah it's uh i don't know what what kind of shirt did he have on? I need more to go on here.

Before I make a judgment based on his fit. He was wearing like a youth group t-shirt. Like it said the name. Rock Hill, whatever. Yeah, and it had like a cross on it. Like I wore a lot of those shirts in high school just because they were mostly free yeah they're mostly free from church so dude i saw it's funny how you know everybody does this thing where it's like i'm doing this for christ i I'm like, you know, I'm a...

Well, the obvious low-hanging fruit is we're all warriors for Christ. That's the first thing. Right. But then everybody's like, whatever your profession is for Christ. And I saw one the other day that really, really stretched the bounds of where that should go. And it was a tow truck that had somebody's beat-to-piss Kia on the back of where that should go and it was a tow truck that had somebody's beat to piss kia on the back of it that said towing in his name there's only like a handful of things i think you shouldn't be doing in his name. That's one of them.

You know? I'd say it's certainly one of them. Like, repoing. It's, like, hilarious. A guy that has, like, a $200,000 truck that he, like, just utilizes to go make people's lives miserable thinks he's doing the work of Christ.

You know? So, shout out to Simpsonville Towing in Simpsonville, Kentucky, doing it in his name. I want to have a tow truck towed. Yes. I wonder if you could do that. You would need a slightly larger tow truck, I guess. I'm going to go find, I'm going to go find,

I'm going to use the Trill Billy's credit card, I'm going to go find a big'm gonna go find i'm gonna use the true ability's credit card i'm gonna go find a big tow truck and have this guy towed off his own property yeah what are the physics of towing can can you only tow it a vehicle if you're slightly clay can it two tow trucks one like they're both the same size can it one of them tow the other does it work like that i wonder i guess it just depends on the towing capacity towing capacity it all comes down to towing capacity that's what i was really getting out here i was i love i love the vehicles that like lists of trucks like it's like kind of an anonymous tag that just says the state and then their license number and below it says however many

pounds it can tow yeah and i wonder if the guys that are like indiana 11 000 pounds ever get jealous of the guys it's like kentucky 26 000 pounds just immediate rage 11 huh interesting specs man okay so the other table at food city so there was that table and those guys were being extremely aggressive like trying to

panhandle more or less and then the other table was a table set up by Food City itself. They had a big sign in front of the table in these pamphlets, all printed in neon colors, meant to look cool, look flashy. And what it said on it was hiring vibes. It did not it said hiring vibes okay okay we're i think this is i mean i hate to be the guy that makes these declarations or whatever but i think this is the surest sign that vibes are over. Dude, it's like they're going to be putting you in prison.

Like, prison vibes, my man. Yeah. Yeah. Just some nice flamenco music popping through there as they fucking lock you away in a cage for 10 to 20. Yeah. Oh, my God. Root canal vibes, my man.

Who? Up high. Man, that's what we got to do. If you take nothing else out of this episode, here's what we got to do. Vibes are over, and we have to limit the number of things you can do in his name. Uh-huh. And we also need to raise towing capacity to the highest. raise towing capacity to the highest i want to know what the high like what vehicle can tow the highest amount of tonnage like we're gonna have to like rent out a goddamn transformer to fucking

tell this guy but he's gonna get towed and i'm gonna say when he does i'm gonna say it came to me in a vision that you needed to be towed the tower the tower has become the toad there's just like a lot of really ignoble professions like that one thousand i mean i agree one thousand percent you know one of the first you know it's it's really like fur trapping. I'm not... Like, when trad people say... Like, when, you know, traditionalists or whatever, trad people, they want to, like, harken back to an older time.

The thing is, is, like, we've so destroyed the environment. It's like none of the previous occupations, and even probably social and gender roles, are even possible anymore. Right, I was thinking about that. All nostalgia does not make sense because the conditions are just different all around. You know what I mean?

Yeah, a new world, like a changing sort of biosphere and our relationship to the natural world and everything like it it is happening right before our very eyes due to capitalism it's pushing us forward into a new world uh but i don't know i guess i guess they want to graft older relations onto that new world it's it. I don't know. It's just an example. I wonder what Marx or whoever, if we could raise him from the dead or whatever, what would he think about the conditions of capitalism, like all of this,

in the context of a world that is nothing but pastiche now. Dude, now that I'm thinking i'm yeah it's like now that i'm thinking about this it's very interesting to think about this like capitalism is inherently progressive but that doesn't necessarily mean that the direction it's heading in is good but it does have like a kind of teleology to it right like there has to be an end at some point with capitalism like it is inherently it propels uh society you know relations life itself forward in a direction it's just death it's right yeah it's like uh i'm sorry i just ate self-conscious how to look on the camera for you you got stuff in your teeth It's like... I'm sorry. I just ate.

Self-conscious how I look on the camera for you. You got stuff in your teeth? Yeah. It's not hiring vibes. Dude, it's not... It's on the pamphlet. They said if you have stuff in your teeth, it's not hiring vibes. That's not hiring vibes.

No. Go home, brush your teeth, and come back tomorrow. Yeah. When the vibes are right. When the vibes are right, yeah. You peed your pants? That's not hiring vibes.

