Will Cain Country - Recession, Censorship, and a Techno-Corporatocracy

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Join Will for an hour of economic and monetary doomsday dystopia with the President of the Brownstone Insitute Jeffrey Tucker as they break down a variety of new world phenomena in the 21st century. Tucker explains whether there will be a major event in the coming year that shows just how bad the economy may be. Plus, they look at how this could affect the 2024 Presidential Election. Tucker also explains how a new book by the founder of the World Economic Forum could be a pretext for an elites-driven new world order.   Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail]   Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for $5.5 plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. Recession, censorship, and a techno-corporate. An Hour of Doomsday Dysopia with Jeffrey Tucker. It's the Will Kane podcast on Fox News Podcast. What's up?

And welcome to Wednesday. As always, I hope you will download, rate, and review this podcast wherever you get your audio entertainment at Apple, Spotify, or at Fox News Podcast. You can watch the Will Kane podcast on YouTube. And follow me on X at Will Kane or Instagram, C, Will Kane. Texas Rangers for Tampa Bay Devil Raise Zero one playoff win in the books in the best to get three games series it's big it's big to get the first win for the Texas Rangers simultaneously as that was going down yesterday afternoon Kevin McCarthy zero

opposing team Matt Gates one the speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, Republican, was removed from that position yesterday with a motion to vacate filed by Congressman Matt Gates. Republican. Enough votes were honored to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. What comes next? I don't know. Who's it a win for? We'll have to see when I tweeted about the Texas Rangers during this fight for the speakership. Somebody said to me the world is coming to an end you're tweeting about obscure people that no one knows excuse me sir evan carter will possibly be rookie of the year next year if he's not beat out by soon to be texas ranger rookie for the twenty twenty four season white lankford so there are

some of us who know evan carter and wyatt langford that being said i can appreciate the fact that this was all playing out in real time on social media at the same time as a playoff baseball game. But the reason that we fight for ideas and the reason we fight for politics is so that we can live a life outside of politics. So we can enjoy sports. We can go on vacations. And in this case, even though we may not know the future of the Republican Party, we may not know who yet will be the Speaker of the House, we can root for the Texas Rangers. Today, I think you're in for a treat. I think it's a fascinating conversation that, yes, at times, toys with dystopia. But I have a fascinating conversation with the President of the

Brownstone Institute. Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey Tucker's been on this program before we've talked about FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. We've had conversations about the economy. Today, we address what's coming, what kind of economy, how deep of a recession is coming for the United States. Plus, we talk about leaving political ideologies behind, with humility, looking at past thought, rejecting the traditional left-to-right political spectrum, and dealing with the realities of our world, what do you do when it's hard to distinguish between the state and private companies? What do you do when they are in a unholy marriage to suppress freedom? How do you see, in the end, a path for freedom? Here is an awesome.

conversation with Jeffrey Tucker. Stop. Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie, The Naked Gun. Liam Nissan. Buy your tickets now. I get a free Tilly Dog. Chilly Dog, not included.

The Naked Gun. Tickets on sale now. August 1st. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at the quiz.

Then come back here to see how you did. you for taking the quiz it gets all the benefits of nicotine with none of the downside of tobacco well okay but i i go through a can of zen and like an afternoon it's terrible get you the six milligram double up um all right go ahead a quick story about this uh in alabama this cost about two dollars in massachusetts it cost 18 dollars Yeah. That's all tax. That's all tax. In Massachusetts, they're trying to shape you up, you know.

They don't want you to do bad things, like chew tobacco. You know what would be a fascinating study? Let's set aside chewing tobacco because it's culturally regional to the south. What I'd be curious about is smoking rates in Alabama versus smoking rates in Massachusetts or New York City, where the taxes are designed, I think, to discourage smokers. So are there fewer smokers per capita in New York City than there are in Birmingham? I think I would be hard to predict. I'm not sure I would have an intuition about that, really.

In this context, it's one of the most bizarre turnabouts I've seen in my entire life was the change in government attitude towards weed over the last 10 years. You know, I mean, we're throwing people in jail for this stuff, and there was a big war on it. You know, my friend, Ross Oldbrook, still languishing in prison because he opened up a website that sold up. And then just practically overnight,

you know, especially during lockdowns, all the weed places stayed open. And now New York City smells like the stop. Every major urban center smells like. And Massachusetts, they encourage you to grow it in your front yard. You know, one wonders what led to this change. And as a libertarian, I'd like to think that,

oh, libertarian ideas prevailed? I don't think so. Actually, it's, if you wanted to kind of construct a dystopian fantasy version of events, it's like the ruling class sat around and said, you know what? Astoned people complain a lot less. I think that's not an implausible explanation for the sudden embrace. Let me just offer an alternative theory and see what you think. politicians ultimately more so than nefarious are simply weak and what they do is self-preservation to continue to maintain office and they saw the cultural tides turn to the point where they thought it's not advantageous for me to continue to resist this movement in the cultures so let me just ride the wave of weed uh that's that's a very plausible explanation that may cover it i wish it had been something else like low tax or a deregulated economy or sound money or something other than mass smoking of weed. I mean, I'm just not sure we're better off as the civilization as a result of this.

One thing I'm confident about, it wasn't like a sudden embrace of scientific research. Because the embrace of weed has come along with this idea that it is completely harmless. And in fact, it has health benefits. I think any rational person, and you and I began this conversation talking about nicotine, can understand that ultimately there is an upside and a downside to everything. And we pretend right now that there is no downside to weed, no depressing factor on your ambition or your energy level or whatever maybe. And somebody listening right now is going to get mad at me because they want to believe that it is a panacea. But of course, you and I began, I like nicotine. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I'm not compromising something with my health.

