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Now go to nflshop.com. Hi, I'm Robert Sex Reese, host of the Doctor Sex Reese show. And every episode I listen to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues. And yes, I despise every minute of it. I mean, she she made mistakes too. She kill everyone at her wedding. But hell is real. We're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me. Won't you listen to the doctor sex Reshow every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts? Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Robert, you with the grant, so we can start the broadcast. I think we should just start the podcast with you asking, Robert, do you want to grunt so we can start the podcast? That that seems avant-garde. I don't know what avant-garde means, but this is it could happen here, a podcast about how things are falling apart and how maybe, maybe they don't always need to be falling apart. Maybe we could do better. Speaking of doing better, you know one thing that sometimes helps us do better? Getting, getting in the face of people ******* **** up and being like, hey, that's not, that's not cool. Don't be doing that, Garrison. That's your lead in. Take it from here. Yeah. Hi. So we, I've been, I've been trying to keep better a better job of like following ecological defense movements happening both in the States and in other countries. I know there was, there was a big one up in Canada recently. There was a huge one in Germany, too, just the other day. Yeah, I know the the one, the one in Canada. There's a the. I forget. I forget what the actual indigenous group is called. Umm, maybe maybe someone else. The the the. Housing of sauti Santi. Yeah, yeah. The the people who who who took back their land and blocked the road off. And now they are the unis Toten token and the wet suit in the Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, basically taking their land back and blocking off the road. And now our sample is getting called in and we'll see how that develops. And in Guatemala, there's protests against Canadian mining in Maya indigenous community that have have have gotten pretty heavily militarized at this point. There's there's a lot of stuff, there's a lot of stuff on the ecological defense side of things. Including including in you know the Pacific Northwest here with all of with all of the forests and and such in this area and part of this kind of exploration into into ecological defense. I wanted to talk with some people who are a little, a little bit more well versed in this type of thing than I am. So I've there's two people have agreed to talk with us Sam and Kat put both people who work who work on this kind of thing. From like an activism standpoint, yeah, say hi, hello, hey all. So very, very thankful that they are going to be talking with us today. So I thought we could, we could probably just start by kind of discussing what forest defense is and how it kind of has a history specifically in this area. But but kind of more broadly like if people listen to the Earth first episodes, you know that kind of that covered like anti pipeline stuff we didn't really get much into like forced. Defense and you know, like the traditional like tree sets and that kind of thing. So, so, yeah, what's what's up with defending the forest? What's what's what's going on with that? Yeah, thanks for that great intro. In forest defense is I think probably the most characteristic type of direct action in this bio region. And here we're talking from Cascadia right now. I actually moved out here from the East Coast 10 years ago specifically to get involved with forest defense because this place has an incredibly rich history of people basically just throwing down, risking life and limb to stop chainsaws from taking down some of the oldest and most special forests out here. And so I'd say, you know, for Forest Defense, direct action is in a lot of ways. Rooted right here in this fire region and obviously like all kinds of movements, things have changed over the course of time. Back in the 80s when and and 70s when forest defense was really, really kicking up and stopping old growth logging, specifically out here when it was kind of like rampant old growth, clear cutting. It really took the shape of trying to focusing on ecology, focusing on the integrity of these ecosystems, and basically like doing everything possible to stop the chainsaws. And now obviously a lot has changed. We have the Northwest Forest plan and some policies which are doing better to kind of like protect old places and old forests, but at the same time the same **** is happening. You know, the timber industry is great at using euphemisms to kind of cover up its clear cutting anyways and finding policy loopholes to target some incredible places. And now I think where we're at with like the direct action movement is we're in the context of climate change. They were not just defending for us for the sake of these like incredible ecological strongholds, but we're also defending them because we recognize that forest defense is climate defense. This is a like environmental justice issue. It's a human issue. It's a community issue. And so now direct action, I think is, you know, happening not just the name of our forest, but in the name of our communities and our future. But it's just as rich now as it has ever been, and especially right now and especially since the 2020 fires, which I know will get into. People have been throwing down all over this fire region to protect what's left of our forests. Yeah. And I think it's it's good to get into kind of why, how the fires have impacted this because one of the shady things that has been done is we had, I think most people in the country are where Oregon had unprecedented wildfires this year and we had unprecedented wildfires last year. And we we're going to have unprecedented wildfires every year for a while. And whenever these fires run through, they don't