Your nipples are hard? Are your nipples hard, sir? That's not hiring vibes. No. We can use you cutting meat back there with those things, so that's about it. You're all qualified for one position. They save on overhead. They don't have to buy knives or anything.

They just hired the guy with sharp as nips. With the hardest nips. But what do you do? What do you do? There is a progressive logic to it, of course, but like,

how does that play it out in a world that just makes Thor Part 7 all the time? Not to bag on that. That's just well-trodden territory. MCU sucks has become the Bob Dylan sucks. It's just an edgy enough take, but it's like you know why that's i think that's why everyone and everything is insane it's because like we're all trying to piece back together the detritus yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah in a world that is in that changes from one day to the next next physically you know what i'm saying like it's uh like there's one less mountaintop today

than there was yesterday due to coal mining or something you know what i mean it's like right there is always something being metabolized towards an event horizon uh and like some political groups shy away from that communists don't communists realize that that is that are the that's the stakes that's why you need a new mode of production but like everyone from liberals to white nationalists all they don't realize that inherent character of capital of capitalism yeah and so that's that's yeah that's where the death drive almost yeah that's where the monsters and shit arrive i feel like arise well on the on the issue of on the issue of capitalism as it inherently i don't even know what the fuck i mean by that it sounded smart but like now i think about it i don't even know what the fuck I mean by it being an inherently progressive force.

I do think it creates like a new world with every passing moment. It does obviously reify certain institutions and social relations, but at the same time, it is kind of always disrupting them as well. but at the same time it is kind of always disrupting them as well you know i right before we started recording i was reading this article in the new yorker that you said you you said you had read the most insane article you've ever read which is saying something i think i think what i said was the dumbest it is definitely the dumbest so running away the dumbest definitely the dumbest it well it definitely highlights two of the dumbest fucking people i've ever read about oh my god give it to me it's in the new yorker the article is called is selling shares in yourself the way of the future two tech-minded brothers are testing the market on themselves

i'm trading on the fucking penny stocks at the first of wolf of wall street you know the little scam stuff that's that's where i'm opening my dude yes you need to step your game up, brother. You are thinking in outdated models of investment, man. That is true. You need to update. I'm a NASDAQ man at least, goddamn. Are there Dow men and NASDAQ men? Kind of like how there used to be Ford guys and Chevy guys? Yeah, like the NASDAq guys are like a little hip and i like ah now hmm yeah we're just kind of like independent uh-huh um yeah i'm just like selling shares with myself now like i don't really have

a company it's just kind of what i do so it um it opens with a hypothetical here we go imagine you were growing up in moscow part of a family of eight living in a small apartment the berlin wall fell not too long ago four times a year you join your siblings in unpacking large boxes of buckwheat that your mother has kept stacked against the wall you You spread the kernels, pluck out the weevils, bake it all at a sterilizing temp, and pack it up again. You are preparing for the future. Around you there's piracy and chaos, but you're enterprising and keep to your path. At university, you hardly sleep and you eat what you can afford. Why do you work yourself this way? It's not as if you're getting paid for it. Another version of yourself in another time, though, is. Now, living in the

california sun with some success you reflect on your poor when sleepless younger self and feel a wave of gratitude and then of prickly regret the kid you were had different dreams it strikes you as unfair that you sit pretty on the spoils of that person's efforts if you could take some of your wealth and send it backward in time to your younger self, you would. We usually think of inequalities as extending from bottom to top. I earn a little wealth over eight hours. Is somebody trying to say we're exploiting ourselves? Like our future self is exploiting our past self? I think that argument is inherent in perhaps what will be detailed here.

I earn a little wealth over eight hours. Bill Gates earns much more. But there are also inequalities that extend longitudinally from the past into the future. Your young self does labor for which your older self collects rewards. Such timing issues, how much money you receive or can spend now and later, have effects on your financial fate this is incredible this is actually this is actually insane it kind of has like it hints at that at the existence of like a new value form like an entirely new value form like in the marxist conception right like the value form is imparted to the commodity like you labor

using your tools and implements and the means of production provided to you by the capitalist your labor goes into that mixture with those things and out pops the commodity commodity is sold for money etc you get a little piece of right but like they're saying that like value is created from the time you start working i guess it's kind of like in some ways it kind of sounds like a hokey version of a a pension plan or like a retirement plan or something like that it's like they like you like you're creating the value over the duration of your career uh-huh and like you should be able to borrow on your future earning potential or invest yeah exactly exactly that's exactly right i could see that working if you were

i don't know say lebron james uh-huh if you're tom sexton i see that going differently because i think it's a very much an open question what happens to you. You're saying you would not invest in 20-year-old Tom Sexton? You would not invest in that future being allured upon? Man, I have been floating. I don't even really know how I've gotten here. I really have done better than I ever should have done.

But, anyway. Same. Same. This is the than I ever should have done. But, anyway. Same. Same. This is the best I ever imagined. I get down on myself about this show from time to time. Just like, you know. Oh, you're stupid. You do what you do.

You know what I mean? But, it means something to some people. You know what I mean? And I'm proud of that, in a way. You know? And I'm... That's why I said to you know? And I'm, that's why I said did you stuff, I was like,

damn, man. I never even thought this would be anything and people find something in it that they like, so. Yeah, people.