No, I mean, there's a downside to everything. And you're right. People who are daily weed smokers just do not recognize what's either what's happening to them or that there's a downside to it at all, even though they'll admit that, oh, I smoke it to calm down, I smoke it to celebrate, I smoke it for this effect, to reduce my anxiety. Well, if you're constantly denying your brain, you know, a normal experience of the range of emotions that come with human life, what do you think that's doing to you? I mean, how do you know what the effects of that are going to be? I don't believe it. I've seen too many lives turned upside down because of this stuff, and not because it's physiologically dangerous, really, but it changes people's outlook and life. reduces their ambition, makes them satisfied with things they shouldn't be otherwise satisfied

with, it introduces a kind of a chill attitude where it's not really justified. And over time, I just wonder what is breaking down. I understand associated with schizophrenia. And if it runs in your family, you're at high risk. And weed, you know, intensifies that. That I understand, but I'd like to know him a little bit more. You know, philosophically, and it's probably dangerous, Jeffrey, too. I want to have this conversation with you today, and I want to talk about the economy, but as always is the case when we get together. I just want to just follow our curiosity where we go.

You know, I did a recent podcast. First of all, I did a podcast some time ago with Alex Berenson on the connections between habitual use of weed and schizophrenia. But I did one on ideology just recently. And, you know, I feel like, Jeffrey, I have become less ideological in the past five years or so, less libertarian, less doctrinaire. I'd like to think not less principled, but I have to be real about myself. In other words, trying to think more practically. What I'm getting at now is I'm going to drive an overarching philosophy at you for a moment.

I also believe that your strength is your weakness in life. And that probably applies not just to humans. That everything, you can find everything's downside in its upside. You can find its weaknesses within its strengths. And you just pointed out with weed, like, well, not it's weed or alcohol. The reason you do it is what you just described, to chill or to relax.

But if you did that habitually, why would you then think it doesn't make you too chill, too relaxed, too depressing upon your ambition? Now, I need to probably think about that strength and weakness thing with nicotine because they say nicotine helps focus, short-term mental acuity, doesn't have the carcinogens of tobacco. But there's something in there, I don't know, elevated blood pressure or something. I'm sure that is it's negative.

I think our strengths are our weaknesses. I hadn't thought about this subject for years, but I'm rethinking my attitudes towards wheat. And more broadly speaking, I have to say that a lot of my writings these days, and this is really since lockdowns, have been about correcting my impressions that I used to carry around ideologically in the past. It was almost like doctrines. I didn't know I was holding. And the world has not conformed at all to the way I thought it was supposed to. Interesting. That's been a very powerful reminder to me to stay humble, stay alert, try to look at things clearly and realistically, rather than carrying around this gigantic philosophical

ideological baggage with you that prevents you from seeing the reality before your eyes. That's very dangerous, actually, to not have your eyes opened. And, you know, excessive pessimism or excessive optimism or techno-utopian libertarianism or wild-eyed socialism, all these things are just like mental poison that stop you from, you know, grappling with the realities all around you. For me, the lockdown period was an astonishing revelation because it blew up everything I thought the – it ruined everything I believed about how the world was supposed to work. Really? How? Really how? For ever since the advent of the digital age, I had become convinced that we were on a trajectory in a Hegelian sense towards ever more emancipation from old structures, corporate cartels,

big government, nationalism, you know, all these things. And I thought they were gradually dying through the digital pressure and the internet and our ever more, a greater ability to communicate with each other. In the middle of this whole thing, unfortunately, they're developed a kind of censorship industrial complex that Edward Snowden revealed 10 years ago. We paid no attention. Nothing was done about it. And next thing you know, we wake up in 2020, and we've got totalitarian controls in our lives.

We can't go to church, kids can't go to school, we've got travel restrictions, and then also, of course, inevitably censorship. And we had to look to the government to find out of where essential or unessential, like the worst possible world was birthed before our eyes, just out of nowhere. And it turns that it wasn't out of nowhere. the problem was I wasn't looking for it, you know? That machine was being built over the previous, say, decade and a half or something, especially since 2016. And it shattered so much of my assumptions about the world. I think as a child of the Cold War, I had implicitly accepted the sort of end of history theory, you know, the Fukuyamaite thing that we know the best ways forward.

It's freedom and democracy and prosperity, yay. And humanity was embracing that, and states would never really turn back that trajectory. And I was just here as a narrator of progress. That's how I saw myself. And I'm mortified when I look back at my writings and see, you know, how could I've been so wrong? And a lot of my passion about writing right now is a kind of a corrective passion. Like, I don't want to make that mistake again. I want to figure out where I went wrong, and I have this driving desire to get to the truth, whatever it is.

Wow. Okay, I want to come back to that. That's going to be something I follow up on mid-conversation here. What I was going to start our interview with, but I think you now have explained is what sort of an anarcho-libertarian capitalist is doing showing up to an interview five minutes early. I thought rules were not for you, but here you were five minutes early to this interview. But, okay, President of the Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker, I want to start with this. I've been to dinner, breakfast or lunch, in Dallas, Texas, my hometown, over the last two weeks with several different groups of friends. And I am highly concerned, Jeffrey, about how many of them have said this to me.

We are about to really pay the price. We are about to very much, in the next 12 months, enter a painful recession. Now, some of my friends are value investing Warren Buffett type, the payment must come due sooner or later types. Others are simply guys in real estate. It's a big industry in Dallas, Texas, commercial and residential real estate who sort of see behind the wall of what is coming. But it is pretty terrifying to hear these guys talk about what's going to happen, how it's going to impact our presidential elections. Everybody thinks that the next 12 months politically are going to be pure, unprecedented chaos. And in the midst of all that, what we may not be appreciating is exactly the chaotic economy that's going to coincide in those same 12 months.