like. Destroy every tree in their wake, but they char them and logging companies then come in under the guise of like, well we have to make this area safe so that like the fires don't burn here next year. So we gotta cut down all of these trees and and clear cut this part of area of public forest. So like as you're driving around in forests that you used to be able to do stuff and you'll find areas that are just like blocked off because mining companies are coming or logging companies are coming through and clear cutting all of these trees that could very easily recover from the fire. Or that weren't even burned by it. But we're just like in this area that they said, OK, well, we have to clear this out in order to make it safe. And it's kind of this way to like back door in the guise of Fire Protection, like expand logging. Yeah. And just to add to that too, the logging companies love to say that the reasons we have increased wildfires, because there's an overgrowth in the forest, because of the Northwest Forest plan, because there's more protections for the forest fires are happening worse because we're not getting there bogging the forest and removing all the fuel. So you have like this two-part thing that, like cat just mentioned, we're like on the one hand, companies are like, we need to log more to prevent wildfire, which is ******** and we can talk about why. And on the other hand, after fires burn through an area, they're like, we need to log because we need to help the forest recover ecologically. Also we need to salvage all of the timber before it rots and goes bad and like all of these reasons. And so basically it's just like fire has become the excuse to just like log preemptively and log after the fact. And yeah, it's a total, total **** show. Yeah. I mean, I think this kind of falls into capitalists trying to use climate change is just another way to find things to extract and things to grow on, right. It's they're they're going to try to find their own way to sneak in when all of this, you know, ecological disaster is happening to you know, sell you whatever green safe product is going to help against the collapse or, you know, package things in a way that makes it seem like it's solving this you no problem, but it's actually. It's part of, it's part of the same thing. You or so you ethically logged wood from the yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. You see this in every single industry and it's always it's it's going to be like this because this is the only way that capitalism knows how to address this issue is by just turning it into another, turning it into another thing to consume and another thing to sell and package. Pretty, pretty grib, yeah. And there's, I mean, there's cascading effects too, because they they cut down these trees in under the guise of making it safe for the next fire season, but which also makes a big chunk of land a lot more vulnerable to like mud slides and the torrential raining that we're having right now. And that's also going to get more common because that's how ******* climate change works. It's it's just like. That comprehensive *******. Comprehensive *******. And let us be clear, too, that logging doesn't actually work to prevent wildfire. You know, even you know, they they say that it does, but the kind of logging that they do in the name of wildfire prevention just looks like clear cuts. And we have a pretty robust body of science now showing that those kinds of activities actually make fire hazard more severe for local communities. So that's like one of the things they're doing, and we've been calling it just gaslighting. They're gaslighting, all of us. By saying, you know, there's nothing to see here, there's nothing to see here, we're taking care of you all, you know? We're barely logging it all, and then we've got community members on the ground, despite the closure orders, who are like, actually, there's a lot to see here, and you all are like completely devastating the landscape and further harming our communities. So yeah, it's total gaslighting. Yeah, in Oregon has both in terms of like watching fires and watching logging. Some like rules that are not in place in other areas, especially for like even for for press and and the like, like. It's it's actually hard to get in to look at this stuff without, you know, breaking some sort of law technically. Which is not at all shady, yeah? Yeah, I feel like that's another important thing and maybe cat can jump on to is just. Basically, I mean, I think what people aren't understanding is that after the fires, the these federal forest managers closed gates and essentially are converting public land into private land by, you know, using the threat of violence to kick people out if they go on to their public land. And since 2020, and they say until 2023 at least, the only folks allowed behind these gates are cops and loggers. And so this is like literally. You know, the enclosure of our public lands and like the privatization of our public lands so that cops and loggers can do whatever the hell they want. Yep. And it's the kind of thing. I mean, it's the kind of thing that people. If you're if you're if the, if the Bundys and that group actually meant the stuff they were saying, like the rhetoric they were putting out. It's the kind of thing they would be ****** *** about too. Because you're right is the enclosure of public land by the government and corporations without any kind of consent from the people who are supposed to be the collective owners of that land. It's it's a. Again, something that a lot of people should be angry about who aren't angry about because there's been this huge propaganda campaign in the northwest about timber unity and the like and like supporting the timber industry by destroying, like, the single greatest gift this entire part of the world has. It's it's pretty frustrating. Yeah. Anyway, I have to. We have to actually have a quick break so I can go watch my soccer