I quit being mushy but I appreciate you all. Go to patreon.com, P-A-T-R-O-N-E-N-O-R-S. Yeah, P-A-T-R-O-N-E-N-O-R-S. But you're, basically, no one was, go to patreon.com p-a-t-r-e-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d-r-o-n-d doing i was working the night shift at the day's end uh and uh mostly what was that yeah i've worked the night shift at the day's end and watch reruns of wings on youtube so no that guy didn't really have a high ceiling um let's see there are also inequalities that extend longitudinally from the

past into the future your young self does labor for which your older self collects rewards such timing issues how much money you receive or how it can spend now and later have effects on your financial fate in a more equal world you cannot help but think people would draw on their lifetime wealth throughout their lives not merely at the pinnacle of their careers. You notice that older generations and big corporations rule the roost in the U.S., but it's not clear why this should be so. At your day job... I will say this.

I will interject here and say this. It's an absolute... Like, even if you're the most rabid capitalist in the world, right? Not saying, like, a rich capitalist. I just mean, like, you, like, think America's got it figured out. Uh-huh. It is, on its face, batshit insane that we would mortgage the best years of our life to enjoy a little more at an age when we can't really even enjoy it yeah meanwhile our overlords are enjoying it every step of the way from womb to tomb you're absolutely right it is funny though that like

what they're getting at here is i think that they've innovated the retirement plan like yeah because we're not gonna have pensions in like probably 20 30 years i don't know i'm sure those are still pretty lucrative financial vehicles right like well but the reason i think that they've been trying to stamp those out over the intervening decades since, like, we've established a monopoly of manufacturing after the Second World War. Like, they just never banked on people living this long. I think, yeah, you're right. You're right. Like, you know, you got a pension, you worked in the factory, and you got a pension.

They thought, oh, this motherfucker's going to be dead in five years. So, you know what I mean? But now people are living 20, 30 years past that. In some cases, unfortunately. We need some of these motherfuckers to die out. Unforeseen consequences.

Yeah. That's the thing about investment and risk. Yeah. Ah, man. Yeah. At your day job, which deals in shareholder capital, you impress your graying superiors while at night you talk with young friends

who, beset by debt and meager wages, feel they're barely eking out a life. You dream of what would happen if the money from your day job could cross over to your friends at night. Imagine that this idea becomes a fixation, so much so that you decide you'd risk a piece of your own future on a solution. Okay, and that's where it introduces the two brothers at the heart of this. Let me just say, like, I guess these guys, like most people in this world,

this world like the kind of uh ngo non-profit like uh ted talk adjacent world of silicon valley their their hearts probably are in the right place like at least in the sense that like abstractly they know that suffering is probably bad and wrong in the world yeah i don't i don't presume just because somebody doesn't share revolutionary politics that they're a bad person or have a fucked up moral compass. I just think they're deluded. Yeah, completely deluded. Honestly, for me, it's even more fundamental than that. I find it to be incredible content. Yeah, it's hilarious.

This reminds me, before we got on this call, I was talking to a buddy of mine, and we were talking about this guy at college that we didn't like. And he posts these rise and grind type shit on Facebook all the time. We call them memes, but really it's just pictures of him giving presentations. Yeah. And he has it captioned with but not captioned like under the picture like he is written on the picture you know or like you know kind of like from instagram or whatever when you like put your stories up with like words and stuff on it i'm a porsche

with no brakes it was his latest hit and i'm just like man that is such a hollow way of i don't know like i just don't think i just don't think you should be passionate if you're drawing a wage even if that wage is pretty decent yeah i agree because even if you somewhat like what you do or you even like what you do it's like yeah i saw like a bloomberg poll that was like 63 percent of work from home workers say they miss the office because they miss their work family it's like get the fuck out of here oh it was 25 it was 25 which is hilarious because it's like so you're saying three quarters of people hate that. Right, hate the work field. That seems a bit more, I think somebody pointed that out on Twitter too.

It seems a bit more the pertinent part of that stat. Right, right. You're right. Thank you for the correction there. But yeah, so let me outline for you their plan. Their plan in buying shares in a life. Because they come to this idea by a complex series of arguments and observations about the way that the world is. Entirely abstract, by the way. abstract by the way i mean like it tries the article tries to make it seem like these kids grew up in an extremely poor environment and they they probably did in the 90s after the fall of the

soviet union and everything was going fucking insane but their dad was like an eminent scientist in the soviet union yeah and uh and so i think that they were like pretty what i'm getting at is like these guys have developed some standing yeah right right right right um but uh so i'm gonna just read you yeah like the series of ideas that got them to this point. Redistribution, the idea that grossly imbalanced wealth should be spread to help the needy become less so, has traditionally been the province of this political center and the left, which believe in taxes and a safety net administered through the state. The Liebermans, that's the two brothers in this article,

who are annoying as fuck, by the way, who are constantly finishing other sentences. They read together. they sleep together they can't date because like they have to go everywhere together and they like they like the atl twins that like have sex with all the same chicks or like the island boys who rumor is they fuck each other i i would say probably more the island i got more island boys you got more island boys vibes from okay i say yeah something that's not substantiated it's just one of those internet rumors right right just a feeling i have uh but the vibes are definitely off regardless the hiring vibes are off here right yeah these guys these guys are not hiring i don't got i don't get good hiring

the lieberman say that their market-based approach can potentially have more wealth the big money has been known to resist taxes but is all in for investment and weave its own networks of support in one conceivable scenario, an expiring folk singer of 22 decades, or I'm sorry, of 22 decides, like the Liebermans, to offer shares in her life. The shares are cheap. The monetary value of her future is uncertain.