Are you similarly not just pessimistic, but scared about the next 12 months of our economy? Well, I would go a little bit further and say that there's plenty to be scared about what's happening right now. Like, people are massively in denial over this. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about how everybody's spending the money going crazy and retail sales are up and nobody cares about that. future savings are down, there's a sense of like, these are the end times, you might as well just squander whatever you have. This is not good. You cannot build a prosperity with no savings and without future planning, without capital that's built out of self, of sacrificing present consumption for future investment. That's just not happening

right now. And we'll honestly, I'll just tell you something that that I have an intuition of. I wonder if we ever really left recession from March 2020. All the GDP data is within a margin of error. All the job creation rates keep being adjusted downwards. We're still a lower rate of labor participation than we were. We can't seem to get rid of this inflation. You know, I mean, the sticky price index is still running like 5.4%,

which we haven't seen anything like. that in 30 years. And the Census Bureau, which is fairly reliable. It's different from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Census Bureau just came out with its annual survey about median family household income. And in real terms, is down now for the third year. And I'll tell you something else that's bizarre. We are living for the first time in, what, 17 years in a world of positive in real terms interest rates so that you can save money and make. money at the same time. That hasn't been possible since Ben Bernanke blew up the yield curve back in 2008. So what would you expect in this new world? You would expect savings

to be growing dramatically, right? And for credit card debt to fall dramatically, for borrowings to reduce and savings to go up, because that's what all the economic signals are pointed as telling us to do. We are in fact seeing the exact opposite. Now, how do you account for that? I mean, part of the problem is that the funds are gone. You know, the people just don't have enough money to save. Two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck right now. So right at the time, when it should be rewarding us to save, people are doing the exact opposite.

When people should be restraining the spending, they're doing the exact opposite. Reducing their borrowings, they're doing the exact opposite. Even though credit cards are charging up to 23 percent interest, we've seen. now credit card debt blow past one trillion dollars. This is a weird situation. And I'm looking at this wondering, you know, everybody's waiting for the bad thing that's about to happen. Maybe the bad thing is already here and never really went away from 2020. And the rest is just illusion. Just throwing back there. That was going to be, well, well, help me understand that in, you know, really simple elementary terms.

Because my next question for you is going to be, is there some inflection point? Is there a banking crisis? Is there something that happens in the next 12 months that makes it obvious to everyone what is happening? But if it's already happened, as you just described, what are we looking at like this? I mean, at this point, based upon what you described, stagflation, you know, or something like that, would be a rosy outcome. It would be. But look, there's real, I didn't mean. to suggest there's not worse on the horizon.

And what I'm looking at right now are a series of terrible signs of awful things to come, mainly in the large cities. The large cities cannot get office workers back. All the leases that these big companies took out in 2018-2019, five-year leases are all coming due.

The offices are only half-full at best. And we're talking about Boston, New York, you know, Hartford, even Atlanta, okay? So when it comes time to renew these leases, companies are going to look at this and go, yeah, I'm not so sure. I mean, we're trying to get our workers back, but we just can't seem to do it. So what's going to happen to this, to the massive office space, real estate and our cities? And then what happens to the owners of these large skyscrapers that are super levered up?

thanks to Ben Bernanke's policies, when they're facing higher and higher costs of servicing this debt with ever lower revenue and they're unable to lease to space. And what happens then to city finances when the tax base is completely gone? And the retail stores, you know, all vanish. I mean, this is a possible dystopia we're looking at in which our grand and glorious cities that took us, you know, 120 years to build into their present shape, just become useless. Is that our future? I don't know, but it doesn't look good.

And then the bailout start, right? So suddenly New York City is going to Albany, saying, well, we've got to have a bailout. And, you know, Hartford's again going back and giving us, and Boston's doing the same thing, and then Atlanta is doing the same thing, and oh, we can't do without the great cities. And so in comes the infusions of hundreds of millions of dollars. to get them past the next three months, six months, but then the money's gone again, right? You're just kicking the can down the road. There doesn't seem to be a viable, there doesn't seem to be an end point at which that

looks beautiful at all. So I'm very concerned about that. Well, that bailout would also accompany, you would presume in the scenario you just described, a banking bailout because those real estate loans come do, they go belly up. The banks then, in turn, who hold those notes, go belly up. So we're bailing everything out. And I was going to ask you what you think the political response would be, again, probably over the next 12 months, but you just described some of it, bailouts, cash infusions. But I don't know how long that, A, that probably costs Joe Biden a presidential election if it's as bad as we're predicting, whoever the other side of the ticket is, unless our political environment is just absolutely consumed with race and Trump is a threat to democracy or Trump is.

in jail, and we don't know who the Republican nominee may be, whatever. It's going to be simultaneous chaos, and I don't know what the end result is either for the economy or our political class. I mean, part of the problem, Will, is that we've never actually been here before. I mean, we've never been in a situation where we're coming out of 15, 17 years of zero percentage of rates with the largest increases ever on record, largest fastest. increases ever on record. Meanwhile, there's about $6.5 trillion more dollars sloshing around today than there was in 2019. We don't know how that new money becomes endemic, what that looks like, where it's going to land, how long the inflation is going to last, what kind of

distortions that's creating, and the production structures, how much of an adjustment out of Bernanke's policies is still left for us. We keep thinking. We've, you know, we're through the worst of it, and then the worst keeps happening in different ways and an unexpected ways. So we just don't know. It's a real fascinating thing. I was looking through the history of finance and monetary policy over the last century to get some clue as to what we can expect, but the truth is we just don't have any precedent for these times. So we're all just kind of sitting around wondering, you know, how's this going to end?

Well, I appreciate that humility, and humility is the overarching theme of what we've talked about so far today. But I know that one of the things I was excited to talk to you about is this. The humility that you've now expressed about understanding where the world is headed and where you thought the world was headed. I know you tweeted not long ago that you've kind of gone back to first texts. You read The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab. And you have this vision now. you believe that shows we aren't on this arc towards prosperity and freedom. How much that was informed by reading The Great Reset?

Yeah, that book really rattled me. And I'll tell you somebody else, well, this is why we have to be courageous as thinkers and intellectuals, whatever, as citizens. We have to be courageous. When I first started hearing about the idea of a Great Reset, I thought, okay, that's a crazy conspiracy theory. You know, those people are always going to be out there, you know, proclaiming something. And then I looked it up on Amazon, I realized, oh, wait, the head of the World Economic Forum wrote a book called The Great Reset. And yet, you know, it came out, what, three years ago, and I just was unwilling to look at it.