game at the timber stadium. Completely unrelated, so I'll be right back. I'm going to drive out to Wheeler, Oregon, myself, but we all have different things to do during the break, but also in the break. I guess we could probably do an ad break here, because why not? All right, yeah, everybody loves ads. And we're back still talking about forced defense. I want to there's something that people should probably know before we go further about the way that that Oregon works. So for a while, Oregon is a place where you can't get elected. And a lot of parts of, a lot of populated parts of Oregon, if you're a Republican. So the Republicans just play nice and and pretend and, like, throw out some some social justice language while while still doing all of the extractive stuff they were going to do anyway. And that's the story with like, Ted Wheeler and his family. So Ted, Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, comes from timber money. His father was a major Republican donor. Not that the Democrats don't have a lot of extractive history behind them, but like, it's it's. Very obvious what's happening with the Wheelers, where they were huge Republican donors and huge backers of the right. And then Oregon had this kind of switch politically. And so Ted Wheeler just started throwing out nice social justice language. But the the whole, you know, he's he's, I'm sure going to make a run for governor at some point in the near future and you've got this like this dressed up. Very extractive logging industry and politicians that always find a way to kind of make it seem palatable to the liberal majority. That and they've gotten pretty good at that because it doesn't. I don't know, I I think maybe we're coming to the end of this. But like, I haven't, I haven't seen up until this last year, a lot of widespread kind of outrage about the clear cutting. And they also hide it pretty well, like if you're driving through these beautiful public forests in Oregon. The areas that are right along the road will generally be pristine and you'll see old growth and everything. But sometimes you can see as you like turn a corner or something like, oh, that old growth only goes back a couple of couple of dozen yards and then it's a clear cut and they'll they'll, they'll hide it so that it's it's not as obvious because they know it upsets people. So there's this, there's this kind of surprisingly. Surprisingly thorough campaign to do as much of this as possible without upsetting people. Which which means there's a potential to upset people, which means there's a potential to actually stop this if enough people get upset. But it's you know, you're you're you're going against folks who have thought a lot about how to do this in a way that isn't going to upset the apple cart. So how do you upset the apple cart I guess is what I'm asking. Well, I think one way that we upset the applecart is by bringing people out to these places. And, you know, in the action that happened on Tuesday that looked like disrupting and disobeying a federal closure order in order to bring people out to these places. You know, basically metaphorically walking behind what you were describing, the beauty strip along the highway and seeing what's behind it. And you know, as we were saying earlier, unfortunately, because of all these federal closure orders after the fire, that looks like risking. You know, repercussion, state repression, arrest, even, in order to just lay eyes on it. But that is the way that we tip the apple cart. We get people to see these places so that it cuts through the gas lighting that the industry is doing. And people can literally, viscerally feel and see the damage. And there's no way to convince them that that's OK once they see it. And how do you do about go about, like, finding people to bring into this, convincing people to come? Like, what is kind of that effort look like? You want to answer this one cat, you did a ton of recruitment. Yeah, totally. I think a big part of it is getting them while they're young. I think that, like, young people right now are already pretty radicalized compared to 10 years or so, probably because of, I think George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and the use of social media in those movements. So I am a college student and we're seeing like so many people coming in and ready to throw down. Like they just cannot wait to get involved and we'll kind of just show up to anything. So I think that that's like a major tactic for sure. And then also making sure that when you have like a an action that you're recruiting people for that. It's very easy to plug in. It's like very accessible closure order. So everyone on site risking arrest and planning this action, it felt like we would be lucky as **** if we got 10 people out there. But I will say it was easy as **** to get 50 people out there and that's because people care and you know, I think we did. In terms of organizing strategy, we use the affinity group model. And so we had a core, you know, there was a core group of organizers and those organizers recruited through affinity groups and their affinity groups, and that helped to keep kind of information secure and, you know, everything tightly organized. But people want, people were really desiring to get together and do something, especially in the past couple years of COVID. People are just, like eager to do something. And on top of that, you know, we we promised that this isn't just an opportunity to potentially get arrested, but this is an educational opportunity and a movement building opportunity. So while the road was blocked with a slash pile and a fire truck, there were workshops going on. There were hikes going on in the forest that's supposed to be cut. There was discussions about know your rights trainings and affinity groups. We had a band playing on top of a fire truck and there was a dance party and basically, you know, we were like building community and solidarity. In