Yet they attract some investors because maybe she's the next Taylor Swift. She's high risk, high reward. Thanks to the investments, she can now afford a new headshot in the time of a well-connected producer she has a bit of cash left over so she buys a share also cheap in the future of her best ah i see what they're going for here it's like they invest in there and then these people get an infusion of cash so they can it actually bolsters their future

earning potential because somebody's invested in them. Well, even more so than that, I think what they're trying to do is make it social. So what they're trying to say is that, like, you or I, using our phones, probably, and an app, can invest in the career of an artist. And so, like, in this scenario, she also buys a share that are also cheap in the future

of her best folk singing friend so like they're encouraging you to buy the shares of each other i see to turn your relationship with someone into something yes not only entirely transactional but is a literal financial investment it's not like an emotional one or anything like that it's right literally just financial um so it's not even like it's not even like uh the thing they were doing in china they got everybody's goat where you got like you get like social credits or whatever it was do you remember that when that was happening i don't remember that it kind of sounds like it might be similar i think it was something like you get i forget what it is but like you get like some sort of like remuneration for like or i forget what it was and you never again

i hate talking about china because you have no idea what is just like bullshit that we've put out here about them or what's real, you know? Right. Like, that could have just been a propaganda campaign. Like, that was like a 2009 hit from the CIA. That was like one of their earlier campaigns to discredit China. They were like, look, they got a a credit a social credit system yeah yeah they do have something like that apparently it's a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of china the program initiated regional trials in 2009 system was intended to standardize

the credit rating function and perform financial and social assessment for businesses, government institutions, individuals, and non-government organizations. Interesting. It's crazy. I guess I hadn't really thought about that before. Like, you know, in the United States, you have a credit score. Do they have that in China, too? Maybe that's...

Maybe, I don't know. I don't really know how China works. I wish I did. i'm fascinated same i would imagine in the life shares program it probably operates like tinder maybe you can swipe on artists and people i mean obviously like a perfect example of this was probably oscar wilde like oscar wilde wasn't he like a celebrity before he ever wrote a book? Because he just went around and told people he was a writer? Right, right, right.

Yeah, he did all these salons and stuff and traveled all over the world. Yeah, before he even put anything out. That's actually a smart way to go about it. Yet another thing you could never do today. Uh-huh. I guess you could to some degree. I guess Instagram influencers would be somewhat analogous to that. But.

Some of these Silicon Valley guys are like that. But you can't, but like everybody is like look-up-able now. You know what I mean? Right, right. Like you can't just like say, oh, do what I've done for years and go somewhere else and say, yeah, I'm the third string quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. That's pretty debunkable really quick. In Wild's day, he could be whatever the hell he wanted

because it would take eight months to debunk it, you know. Yeah. I mean, he told people that too, though, that he was the third string quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Oh, that's where that originated. That's where that originated. That's where that originated, yeah. First Irishman in the NFL. Maybe the only to this day.

Okay, so anyways, back to our 22-year-old folk singing friend. Ten years pass, and her work pays the rent. She sells a few more shares at a higher valuation. Her future value is now a vector based on measurable success. A decade later, she releases her fifth album, full of candid songs about middle age. The album speaks to a generation and goes platinum. The price of a share in her future has now gone through the roof. Or maybe it's her friend who made it big. Our folk singer is envious all the way to the bank. She sells the share in her friend she bought long ago at a profit of a few hundred thousand dollars and makes a down payment on her first home now it's her friend's success that

keeps that's keeping her creative life afloat or the likeliest of all nothing happens and so she finds a job in another line investors as they would do with the stock of any pivoting company might decide to hold hold or to sell at a loss. She owes them nothing, though she got some extra funding on the way. The Lieberman's theory, so I don't know, did you get all that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Lieberman's theory is that in terms of stuff that America's big wealth can invest in,

people are more appealing than the current catalog of middling venture capital funds, shipping firms, and companies selling toothbrushes by mail. Instead of putting money into a fund for startups, investors would be free to find an ingenious entrepreneur and invest in her entire career. Rather than buying shares of Spotify, a fund could buy into a portfolio of the futures of emerging hip-hop artists, all of whom would get that cash. Most of us are more excited about our brilliant

friends than about the companies they work for and while the average age of an s&p 500 company is approximately 20 years most die young people do better the stronger their boost off the blocks the stronger the longer they can keep trying and increasing their odds of success okay like okay i'm purely, strictly capitalist terms, does this make any sense? Like, if investment isn't chasing, you know, startup funds and is instead chasing after literal, single entrepreneurs, wouldn't you just get more, like, Elizabeth Holmes and, like, Doquan, the guy that did Terra tara and lunas scammers scam yeah wouldn't you get more scammers and shit yeah and also people like people could you may okay you remember like back i guess i was back in the winter when everybody was doing that amc short squeeze stuff like that