I was just unwilling to take it up for some reason. I don't know why, because maybe I dreaded what I would find or something. So I sat down and read it, and it's far worse than anything ever imagined. We're talking about, you know, a vision of a biomedical security state with infinite surveillance and, you know, states that keep us locked down forever distinguished between essential and unessential, a central, kind of a techno, central ruling class central plan that's not communism and it's certainly not capitalism. It's something else. It's kind of this techno-corporatism. But it's combined with a strange primitivism. Like, they don't like us to drive cars with that burn up gas and, you know, go on family vacations or travel or fly here and fly there. They don't like any of that stuff. They like the idea of artificial meat and foraging for food and living in much smaller places and a central bank digital currency that allows the ruling class government corporate elite to be able to shut off our lives and turn the back on again depending on the level of compliance. I mean, I never would have believed that was anybody in the world who really thought this way.

So it takes reading Schwab's book, actually, to convince you. This is a genuine threat. It's what I've called technoprimatism. I can't really come up with the right name for it. It's like corporatist fascism. You know, there's a lot of different names for it. But it's grim, and it has nothing to do with the Constitution, nothing to do with traditional liberalism, and nothing to do with anything we've,

traditionally called freedom. It's something else entirely. And I'll tell you somebody else, well, it's not as if Klaus Schwab is some eccentric, you know, pushing some wacky theory and nobody cares about it. That same vision was more or less articulated by Anthony Fauci in an article that was in a journal called Cell that was published in August of 2020, in which here he is regretting the last 12,000 years of human history, you know, that once we learn how to move around and gain freedom and rights and mobility, that was sort of the beginning of the end, as far as he's concerned. And so he wants to, as he says, remake the infrastructure of human existence. This is what Anthony Fauci wrote in August of 2020. So I'm telling you, there are some crazy

people out there. And what's terrifying about it, to me, is the extent to which the reality we're seen all around us, is kind of strangely starting to conform to this vision. So you have read this book. I want to some of, and I have not read this book. So I am dealing with echoes and opinions of opinions in understanding the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset. But I want to ask you this, some of what you just described to me, again, which I'm getting as an echo of what was actually written, it's interesting. Like, even among conservative or perhaps the libertarian circles, if you described to me a vision of the future that was not so urban, we even talked about those urban centers decaying, that was more communitarian, more small

town related, even some primitivism. We've seen like traditional conservatives or trad conservatives kind of lean back into things that I love, like hunting and outdoors and nature, you would say that is an individual choice of a better life that I can envision, not one that I would impose upon society, but one that I would choose, small towns, neighbors, outdoors. I'm curious, as you read that, how do you steal man, Klaus Schwab, and the vision of the Great Reset? Like, when you read it, although your description of it is grim, what do you think his or Fauci's vision is?

It can't simply to be a Bond villain, right? It can't simply to be Dr. Evil. what is it that they are pushing towards a vision of truly good-intentioned utopia? What, steal man their vision of the future? Yeah, it's not that different from that which gave birth to things like the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution, other great upheavals in history. It's the conviction that there's a, that the highest level of intelligence really resides within a, small cohort of people who are very wealthy, highly credentialed, and they all know each other, and they know better than the rest of us on how to run society. And from there, the details

change on what they think should happen. And even in the Klaus Schwab book, there's a lot of, well, it could be this way, it could be that way. But the one that non-negotiable is that they're in charge. It's a conviction that the smart people should have management of the resources, and a clear plan, and everybody else should comply. So it's always difficult. Have you read other first texts? Have you read Mind Kampf or the Communist Manifesto? Have you gone back to first text on a lot of those types of treaties?

Yeah. And thank you for bringing that up. That's exactly why I read the Schwabuk. Because, yeah, in every great upheaval in history, there is something like a first text, right? And, you know, the Communist Manifesto. And I also have read Capital by Marx, which is a dreadful book, actually. It's just bad economics from beginning to end. It's awful.

The Communist Mifesto is kind of alarming because it kind of reduces it all to just an easy, readable thing. Then you've got M. Conf, you know, which is the fascist, racist manifesto of the 20th century. So I was wondering, like, okay, what is the urtext of the great, great reset, you know, the techno primitivism. And that's why I was inexorably drawn to the Schwab book. I thought, maybe this is it. And sure enough, that's it. And sure enough, the whole book opens up with the COVID era is our chance. This is, nothing's ever going to be the same again. We're now in charge, and here's the future we've mapped out for you. This is just the

beginning. Because if you, if you, and the only one of those first texts that I've read is the communist manifesto. But if you look, if you look charitably and you steal man Marx or that entire ideology, it is that they have a utopic vision of the future, a better, in their mind, a better vision of the present and the future, if only they were in charge. Now, that, I agree, that is the, that's the common thread. That's the commonality, that they're always in charge. But they do sort of, and this goes to our conversation where we started today about ideology, where ideology, absent of practicality or reality, it allows you to do any manner of evil, right?

Because there's always a greater moral truth. There's a longer arc to history. There's a bigger future out there. If only you would just get out of my way. But it does, interestingly, always start with, in their mind, a good intention. Sort of. Well, you know, I don't know how good intention it is to imagine that whatever. of delusions you're carrying around in your head should be imposed on the whole of the human

population. I mean, that's just a weird way to begin thinking about anything. That's a very good point. Yeah, that's how Marx did it. That's how Rousseau thought. You know, they, you know, these people imagine that whatever they've got of their head should be the one true way for the whole of the rest of humanity. So, unfortunately, it is true that the COVID period gave a tremendous momentum to this, to this group, whether it's Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci, and there's a whole bunch of them. I mean, let's just say there's 3,000 of them. I mean, not a whole lot, but they're very rich and powerful people. And globally connected, hugely influential over all the private foundations, major corporations, and governments.