a positive way, while ******* **** up. I think that's the key. And I mean, where do you? How? How do you like? What is the? Let me let me think of a way to phrase this. What is kind of the next step here because they they they haven't started logging this area yet but they're kind of doing like the pre prep work. What do you what do you think actually can be done to to halt it like is it is it a a like because it seems to me that it's there's got to be like a mix of tactics there to actually get them to stop and and you're dealing with a number of different. Threats, including not just at the state level, but these federal closure orders like what is, I don't know what it what is the path forward look like to you? Yeah. So there's a preliminary injunction on being forced by some nonprofits. And so this is a really good example of different tactics coming in. And so the preliminary injunction is basically to state that what they're doing before service is doing is illegal, but before that, that can be passed. They can come in at any point and log the area. And so that's where direct action comes in to slow them down and halt them as much as possible until the courts can process that injunction. And that feels really huge too. Like what Kat just said is like, where is the place of direct action in forest defense? This is like the golden moment for direct action, while there's like an open legal case that we're waiting on a judge to settle and the timber industry is like coming in ready to moot out the case by logging before it can even be decided. And like to just add a little bit more back story too on like another reason why people are so ****** about this is that, you know, this watershed has been, I think, like beloved and also. Embattled since the 80s, like the infamous Easter massacre logging event happened in the same watershed. Where? Could you explain? Yeah, sorry. Yeah. No, totally. It it in 1989, a timber company was planning to clear cut log old growth forest out there and started moving on it on Easter in the snow and a bunch of ****** direct action activists set up a 5 tiered blockade on a logging Rd to hold off the logging and successfully did for days and days until a bunch of them, I think over a dozen folks got arrested, thrown in jail and the forest was clear. So hence, you know, the Easter massacre name. But a ton of folks who you know still work in forest defense in this fire region were there and remember that story. And we're with us when we were out there this week telling that story. And you know, since then, between 1989 and now, people have been showing up again and again and again in this watershed because it is so special to try and fight off logging. And myself and cat have been a part of efforts over the past handful of years to. Fight off a number of logging projects out there. We were successful in doing that. We actually like smacked the forest services grubby hands off of a bunch of old growth because our scrappy friends spent days exploring this watershed and documenting doing like site specific science, citizen science, documentation and giving it to the Forest Service. And we fought them and won and protected a bunch of the forest. And then the fires came through and they closed the gates and they secretly changed all of these contracts to include clear cut logging. And so that is why there is an open lawsuit, because we believe it's illegal, what they're doing. It's sketchy and illegal. Yeah, but it does. It does illustrate like kind of the depth of the fight necessary not just in forest defense, but at all efforts have kind of resisting the extractive industries that are driving a lot of climate change. It's it's not enough. It's never enough to win the first victory. They're going to find some way to to, to swoop around at the flanks and try to take it away from you like they're doing right now. Which is exhausting. It seems exhausting, but doesn't mean it. You can ignore it. It's ******* exhausting. Yeah. Like I always say, it's like our forests, our federal management agencies they like suffer from this powerful amnesia where they just like keep coming back with the same ******** proposals. But like, our movement does not suffer from that and we are just like building power and getting stronger and getting more successful. So like when people left on Tuesday, there was a promise that people will be back if logging happens, and we're very sure that that will be the case. And if if people are in the Cascadia bioregion. And are like, well, this sounds. Pretty sweet. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna keep keep some trees where they are as opposed to putting them on the back of a truck to drive somewhere else. Uh, how could they get involved? Where, where might they reach out to? Well there's a few different groups who were a part of this. Definitely the Portland rising tide, Cascadia forest defenders cat can talk about climate Justice League and maybe the action that you all put on yesterday as a follow up and like how folks can get involved with that. But basically yeah you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram and and please you know keep a lookout because we will be, we'll be getting it out far and wide if there is a call for folks to get out there again. Yeah, and climate Justice League is an org at the University of Oregon and people are free to just join the organization. Community members are also involved. But we did put on an event yesterday where Tyler Ferris of Ferris logging or Ferris Timber, who is actually the company that bought the rights to Brighton Bush, which is the area where we did the action. On Tuesday, he was giving a speech at the University of Oregon to talk about. It was fire logging, which was just like crazy timing. They kind of just like put it in our lap. And so we recruited from that action and we're like, let's disrupt the hell out of this talk. And so we like, showed up and kind of tried to sneak