yeah can you imagine just like pissing off some dude and him just totally cratering your life by like some sort of like reddit short squeeze type scenario on your life shares yeah but it's on your life shares yeah just because you just yeah like you pulled out in front of him one day or something you know what i mean dude you're right people are motivated that's the other thing i mean one thing that i mean the the meme is marks failed to consider but i think marks considered pretty pretty well the nature of people in society and the roles they play in society yeah the capitalists don't really for as much as they love about they love data and mining our data and in cases like we know with like facebook stuff stealing our data out from under

us before we even knew it was valuable like they still don't know a whole lot about the human condition and what makes people tick is what's interesting dude you're you're absolutely right you're totally right well it imposes on that dynamic and process imposes on people a set of rules, imperatives, obligations, norms that you have to adhere to and if you don't then you're fucking dead. Well, I think what Marx considered is how people

plug into the broader society. What the capitalists consider is like, what do these people buy to make it through this health that we're putting them through? It's apples and oranges. You know what I mean? Right. You're right.

Um, so this is the part where we kind of get into that new, that kind of like Silicon Valley, Ted talk, NGO, nonprofit adjacent aspect of all this. So some new egalitarians speak of quote basic capital models as opposed to basic income the idea being that it's more equalizing to grant people an early chunk of capital that they can grow than a steady drip okay that's that's fine

like i i guess if we're to have to live in this world, and if you don't see it ever changing, and you're so pot committed to capitalism, you can't see any future, every interaction is not commodified, etc. Then I guess I could agree with you there. But just on its own terms, there's no fucking way that would work there's no like just

by the nature of capitalism there have to be people at the top who have capital and there have to be those of us who sell our labor like yeah you could you could not have a situation where i go get a job at wherever lows okay and then i sign my contract i get my job i pass my drug screen anything any other hurdles they make you jump through and then they say well you're going to make uh thirty five thousand dollars a year here's thirty five thousand uh-huh and then you know what i mean like no they the the the drip is does two things one it's how they keep you needing them and depending on them is the drip, right? The other thing, it keeps you coming back. But, like, I've learned a lot about the time value of money.

Like, how, like, having $10,000 today is actually a lot better than having $10,000 in two months. You know what I mean? Because today you can invest could invest that you could do whatever like what you have the cash on hand to do what you need to do to make it grow or whatever and that's one thing denied people and i'm not like making the advocating for like the stock market or investing or anything like that when i say that but that is one thing denied to working people it's like the opportunity to have an amount of cash up front that they could do whatever with to you know try to make it work for them you know i mean that's that's a way to yeah well i mean what would happen if they if the

government implemented a program like that a universal basic capital everybody like seed money for being born every every baby every every every baby son and every baby daughter gets fifty thousand dollars in cold hard cash the day that they're born right like not only is it ideologically impossible right like not only is it ideologically impossible and and obviously the product of complete isolation and alienation like only only two people who only hang out with each other and do all the same things as each other jack each other off uh fucking read each other the same coloring books i'm still imagining the atl twins here only that only people two people in that situation could come up with something like this it's it's just so not only is it ideologically impossible but i feel like mechanically it's impossible like there's no there's no possible

way that you wouldn't create what would it be like insane inflation or something like that like there would be some side effect of giving every single person basic i i support it i saw somebody sound off in the comments on the patreon from from last week and they were talking about like what the 1500 stuff did to inflation and all that stuff, whatever Trump was giving us and all that kind of stuff. Like, let's say that person's correct, and he just said every child born, he'd get $50,000 right up front. It'd be tight as hell,

but the whole world would change around it to account for it. I support it, I i guess of course like it's it's just so fucking foreign to the way things work and are that it's a it's a it's a a complete impossibility if every single person has capital then you no longer have capitalism i guess let me yeah yeah for that to work work yeah you have to have you have to have losers in order for capitalism to work you have to have losers as in like you're a loser i mean you have to have people born to a different station that they have to like then sell their time to somebody in order to sell their time and labor exactly exactly right you just don't have

capitalism anymore if everybody has capital paradoxically is that the thing like they've become so divorced from the commodity form as a physical object that is created and made in a factory like as all we all have obviously but like have we become so divorced from that like they're trying to recreate value forms they're trying to recreate the very i don't know like these people they're rich so they obviously people are giving them money this is an idea that someone is buying into somewhere and is putting money towards but uh let me ask you let me ask you a different but kind of tangentially related question what is your conception of you so you heard this thing that where biden is kind of dangling student

loan forgiveness he's like thinking about it probably he needs a play for the midterms and that would be certainly a play you know what i mean what would you say to the person who says well if i'd known that i wouldn't have incurred any debt or like real debt i would have like planned my life and went to school and done all these things like there go it's not fair for fair for other people to have to pay for it well that but also it's not fair that if i didn't go to college then i don't really get anything out of this deal right where do you land on that you think it's a bourgeois giveaway do you think it's like no i think like the republicans are arguing i know that is really a ridiculous argument but