And they have a lot more power than you and I have. And they want to use it. to construct a new kind of world, which they are calling it a new kind of world. And it's not a world that you and I really recognize from philosophy classes or economics classes. This is something completely different and deeply dangerous. And it's actually strangely happening. I mean, it sort of makes sense. There's all sorts of things that go on all the time.

Like, why do we suddenly talking about 15-minute cities? Well, that's completely consistent with the Schwab and the Fauci View. You know, how come we're facing mandates for everybody should buy an EV, even though you can't really go on long trips in an EV? While that works, you know, according to the Great Reset Vision, why are we intensifying all the digital surveillance and censorship? I mean, all of these things are part of the desire to control the public mind to bring about this really, terrifying vision. And by the way, Will, you know, as I'm talking, I sometimes correct myself in my head. I cannot believe I'm saying these things to you. Why? I would have been the last person to talk like this four years ago. And if I heard a person saying what I was saying, was saying right now four

years ago, which is that guy's a crazy person. Why? Because it just all sounds too conspiratorial. It's, well, there's the conspiratorialness. The sheer intentionality of the ruling class is something that I think in the past, I never would have imagined, but I don't know how else to explain it. The intentionality, the conspiracy element, the darkness of the vision, just what an existential threat it is to all those things that you read about in the Constitution of the Bill of Rights or you read Thomas Payne or whatever, you know, that's sort of who we are as Americans. And then you read this literature, it's not that. It's something completely different. And to think that Fauci was basically dictator of America for two years.

And he embraces this very view. So let me talk about the nature of conspiracy for a minute with you. And we'll apply it to the world economic form and the Great Recept. The weakness of any type of conspiracy theory is usually the presumption of competence. It is the belief that a identifiable group of people can come up with some common goal, implement it, and keep it a secret. I know this, for example, just to use as an example, I've been very, very, Jeffrey, involved and dedicated to the story of what happened in Maui. And I know that what happened in Maui is consumed with conspiracy.

Was it a direct energy weapon? Was it a ployed by the elites to take the lands from the natives? The problem with that is, again, much of it is insane, quite honestly, and I don't mean to do that dismissively. I did an entire podcast to address them with goodwill and spirit to give the people the truth. But no one would have been capable of hiding those intentions. No one would be incapable of executing those intentions. That's the problem with most of these ideas of, as you just described, intentionality and conspiracy. But it seems to me like what with the Great

Reset in the World Economic Forum, I can't speak to competency and execution, but there hasn't been an attempt to keep it a secret. It's out there. They meet every year. They publish books. Yeah, I mean, for that matter, they germ-gamed the whole COVID response for years prior. I mean, there was that event 201, which, again, I used to dismiss this stuff. Well, read about it. It's all there. And another one called Crim Contagion, which overlapped with real-time lockdowns. I mean, they were practicing lockdowns, and then the lockdowns happened, like right at the same time.

And let me address another point you made, which I think is a really intriguing one. It has to do with competence. But related to that, Is something that I have always strongly believed, which is that the state, as we think about it, is not actually capable of doing the things that it claims that it can do because it lacks the knowledge, it lacks the ability, it's massively inefficient, it's a terrible institution for doing anything. I mean, just look at anything the government does, and it's no good, right? I mean, as compared to the private sector alternatives. And so that conviction is what led me to a certain blindness about what was happening. What I had not anticipated, and this is where I think the real challenge is for people like us.

I'm going to say conservative libertarians are people in that sort of mindset. Socialism doesn't work kind of mindset, which I think is correct statement. The problem is when you merge the state with very powerful and highly efficient, corporate interests so that both sides benefit, you get a strangely effective and efficient form of statism that never existed in Russia because the state tried to do everything. But in the Great Reset in the 21st century, you've got this very close merger between the state power and private companies that are benefiting from it and assisting it. They assist with the censorship.

They assist with the tax collection. They assist with the surveillance. I mean, it's private interests are all over this form of statism. I mean, sometimes it's so weird. You can't even tell which is the hand of which is the glove. That is fascinating. Right. So that's why it's an ideological challenge to people like me.

I always thought there was some kind of demarcation, the bad public sector, good private sector. Well, what happens when they just are all woven together in one big mess and you can't tell who's running anything anymore? It becomes a different, an ideology of a different type that I'm not used to understanding. We're going to step aside here for a moment. Stay tuned. This is Jason Chaffetz from the Jason and the House podcast. Join me every Monday to dive deeper into the latest political headlines and chat with remarkable guests. Listen and follow now at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts and it has to your point much greater competency than simply a bunch of bureaucrats um okay and then let's talk let's continue moving forward

into the futures here on this dystopic vision of pessimism an hour with geoffrey tucker um what uh what one of the things that has to compound that geoffrey is AI and i know you wrote about this recently but that is going to hand an incredible amount of competency to this techno corporatocracy. Yeah, I think so. I was initially a little bit, actually, it's like sanguine about this because I played around a chat GPT, and I found it to be just ridiculous, like a parlor game, you know, just a silly trick. I mean, anybody who writes their articles with chat GPT, you can tell it immediately. and they're disgraced.

I mean, it's just not impressive. You know, if I wanted to write a poem about you, I could generate it in eight seconds, but, you know, so what? I mean, that doesn't mean anything. But that's actually not the best use case of AI, you know. AI being used as a tool of control and censorship and monitoring and anticipating your movements, looking at your finances and examining where, you know, there might be certain

leakages and then going after that. I mean, there's a lot of ways AI can be used as a tool of grotesque despotism, which actually speaks to a more fundamental issue that I've gotten wise to. The mistake I made in the past was believing that a technology alone was going to be our source of emancipation, that it embedding. within it, some sort of deterministic, you know, outcome. Like, oh, now we have the internet, so now we're going to be freer than ever. Now we get democracy. That's what I believed. It turns out that's not true. Technology is neutral to the outcomes. It can be used by good guys.