in. They were having zoom issues, which like luckily distracted them from the fact that there was like 40 or 50, like pretty punk, anarchy looking kids in the room. But we like, let him go on for a little bit and then we started to ask him questions that he obviously didn't know the answer to. We kept like, asking questions about, you know, the science says this, but you're stating this where you getting your science from? And you kept saying things like, well, that's more of a political question and the statistics don't really back up what you're saying. And then, yeah, we just chanted and made them really nervous. Yeah. And as a heads up, if you're, if you're looking to win an argument on a zoom call, you can just say the statistics don't back you up without citing statistics. It's it's it's really the easiest way to do that. I guess I am kind of curious for like you guys said you've you've prevented you know some of this stuff in the past by doing stuff like documentation and you know when, when, when that kind of thing becomes not enough. You know this, this area does have a a a rich history of kind of direct action stuff to protect forests with again also like a mixed success like by no means does direct action always, always work to do anything. Right now we still have the line. Your pipeline, we still have all of these things that direct action has tried to prevent. But it turns out a lot of the kind of direct action that's associated with these type of like ecological things is, is, is kind of more performative than anything else. You know, like it is kind of like a tree set is about gaining media, media like publicity because they're going to get you down right like eventually and it's and it's and it's going to be painful. Because like you're not gonna be sitting up there for years to, to, to, to, to to prevent the tree from being logged. So how how close do you think we are into to like reaching that kind of territory? Like it wasn't like the 90s and 80s where it is like a lot of, a lot of people like blocking off roads and doing and and doing that kind of thing, you know, more like, you know, what's it causes into that it's more like autonomous. It's not, it's not like led by a single organization by any means. It's more, it's more decentralized. But did you see that kind of happening? Soon. And you know how, how, how do you think we can balance out direct action with like other like thoughtful means of trying to draw attention to these things and maybe actually and and other things like like actually physically, physically preventing the logging of certain areas. That's such a good question. And I, I'm really thankful that we're talking about strategy because like kind of like I mentioned, I moved out here like 10 years ago to do forest defense work and have seen so many instances in where people are trying to do direct action. And in a time and space where it doesn't make sense, where it's like basically slated to, it's going to lose because it's just impossible to, as you said, you know, hold this blockade for weeks and weeks and weeks and the snow indefinitely, you know, as we. You know, as they continue to try to log indefinitely. So there's definitely a sweet spot for where the sort of kind of the, the sort of direct action that we're talking about like blockading where that is most useful. And that sweet spot is definitely when there is another decisive move, like another like legal victory that's waiting in the wings. Or, you know, we won one in Washington without a legal victory because we shamed the **** out of the Department of Natural Resources in the Seattle Times and they were like, whoa, we're sorry and so direct. Action held off something until we were able to sufficiently shame them and deter them. But typically they don't shame well. And so typically you know we need a legal there needs to be a legal element backing it up. So direct action is a time buyer. But that said, like obviously blockading things is not the only type of direct action. And part of the rich history of forest defense in this fire region is other kinds of more necessarily, you know, discrete kinds of direct action that obviously you know. I'm not a part of speaking on this radio show, but would would publicly, you know say like those things probably need to happen and I hope they *******. What I could say is that I've I've seen these things happening in other places like in like in the Atlanta defending Forest movement right now. I have I I have seen evidence that individuals not associated with any group are putting spikes in trees and that is that is that is something that is happening, right? And all that takes is one person, right? That's not like a group of 20 people going into the forest to do that. That's like one person in an afternoon, right. So those are the types of like single person direct actions, which again, yeah, any type of direct action is going to be scary, right. You're, you're once you start doing that, that is, you know, that introduces certain things, that will is kind of is kind of more frightening to you as a person. But but it's it is something that is happening in other places and it has shown to at the very least upset the people who are wanting logging to happen. Generally they're not thrilled when they when they find, when they find these things. Yeah, yeah. Because like it's like, it's, I mean I think like when it comes down to it, it's like about knowing what your goal is with this tactic. Like on, you know, in in the action that happened this past week, there was an understanding that the goal was to, you know, shine a light on this thing that's happening in secrecy, shame the Forest Service and build movement, movement building so that we're ready when people need to throw down for real and and and that might happen soon. We weren't trying to hold the space for weeks and weeks and weeks and that wasn't the goal. So like going and being like, what kind of an action are we trying to do? What are we trying to much? Are we trying to be decisive? Are we trying to like shape the conditions necessary for success and like culture build or we try like what are we actually trying to do? And then like coming away with that, having, having that, having a clear sense of that beforehand, I think really, really is crucial because I've definitely observed direct actions where that is not the case, that people have not thought those things through. And it becomes the kind of unfun version of chaos. Where you know things, things don't really get done and you're just kind of sitting around and everyone's kind of slightly miserable because again, you're in a freezing forest and no one really knows what the hell they're doing. So definitely having those kind of things thought through beforehand is Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month and now for the plot twist. 