i i mean i think that a lot of people go to college and a lot of people were sold on the idea that it was a a good and a good investment and b that because it was a good investment it was feasible like you know i've also seen like a lot of guys that like have dunked on college people that went to college for a while they like went to college and are struggling you know yeah that and all that stuff oh it's your dumb ass fault for taking it out and those same people are now like crying that it's not fair right right i mean it's it's it's just an issue like a lot of us were sold on the idea that it was yeah it was a good investment and we took money out on that premise and i think people should be i think people should be remunerated or whatever for that

the fact that it was not a good investment and furthermore that education not even just even more fundamentally education should be free should be free it's not it should not be something you have to pay for yeah like you you never should have had to pay for it all this is window dressing like if you went to college it should have been free any fucking lot right well yeah that's what it they if they want to if they really want to fix that then wipe out all debt and make it to where if anybody wants to go back to school who didn't go then it's then it's free they don't have to pay anything there you go there you go you you fucking solve the here's an here i think it's fucking hilarious it's like the idea that like some student loans like okay so taking out all these like risky loans that like are fresh out of high school oftentimes but not always and it really

this really doesn't matter overall but like it's funny like the biden administration early on was like saying oh this was a predatory practice so we're going to forgive ten thousand dollars of student loan debt but not all of it it's like well if like your whole thing is premised on that it's predatory why not erase all why shouldn't it all be gone like you're right you know oh my god it's kind of like how they gave us i'm fascinated with liberals ability to do that it's like they recently made a change to the electoral law to like make it harder for like someone like trump to steal an election in the future and it's like okay if you can make a change why can't you fucking change the whole electoral college?

Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, you lost multiple elections on this thing. Yeah. And you admit that it can be changed because you're tinkering with it right now. Right. Like, just go all in, man. Yeah.

Like, restructure society. Because they're going to say bad things about you anyway, but really, I mean, that all boils back down to down to like they have the same class interests as their opponents so it doesn't really matter ultimately ultimately they can just take a flyer on elections if they lose it right affect them that much um okay basic capital model all right the idea being that it's more equalized in a grant people an early chunk of capital that they can grow than a steady drip. But the idea is old. In 1750, Dr. Johnson described a supposed tavern friend of his who observed that,

quote, it was not worse to have 10,000 pounds at the age of two in 20 years than a much larger fortune at 30. For many opportunities, he says, he occur of improving money, which if a man misses, he may not afterwards recover. That's basically what you were saying earlier. People generally give up their dreams not because they're sure they'll never realize them, but because money pressures close in. That those pressures are uneven, a scion with a trust fund gets more tries

at making it in a risky but rewarding venture than an orphan with monthly rent to cover is one way inequalities compound. rewarding venture than an orphan with monthly rent to cover is one way inequalities compound um juliana huru badenanor a professor of philosophy and political science at stanford and the faculty director of the university's basic income lab that's really funny that they have to have a lab they like a test on they test test on poor college students like rats. Like, now we're going to inject 50 cc's of $10. They're going to take it to Chipotle.

The basic income lab. Told me that she finds the Lieberman's model interesting in its premise, quote, especially if you live in a society that's very unequal in terms of wealth, like the U.S., where a lot of life plans aren't possible if you don't actually have cash early on. In her recent book, Justice Across Ages, Treating Young and Old as Equals, she assesses differences between the generations both in the long arc, between the lifetime experiences of young and old,

and in the moment, how the lifetime experiences of young and old, and in the moment, how the young and old relate. But although Badaninor thinks the Lieberman's model is attentive to the first kind of age-based inequality, she told me she doubts its effects on the second, especially when everyone is jockeying for an investment. If the young have to present themselves in a particular way to get to older generations so that they will find their life trajectory appealing, I could totally see how there could be a social hierarchy you typically just have between benefactors and those who receive those funds. Lieberman's idea echoes one examined by Milton Friedman in 1962 and has many other siblings. backlinks, income sharing agreements in which organizations fund aspiring young people in exchange for a portion of their lifetime income, are gaining popularity even in professional sports, and at the height of the crowdfunding craze, a scheme known as human capital contracts lets

investors give money to promising youths, usually through middlemen companies such as Upstart, in exchange for a percentage of their future incomes. The traditional knock against such schemes has been that they're exploitative or worse, a form of indentured servitude. With the authors of all these contracts share as being powerful and rich. The Lieberman's own life shares deal, a prototype for their model anyways, does not involve income sharing. Direct liquidity happens when the Liebermans cash out, say to buy a house. At that point, there's a proportional distribution, meaning that if I own 2% of the Liebermans, I get 2% of the cash. This works a bit like a dividend,

and there's a reason you might still want to hold stock when the Liebermans are old and less productive. When they die, everything is distributed, unless the shareholders vote to keep their life operation going. Otherwise, shareholders have no vote in anything the Liebermans do um yeah so that's when you're investing in a whole career ensuring health happiness and stamina is good business practice seldom matches theory one economist told me he doubts that normal people even with technical protections could be free of shareholder influence it's like you were saying earlier like someone would fucking