It can be used by bad guys. And it needs to be policed and understood as that with no preconceptions about what's going to happen as a result of it. That's where I made my mistake. and I'm determined not to make that mistake anymore. Yeah, but who does the policing? I mean, you can't rely on the state then if it's this marriage between technology and corporatism and state. Who do we entrust for the policing? So this is a profound issue, and it's an issue about which I spoke with Aaron Curiazza yesterday, who's one of the plaintiffs in the Missouri-Biden censorship case.

So what's happened here is that these guys were scientists. They were censored, you know, after object. the lockdowns, and they noticed that the censorship came combined with a kind of takedown push by the head of NIH and Fauci. So they're wondering, to what extent is the social media censorship I'm undergoing imposed by the government? So they began to look, and in the course of the discovery for this thing, they found hundreds of thousands of pages, and they're finding White House employees lecturing Facebook,

take that post down, take that post down. They've found whole agencies that are working for. very cooperatively with university centers and other third parties to embed employees and their social media accounts. And, you know, it was just a nasty mess of censorship. And so I asked them that very question. I said, you know, somebody's bugging me about this. Let's say this case goes 100% for you.

And the Supreme Court says, listen, State Department FBI, SISA, Department of Homeland Security, CDC, NIH, all of you people have been doing very bad things, and now you have to stop. Who or what is going to enforce that rule? And he said that even his attorneys have looked to find precedent for this kind of thing, mass violations of rights by the highest levels of government. What happens when the courts say you have to. stop it. Who's going to enforce it? Are there civil penalties or their criminal penalties? Is it actually going to be effective? The courts don't have police. They don't have enforcement

arms. And he didn't really have an answer for me. So it's a troubling thing. And as I told Aaron, I said, you know, Aaron, it's a heck of a thing that as Americans, we're asking ourselves such a basic question. How do you restrain the government? We thought we had built systems in this country where we would create a government, but we would restrain it and lock it down by law, right? And that was what the purpose of the Constitution was. That's the purpose of the Bill of Rights. But what happens when the highest levels of government, especially the administrative state,

which is not one of the three branches of government, but which might be the most powerful branch, the fourth branch, routinely violates our rights. What do we have in our system to help correct for that? I don't really have the answer. And I don't have an answer to make that problem even bigger for how you restrain the techno-corporatocracy that you described. I just listened to this podcast, the All-In podcast, which is a bunch of tech guys in Silicon Valley. It's David Sachs, it's Chimoth, Palapagatia, Jason Calcanus, others. And they were talking about AI.

And they had, I would say, a mostly optimistic view of AI. Now, these are probably left-leaning libertarians to a large extent. Not all of them, but to a large extent. And they see optimism for the future of technology, probably like you said, you used to see technology. And I think there's something admirable about that, by the way, to be excited and optimistic about some new innovation. But they did describe a future, perhaps a not too distant future, where AI is dominated by a single individual, a single corporation, nonprofit, but run ultimately by one individual. And they were talking about this guy, Sam Altman, who's at the front of Open AI and others. And the ability of him to exert influence over AI.

But the point I'm getting at is this AI tool really, I don't know, could we have said the same? The Internet was revolutionary. This is the next big revolution, right? And so how does it impact our daily lives? How is it restrained? How is it used by the state? But even more than that, like what happens when the most powerful thing we can imagine in our society is controlled by maybe not the government, but it instead by a single individual and his vision of the world? Yeah.

Well, and our times have taught us this, right? We see the power of Google to really influence the public mind. We've seen YouTube, which I was thinking about this. You know, that thing was called YouTube because it was going to give the power of television to every individual. Yeah. You laugh a little hard. It did in some ways, though, Jeffrey. But now, of course, now it's subject to censorship.

It did for a while. But now it's taken down and cleaned out. I mean, I can hardly, you know, Brownstone Institute has gotten two strikes. If I post one more video on YouTube that they don't like, we're going to get a lot. our account deleted. So do I do that? No, I don't. So yes, we are censoring ourselves. Wow. That's just the way it works. Real quick, real quick, what were the topics of your two strikes? You know, I don't even know. I mean, probably I said something about vaccine mandates.

You know, they never tell you exactly. And maybe I was, you know, complaining about lockdowns or something. You know, it could be anything. It could just be a joke or a wrong utterance. And how are they discovering this? It's not because they're listening to my interview and some guy, if this is an AI thing, it's an algorithm that's banning the topic. So maybe they just see a combination of words, lockdown, vaccine, freedom, Second Amendment, even who knows, but then they just take it down. So we're all censoring ourselves now. The great tool that was supposed to empower us and give us, you know, our share of influence

over the public mind, is now completely dominated by a corporate interest that's deeply in bed with the state. And you see it across the board. You know, you see it on all these channels. I mean, it's from LinkedIn all the way through. And obviously, you know, Facebook was one of the great tragedies. What happened to that? That was a lost promise.

I mean, this is supposed to be this great thing. And then it just, everything was taken away from us. And this is mostly all happened since 2016, right? So, and I think it was occasioned by the Trump victory. You know, it's like certain people out there said, you know, this whole democracy and freedom stuff's not really going the way we expected it to. We need to dial this back a little bit and curate the public mind a little bit more so we don't get some crazy man this president again, you know?