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Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people and so alleviating poverty? Is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Explore now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format. You can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Extremely useful when you're deciding to trudge your way into some cold dark woods. Yeah, we're going for a chaotic good, not chaotic evil. Yeah, well, a little bit of chaotic. Well, it depends. It depends. It depends what we mean by evil. Evil, evil to some people, we we. Yeah. Anyway. And any other kind of a historical notes on forest defense or any other kind of random, random tidbits you like to mention before before we close out. The one thing that I feel like is super important to say to people is that. Forest defense is not just about protecting forests. It's about protecting all of us we know now, like force defenses, climate defense, our forests are our best natural tool for fighting climate change. And also, like, we need them here. Most of Oregonians, 80%, get their drinking water from forested watersheds. Like, they literally are sustaining all of us. And so, yeah, we hope folks join, like, not just for the sake of, like, being, you know, hippie tree huggers, even though, you know, some of us are about. So because, like, we need to survive as a people and as a planet and forest, our best way to do that? It's it's the cheapest, most advanced form of carbon capture we have yet. So yeah, seems seems kind of asinine to chop that all down to build some ****** sheds. All right. Well, that's a sode. Hi, I'm Robert lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick. And we're the hosts of the Science podcast stuff to blow your mind, where every week we get to explore some of the weirdest questions in the universe. Like, if sci-fi teleportation was possible, how would it square with the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies? Can we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How would an interplanetary civilization function? This free will exist stuff to blow your mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the wonders of techno history. Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody ever told you you ask the weirdest questions, it is time to come. Join us in the place where you belong, the stuff to blow your mind podcast new episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday, with bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen to stuff to blow your mind on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of W Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit on the podcast 9021 OMG. Join Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills, 9021 O. From the very beginning we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen so they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades. As 90210 superfan and radio host, Cincinnati sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect, and relive each moment. From Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates, you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show, and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 9021 OMG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halpern's, host of deep cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We controlled the courts. We controlled absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hit man walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what? He was a rat. I can say with all certainty I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did, and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around the first time my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to deep cover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's it could happen here, the podcast that occasionally has ads from Washington State Highway Patrol on a completely unrelated note. Garrison, you want to talk about the Washington State Highway Patrol today? I sure would love to talk about our our our good friends at the Washington State Patrol. Because yeah, they just, uh, they've, they've they've come up on my radar and in an in an unrelated matter and now we're gonna talk about matter. Yeah. So now we're talking with them. Yeah. So this is the show about things falling apart and kind of part of societal and political stuff kind of crumbling usually it that gets related to some type of law enforcement agency more often than not. And in terms of like tensions rising and stuff, there's a lot of, you know, force gets, force gets exerted via law enforcement and. One such law enforcement, yeah, and one such agency that does this is called the Washington State Patrol. So they were before? I don't know, I I just discovered them recently. They were founded exactly 100 years ago and they were originally called the Washington State Highway Patrol. Now they're just the Washington State Patrol. They removed highway, but they still do the same thing. They're basically glorified traffic cops