corporate do a corporate raid on your person you have like gordon geckos out there just fucking we're gonna end this motherfucker uh-huh yo what an assassination tank your stock? When a founder takes VC money for their company, they suddenly have pressure to make the company and the financial return for the investors as big as possible, says Ariel Zuckerberg, general partner at Long Journey Ventures and sister of Facebook co-founder. Some individuals, I think,

continue trying to make a company something that it shouldn't be. She committed to buying shares of the Lieberman's future at her previous firm because she thought it would help them break from this pattern. Yet for Zuckerberg,

it is the brothers' willingness to cast themselves endlessly back on the grindstone that makes them worth investing in. What the fuck? Just the fact that they keep making up stupid ideas means that they're worth investing in. Dude, I'm telling you, all you have to do, man,

is just be a disruptor and adopt one of the stupidest, fucking most infantile mindsets imaginable, and then people want to throw money at you. It's the stupidest fucking most infantile mindsets imaginable and then people want to throw money at you it's the damnedest thing it it truly is um well let me read this example to you real quick at a vegan sushi restaurant in san francisco the brothers met with marina mogko, an upbeat Russian expat YouTuber in whose life they themselves have bought shares. At 21,

she had co-founded a kind of Expedia for language immersion packages. Now, as a 32-year-old influencer, she taught foreigners how to speak and act like Americans. She has more than 6 million subscribers, and the Liebermans bought part of her future at a total

valuation of around 34 million dollars holy shit at first she didn't know what she would do with the money but in time she hired producers a Parisian stylist and a PR manager and this staffing brought her success forisian style would you buy a parisian stylist if someone gave you a 34 million dollar investment i think i could do a little better than that but oh really wow you would what kind of stylist would you invest like i mean i might be parisian it wouldn't be like a connect? No, I would do that. I would not let anybody dress me. That would be a good job for me.

I would be the Parisian stylist in this calculus. Yeah, like I'm the captain now, but it's I'm the Parisian stylist now. I'm the stylist now. I'm the Parisian stylist now. stylist now. I am the stylist now. I am the Parisian stylist

now. Mogilko is about to fly to New York to be photographed in a yellow body suit for the

cover of Bulgarian Glamour. I feel as if I'm playing a game and keep rising to another level.

Wait, wait, wait. Like, Glamour Magazine, but the Bulgarian version? I guess so. It's in Italian.

Or like, the magazine's called Bulgarian Glamour. Shout out to my buddy Jeff Cole. The editor. Jeff Cole, editor of Bulgarian Glamour. Me and Terrence have a buddy named Zivko Ilaev. He would do the radio show. People would call in. They'd think his name is jeff cole that's hilarious jeff cole jeff cole

um a principle a principle known as the modigliani miller theorem you can't trust a theorem that has an italian what is miller that's a that's a wasp name right or is it could be the modigliani miller theorem says that in a perfect market a company's value will be the same whether it finances its growth only by selling shares or by taking on debt. By this logic, Mogilko, the YouTuber, would have got the same boost through a loan. Practically, in fact, she might come out ahead. Most debt financing costs less than venture capital. The Liebermans say that the difference is psychological and in where the money is coming from. but their model

isn't so much digging young people out of their predicament as you're replacing one kind of weight with another the vulnerable are still vulnerable and it remains a long way from the bottom to the top yeah uh but you know and he goes on to point out like for regular ass people this uh would never work um for regular ass working people uh mostly because like i mean what also what about people that are well past their earning potential what if i'm coming in the game at 67 like how's this work for me how's this work for me right you could invest in someone having a baller ass funeral that's my that's gonna be my investment in you listen we're going top of the line here okay party of the century one last job i i yeah i don't know man it's uh

it it's like not all of us were born to be superstars singers um you know any all of us are i don't know we're all born with a set of like skills and interests and most of us the vast majority of us have to work to survive now if early on in life someone told you like you don't have to you get a here's your capital stock and you get to grow make the life of your dreams make the life of your dreams but Make the life of your dreams. But then you're not describing capitalism. You're describing a kind of world that has some capitalist principles in it. Yeah. But you're describing a whole other world where the things that make this one operate don't work and don't move things.

work and don't move things when i was a young man they were doing testing for uh the gt class gifted and talented um and it was also like career like your aptitude and all this stuff and i can remember being in there and everybody was like oh i took I took the test. I got doctor. I got lawyer. I got this. I got that. And mine came up, and it recommended that I shoot to be a disc jockey. You're not far off. Well, here's the thing is I did that. Yeah.

I mean, there's probably a lot of those kids in that class. In fact, I know there's that never fulfilled their promise, but one thing you can't say about me is I fulfilled my potential. Thanks to listeners like you. Like you, folks. That's where you come in. This has all been one hour-long commercial for investing in the seed capital.

Yeah, investing in our potential going forward. Oh, man. Oh, man oh man yeah i don't know it's uh it was it made my brain hurt it's one of those it's like a brain freeze um pain like you guys can't be this fucking stupid but is ted culture still popping i'd say so i'd say so i just i just feel like all that shit's been become passe in the last since bernie trump hillary bernie trump biden all this sort of like just the shifting political landscape i feel like at this point like a guy like malcolm gladwell probably does not have as much purchase now as he did like 10 years ago yeah well he's i think he's all about cancel culture now so

was he a cancel culture guy now i think so his last book was about these bombers in World War II or something. They got canceled? Maybe. But now it's not enough. I was talking to my buddy Mira Politi over in London by way of Italy, and now you don't just get canceled. You get denounced, canceled, blocked, and rebuked. Oh, wow.'t just get canceled. You get denounced, canceled, blocked, and rebuked. Oh, wow.