That seems to be the driving motivation, but it's terrifying, right? I mean, if you had, again, if you told me 10 years ago, hey, in the future, large successful corporations are going to have a greater influence over public life than government. I would have said, hey, everything's going exactly the way I want. That sounds like a great world, you know? Do you know what I mean? Like, I would have welcomed that. And now I look at it and I'm like, wait, this is the opposite of everything. We've got censorship. We've got surveillance. We've got mandates. We've got shaming. We've got segregation. We've got everything terrible ever, you know, imagine all being imposed very aggressively by large corporations in this new corporate system

I never imagined, but it ever exists. But what I love about that, okay, so that's made you reevaluate how you view maybe institutions and the trust we should place in the ideology of private versus public life, private versus public sector. But maybe the thing that we should be reexamining is human nature. I mean, ultimately, something about this. has to do, what I re-evaluated during COVID was human nature in terms of this. I believed, I think, for quite some time, that what drove human beings ultimately is, I don't

want to say greed, but aspiration, perhaps. You know, I used to laugh, all guys did roughly my age of Wall Street when Gordon Gecko said greed is good, right? And to some extent, it's because it was true, right? It meant like the better life, the better future for yourself would be ultimately. the human motivation. But the lockdowns changed that for me. What clearly, in a Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I should have known this, but fear is a much bigger motivation. Preservation of life and preservation of wealth and preservation of my stash is more important to me than growing my

stash. We're risk-averse. We want to protect ourselves from diseases and pandemics and bankruptcy. And so fear was the tool that we could be played upon. But there's the other side of that coin, too, is what do we know about human nature, then if corporations end up just like human beings, just like governments, that we also lust for power and control, regardless of whether or not we work for the government or YouTube? Yeah, I don't know. I'm reevaluating everything. I think my conceptual distinction between public and private that I've carried around

for most of my career is just melted. It's just gone. And I'm trying to understand, you know, how this happened. And I have to tell you, you know, there are some very good people still in existence. on the left. People, civil libertarians that come out of the left, who have been kind of alert to the problem of corporate power in the past. So I'm not talking about the woke left. I'm talking about the authentic, you know, believe in freedom kind of left. Give me an example. Give me a name. Are you talking about? Like Bill Maher, Matt Taibu,

who are we talking about? Yeah, Tybee, Shalunberg, these kinds of people, Lowenthal, Debbie Laramon, all these people, historically have no real effect. for the right. I mean, they've never been interested in the right. They always thought conservatism was kind of stodgy and dumb. But they're the genuine civil libertarians who went left because they wanted a world that had reduced power for large institutions and wanted more empowerment of individuals and marginalized communities and that kind of thing. So this is their, it's kind of an old left view, you know. And I'm working with these people very closely now and learning from them.

Like, I think my ideological fixations in the past sort of prevented me from understanding. You know, what happens when you get a corporate monopoly that also owns the media, that's being subsidized vastly by government, and also has, you know, embedded FBI and CIA employees all over the place? I mean, what does that world look like? That's what we're dealing with right now. It's a monstrosity of a very different sort. And we're going to have to put together a broad coalition of people to oppose this. And I don't mean just people on the right.

It's got to be people from people who just believe in old-fashioned things, like human rights and free speech and the right to move around. And just freedom, like a normal freedom. We don't have freedom. We don't have freedom. that and we're losing it by the day. So we need all hands on deck right now. And I don't care where you're coming from ideologically or where you've been in the past. I think COVID shattered a lot of us and made us rethink a lot of things. So I'm trying my best to do that because the emergency is upon us. And it's hit us so quickly and so furiously to the point

that we didn't really even have time to gather our thoughts before we've been presented with this with this tremendous crisis that's also backed by, you know, a terrible economic crisis and political crisis and cultural crisis and ill health. All these things are happening at one time. It seems to me that the fight, the debate, or if you are a voter or a citizen and you're walking down the grocery store aisle of ideas is freedom versus utopia. Because It's what they sell is utopia. Progressivism, in and of its very nature, sells utopia, and it points out the problems of freedom, the problems of the present. And, by the way, no one I think, you nor I would profess that freedom produces always optimal outcomes.

It does not. You know, I think I said this in a talk one time. I don't know who said it, but, you know, the famous question, what's a better form of government, democracy, constitutional republic, or dictatorship? And the answer to that question usually is, well, who's the dictator? if you're trying to maximize outcomes, right? Because freedom does produce an inequitable, corrupt, often outcomes. And the challenge is not to see those as the downfall of the system to where you buy into Utopia.

You wrote something that I found really interesting about AI. I want to stay on AI for just one moment because it's the tool to Utopia in my mind. Maybe not in effect, but in the sales brochure in that grocery store aisle. The problem with socialism, communism, was always its incompetence, as we talked about earlier. It was this idea that there is no single individual or group of individuals within the Soviet Politburo who could accurately price and distribute goods and services. So they were always stupid and produced breadlines, whereas market prices were the smartest way, not the perfect way, not the utopic way, but the most intelligent. way, because a dispersion of choices, right, thousands, millions of choices made, hundreds of millions of choices made every day, we get the closest we can get to optimal market

prices and then resources distributed. But AI prospect is to change that. AI can compute all of those choices in a way that that Politburo could not. AI could actually start to factor in hundreds of millions of choices, model out outcomes, and give someone the tool to sell utopia and maybe even implement utopia in some vision. But you wrote, this is what I love that you wrote. You wrote, that's only if you presume that, you know, a vision of the past gives you a perfect vision of the future. In essence, that's what you wrote.

So I know I'm ranting here, but I always talk about this with climate change. Malthus was right when he talked about overpopulation, right? He did the calculations, he looked at available food supplies, he looked at the rate of growth of population, and he projected we would end up with mass starvation. And he wasn't wrong. He was almost like an 1800s AI, you know, but what he couldn't factor in was innovation. Yeah, he couldn't factor in what human beings would come up with. And it seems to me, I think you're arguing this as well, that's AI's limitation as well. It can perfectly model based upon past choices and data, but it has no ability to see

what we might come up with in our creative mind. That is so true. It's not creative. It's not interesting in that sense. And you cannot game creativity. You know, the human mind is truly magic, you know, in a way in which no computer ever can be. To see new future possibilities, to assess and make judgments about the use of resources, to change your mind, to observe the changing of consumer problems.

preferences, to see there's the technology out that we don't need, another thing we do need, all these things that are normal parts of market calculation. AI can't do any of that thing. AI can perfectly run maybe the world as it exists today, but it cannot give us an unanticipated, spontaneously emerging brighter tomorrow. It just cannot. Right. Now, I do want to speak very quickly to this question of, I'm so glad you gave you a little miniature reputation of socialism, you know, in central planning. It's great. But in some ways, you know, what if you have a kind of a utopian communist vision of society or a dictatorial version of society, but you're not, you don't have it in for the private sector. You want a ruling class to stay in charge, but you're more or less tapping.