who operate all around, all around Washington state. And we're going to talk about some of the ways that they've been making things worse within the past decade. I'm since they have a 100 year history. I'm sure we can find lots of historical examples, but we're, we're going to, we're going to do stuff that's more that is more recent because this is you know generally trying to keep things around the the current the current crumbling. And because we're going to talk about police, the the first, the first thing we're going to be discussing, oddly enough, is a racism. Oh my God, because I know, yeah. When you think of Washington State Patrol, that's, you know, it's it's kind of shocking that they might have a race issue. So anyway, 12 years ago, researchers working with, working with the Washington State Patrol found that a troopers were searching drivers from minority communities, particularly local Native American. Tribes at a much higher rate than than white people and they recommended an additional study, which the Washington State Patrol declined to to investigate further. They they were like, no, no, no more studies. So meanwhile, since then the troopers have continued to continue to search Native Americans at A at a rate much higher more than five times than that of of of white people in the area. Yeah so but there are five times as. The popular there. There's five times as many indigenous people in Washington as white people right there. There's not. Oh, oh. Yeah, OK. So in an analysis by investigate, W showed that the patrol continued to do searches at at much elevated rates for for black people, Latino Pacific Islanders, and natives within Washington State. And yet when when troopers did decide to to search white motorists, they were more likely to find drugs and contraband. Which is something the Washington State Patrol actually acknowledges is that when they search people of minority communities, they are less likely to find to find illegal things. Yeah. I mean that's yeah, nationwide and and very, very robust data. So government records obtained via like a Freedom of Information requests and various other, you know. Public records searches also show that there there there is a state law that Washington State Patrol is supposed to collect and report semiannually to the criminal Justice Training Commission in Washington about, you know, race and ethnicity data of motorists stopped by troopers. But so this is supposed to happen semiannually. But the agency reported those findings only three times in the past 15 years. Ohh that which isn't sounds kind of like the Portland police not doing the things that federally they're supposed to do because they're so violent. Yeah. Out of compliance with a bunch of federal regs, 3 three times, three times in 15 years is not semiannually based on what I know the term semiannually that's semi decadently. So yeah, based on responses for over 30 public records, requests from from three different agencies looking looking at Washington State Patrol and more than like 50 interviews with current and former law enforcement officials and people with experience interacting with Washington State Patrol, and also data from millions of traffic. Apps that all this was looked at in total examined about 8,000,000 traffic stops from the 2009, 2015. This is what investigate West was doing which which was the most recent data available, and the analysis found that it it it focused on 2020, 2000 incidents of what researchers called like high discretion searches. That's when troopers had the most like personal leeway to decide whether or not to pull over and search a vehicle. Black drivers were twice as likely to be searched as white drivers, and Latinos and Pacific Islanders were 80% more likely to be searched. Of of these incidents where officers had discretion and, like, they could choose whether or not to pull someone over. So it wasn't like, it wasn't like, they were like, obviously speeding or doing, you know, like, you know, like, like regular, like actually observable traffic violations. This is when, like, people could choose when they investigate. W thing got published. They contacted Washington State Patrol and the spokesperson said that here's here's here's the quote that a race, race was not the only factor when troopers decide whom to search. And that's partially because. Alex, Native Americans and Latinos are more like are more likely to be searched regardless of how much discretion troopers have, which that doesn't really make very much sense. I don't know what they mean by that person. I don't know. What they mean is they're more likely to be searched. Yeah, regardless. Christ. Like what? Yeah, who is that bad at checking the copy? Which is weird, because later on, the spokesperson said that. In the same same person, same guy where the basically where the grease it where we're in a basic agreement that minorities are searched at higher rates but we find less contraband so. And he also said it he also noted that complaints about like a racial bias encountered for little more than 10% of all complaints of the State Patrol filed last year. So I guess he thinks that's a good. He thinks that's a good stat. Yeah, I'm sure he's proud of that. And and and another kind of not great thing is that the analysis found that not only are Native Americans more likely to be searched, but all about the most of those searches happen always at like the edges of reservations. The analysis found that the the two highest concentration of searches of Native Americans by state troopers are on the US 97, where it encounters a reservation at Olmec about about a mile from its intersection at a state Road 155. Just and and more than 130 miles South of of the same when the same highway enters another reservation. So nearly 1/3 of of high discretion of high discretion searches. So when troopers can decide whether or not to pull someone over, like like, they have more discretion whether they can. So 