That's the order. DCBR. DCBR. I got DCBR this weekend, bro. Well, she says if things are escalating, that the order is blocked, canceled, rebuked, and denounced because you don't come back from denouncing. Denouncing is the harshest kind. I i mean the only thing after that is exile yeah it's the only thing after being denounced and exiled is a verb so you

actually have to somebody has to tie you to a horse and slap it on its ass the rest of it just can be done with a simple some words uh-huh. But to be exiled actually requires somebody removing your physical person from their geographic space. Well, I guess there is a step between that. There's, what was it, blocked? Blocked, canceled, rebuked, denounced? Denounced. The example she gives for why denounce should be

the penultimate step is, you can unrebute Jerry, but you can't undenounce him. That's true. That is true. But I would say censor has to be in there somewhere. That happens before they exile you. That might be the first step, censor. That might be the first step.

Yeah, you're right. Censored, blocked. If you just get censored then like like if you got if you're dealing with cancel culture guys you can't censor them because that's just going to inflame them you have to go through the steps you have to censor them block cancel rebuke denounce and then later exile exile of course of course yeah well anyway that's that's this those are the steps there's you can cancellation it doesn't end at cancellation folks it rarely dies no there's worse that can happen to you could be denounced yeah yeah for sure rebuked even rebuked even who wants that that i said the cat anyway yeah gosh if you get denounced man that's that is seriously

gonna stunt your earning potential it's yeah you're fucked yeah but people could buy shares in your new career as someone that's denounced so you know it's one man's denouncement is another man's gain you're learning man in this economy

you're no longer a Nasdaq man you're moving up I'm a Dow guy the Liebermans have made. You're moving up. I'm a Dow guy. The Liebermans have made me a Dow guy. They've made you a Dow guy. I come out of this episode changed, I have to say. Good. Say what you want about the Liebermans.

They have changed me. They've changed you. Good. That was what I was hoping for. You know? And that's rare. You rarely change anybody in this world. Most people don't change. Most people don't change.

Most people don't change. Don't change that much. Yeah. So, you know, that's... Show this... Another thing maybe the Liebermans didn't consider is that most people are just eternal 14-year-olds with just a couple of more mature presentations

depending upon the situation. Uh-huh. You think people are becoming less dynamic over time are there less don drapers of the world people who like remake themselves as entirely new people that's interesting wow yeah if you get denounced you just pop up as somebody else that would be a funny the new job yeah that'd be a funny idea like instead of stealing a man's identity in the korean war don draper got denounced and stole another denounced man's identity no he got i'd say he got rebuked but he stole a denounced man's i did no he had to

steal a canceled man's identity okay rebukation and denouncement are worse than cancellation okay all right i think let me go back to the tape it goes blocked canceled rebuked denounced when who who who came up with this just so we're giving my buddy mira over in london shout out Shout out. By way of the boot. You have... The old country. You've stumbled upon something here. This is...

I think this is fundamentally correct. What is the noun for being rebuked? Like, is it rebukation? I don't know. I've always said rebukation. What is it called to be in a state of being rebuked? Like you walk around in a state of being rebuked. Maybe a state of rebuke.

Maybe. It's like one of those that doesn't change. Maybe. That's fucked up. You can un-rebuke Jerry, but you can't un-denounce him. Just like people, some words don't change. All right. some words don't change all right oh my fucking god dude well there are so many other implications in that like wouldn't to make a proper investment wouldn't you have to like

take into consideration a person's like lability and their volatility their libidinal state. Their sexual drive. Does having kids stunt your earning potential or is it a boon for it? There's so many things. They would have to take all those things into account.

Your sperm count. They'd have to count your sperm every year. They'd sit down and say, it's time. I'm not saying the Liebermans aren't innovators. I'm just saying they have not considered everything yet. There is much, much work to be done on this.

You're right. Well, good thing there's things called Basic Income Lab. This is where they work on stuff like that, at the Basic Income Lab. We got our own lab at the office here we don't do basic income though we do hiring vibes we have the hiring vibes lab here we should hire somebody and just yeah it's yeah you have to pass the hiring vibes lab you have to go through it come out the other end hireable oh man fuck all right that about covers it um if you want extra content please go to patreon uh we used the metaphor earlier of an investment, but don't look at it that way.

You get something out of this immediately. The immediate thing is content. Content depreciates, much like money. So it's only good now. It's not going to be worth anything to you in two years. So go get your content right now go get your content while it's worth something well we've got a lot of episodes over there

so if you've you know work get over there if you're new work the back catalog let us know how it shakes out for you and don't block cancel rebuke or denounce us by, you know, unsubscribing. Mm-hmm. Please don't do that.

All right. Well, we'll talk to you next time. See you over at the Patreon. Have a good week, everybody. Bye-bye.