the large corporations and the private sector to kind of implement that for you in exchange for which they get great deal of you know say mercantile privilege or you know they become you know the favored the favorite corporation that's a much more viable form of central planning than anything ever tried by vladimir linen you know that like communism with capitalistic characteristics yeah yeah by the way is that china is that china is that china Well, that's the reason I said it that way. It was just to, yeah, this is what, China has surprised us, right? I'm of the generation that when China began to open up, Milton Friedman and everybody else said,

oh, look what's about to happen. You cannot have free enterprise without democracy. First, you get private enterprise, you get a free enterprise system. And then, inevitably, the next step is that you're going to have democracy, you're going to get competition in economics, and then competition, in politics. And so this one party state thing is dead. Okay, that's what they said. That's what

we all said in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Now, Tiananmen Square happened. We thought, well, that's a little bit of a temporary setback, but this one party rule is not going to last. Well, it has lasted. It's been very

effective. And something happened over the last, say, five or ten years where all sorts of Western intellectuals decided to look at China as maybe the right system. One party rule, a private enterprise, but deeply controlled by the state, tons of surveillance, an elite emerging at the top to top-down management society, but no political competition, no democracy whatsoever. Just we're going to tag a smart group of this column of the party, and they're going to

run everything forever through their chosen private sector partners. And you don't get to be rich unless you're, unless you're partisan of the party and the state. That system, you know, is it stable? I would like to think it's not, but it has proven to be rather stable. And I have to tell you, I think it's very fashionable among elite opinion in this country. Academic opinion. stable as a as insulated against a threat of a populist revolution? Yeah, that. And yes, sustainable, capable of producing some moderate amount of wealth, you know, satisfying the population to the point that they're not, you know, feeling revolutionary

and going out into the streets and threatening the elites, you know, a stable system. Growing economy a little bit at a time. carefully managed from the top with a central state of the sort that Machiavelli would have really liked. You know, no competition, unchecked power, nobody threatening position and privilege of anybody at the top. That seems to be what China has cobbled together, which 20 years ago that would have horrified, or 30 years ago, that would have horrified many, many Western intellectuals. Today, not so much. Yeah, fashionable. And again, not hidden, not secret.

I mean, it's been espoused by the Prime Minister of Canada. Justin Trudeau has sung the praises of China. That is right. That is right. And don't forget that, you know, when the virus came about, Wuhan lockdown, and the World Health Organization said, look, look, what they did? That really worked. It controlled the virus. Everybody should do that.

And what did we in the West do? We said, okay, let's do that. China's got it going. what the heck is wrong with us we actually believed all the propaganda and we're replicated there's a reason for that there's a reason for that all right Jeffrey Tucker I don't like pessimism so whether or not you have to tap into well not you have to tap into your prior self whatever may be what I would like you to do before we end this conversation is I would like you even with all of your newfound humility to prescribe for me some remedial measures to put us back on a path towards freedom. What would they be? Antitrust laws. I do not see, I do not, you don't believe in antitrust, although, my goodness, if Google is not just simply a big private corporation, but one who is a corporatocracy who embed with the government, maybe you can disavow yourself of antitrust hesitations. But fix it for me. Fix it for me with a few steps,

three steps to fix this. Really quickly on the antitrust point, why would you trust the government? that created a problem to fix the problem. I mean, that's the bottom line there on Andrews. But look, what we need is more affection in the public mind towards the idea of freedom. It's a simple solution. We need to develop affections for freedom and become an intense allergy to anything that interferes with that.

That is the only way to win, change in the public mind. And you know what? It is happening. And we beat back vaccine passports. we've beat back a lot of the COVID controls. A lot of the people that did this to us are now terrified. They're running. They're having to lie.

And they're scared. They're scared of the change of public opinion. So I think that that is the answer to everything. And we're making a lot of progress. My only caution I would give there is that a lot of times what we see as being a victory, they see as a temporary setback. So we can't relent, right? We can't just expect that we're.

going to get the old world back, you know, reverse the Great Reset through one victory. It's going to consume the rest of our lives, but it can be done because nothing is a given. Hegel was wrong about that. Nothing is a given. We can fight back. And I tell you what, if it's going to happen anywhere, it's going to happen in America. This is the country where we sing songs about freedom. We sing songs about the home of the land of the brave, the home of the free, all these things. We have a Bill of Rights revolution against the governments and the ruling class and the corporate destructures is in our blood as a nation. It's in part of our national DNA. And it's got to happen here. And if it happens here, it's going to spread all over the world.

And I think that's what we're going to see unfolding. I don't know when it's going to happen. It could be sooner. It could be later. None of this will happen if we don't fight and become aware and we cannot be demoralized about it. That's the most important thing. We can't be demoralized. We have to, as you say, stay optimistic, but mostly we need to convince our friends and neighbors and not relent.

We cannot relent because everything is at stake. Jeffrey Tucker, a man of contradictions, big ideas but humble, bow tie and patrician accent with a can of grizzly who lives in Alabama. You are, you can't be explained, Tucker. Well, it's so charming always to talk to you. I think you must be the most intelligent interviewer in public life today. So I appreciate you so much.

Oh, well, that's going to get you invited back. Thank you, Jeffrey. I appreciate your time. There you go. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jeffrey Tucker. Stay tuned to the Will Kane podcast a little bit later this week where I promise you will have yet another fascinating conversation with. journalist Matt Taibi.

I'll see you again next time. Listen to ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members, you can listen to this show, ad-free on the Amazon Music Apple. Hey, I'm Trey Gowdy host of the Trey Gatti podcast. I hope you will join me every Tuesday and Thursday as we navigate life together and hopefully find ourselves a little bit better on the other side. Listen and follow now at Fox News Podcast.com.

I'm.