1/3 of those happen on these two stretches of Hwy, right on the edges of these reservations, like they're patrolling outside these reservations to specifically do this. There was I. On interview on this topic that we talked that talked to to, to, to Native Americans in this area and they're like, yeah, every time we leave the reservation we get pulled over. But then we watch tons of white motorists go by and no one cares like in like and they're like you're doing like they're just speeding by. It doesn't matter. So yeah, that is, that is the first first, you know, unsurprising tidbit about some, an organization who started as a highway patrols. Yeah, they're going to pull people over who are not white more often, that is. That's pretty not, not super shocking. Psyched to do that? Yeah. And then make a public statement like, LOL. Yup. Yeah, that that does that does sound a lot like what the Washington State Patrol sounds like. So we're gonna we're so that that was that was the first obvious thing this next part is a little bit more fun. So in in in 2009 the Washington State Patrol made the decision to fire 8 troopers, which is you know, pretty pretty rare. And the reason why they got fired is because they used a fake diplomas to claim pay raises. Yeah so there was there was this whole scheme about getting fake diplomas. To get the troopers more money like, like, like individual people, there's this whole, this whole operation going on. It resulted in the in in a in people getting fired. So troopers can can boost their pay about 2% by earning A2A2 year degree or 4% with a four year degree. And there was this group of of a troopers who just started just forging diplomas. See, Garrison, this is a separate conversation, but they didn't need to forge diplomas. They could have just become doctors of, of, of, of magic like that. It's kind of become. That is what I've tried to do. It could just gotten that religious PhD. Yeah, so there's all sorts of fake diploma mills. Come on, Washington State Highway Patrol. This is pretty funny, so yeah. So. The investigation began after federal agents shut down a diploma mill in Spokane. Criminal charges were not filed, but the patrol did decide to fire these eight troopers. Yeah. So that is one of the more funny things we'll be talking about today. And I think it's time for an ad break. So, Speaking of funny, here's these ads that may or may not be the people we're talking about. Rob. No, unrelated. Unrelated. Ah, we're back. Which is also unrelated. Yeah, another thing that's putting pretty common around police is that the past few years they generally don't think COVID is really real, or that it is the past few years now. I don't love that. For that, Robert, we're we're less than a month away from 2022. Yeah, I hate that. It's like, I mean, **** it's it's like, what? It's almost two years, almost 10% of your entire life has been COVID. I'm not going to think about math. Yeah. So generally they don't think covid's real and also they think vaccines are the mark of Satan or something. Yeah, well, obviously they are, but yeah, so in, in mid-october this this past October, Washington State Patrol announced that 120. Seven of its employees lost their job after the state's COVID-19 vaccine mandate deadline of October 18th. So unlike the Portland Police Bureau who who The Who Portland, many other cities where city officials caved to the demands of the police that vaccine mandates not be not be extended towards police, this did not happen in Washington and they actually got it enforced. So over 100 patrol employees quit quit their job, including a 64. Commissioned officers because like 667 troopers, 6 sergeants and one captain. Right. Yeah. So you know Washington State Patrol has about 2000 personnel within like between like 8 districts. So losing like 127 of them is not it is not an insignificant loss, no and it's it's been a it's it has been trying to hire A lot more people in the in the past in the past like a few months because of this they've been they've been trying to do a lot more recruitment which is why they are I I've heard from other people that they are putting. Advertisements out on the Internet to become a Washington state trooper? That makes sense. This is something I've heard from, from people online when I've been doing all of this deep, deep, extensive research. So yeah, they are. They are. They are recruiting. So if you want to be a Washington patrol officer, don't. Don't. Actually, that's a bad idea. Don't do that. Yeah, I mean, unless you want to. Like, really? **** with people who live on a reservation. If that's if that's your goal. It seems like Washington State Highway Patrol is your your dream career or have another option for you. You could also just get COVID and die. Well, yeah, that is an option. That's an option too. Look, I think I think might be freedom is what makes this nation great. So I think. You know, a choice. Anyway. Continue, Garrison. I'm, I'm gonna send a picture inside our group chat first, because we're gonna be talking about one specific evil dude. Next, I'm setting a picture in the group chat that I want you to look at first, just so you get a sense of who we're talking about. Oh, based. OK, I'm, I'm excited. Yeah. Alright, hit me. Oh no. Oh no. The bow tie really brings it all together. Oh no, you said bow tie, which does not make me optimistic and not Robert. Ohh no. What is wrong with it? Who? Yeah, who puts a bow tie on a uniform like that? Guys, I found a better quality image. But here we go. Same image. But he looks like Tucker Carlson in the Starship Troopers universe when he gets drafted. So this is the next guy we're talking about. Somehow feels like a hate crime towards the Weasley family. So, yeah, feels like a hate crime towards the guy based off Tucker Carlson in Starship Troopers. So this would be a big fan of Ron Ron Weasley's family. This this is this is Sean Carr, a former Washington State Patrol Sergeant. You resigned for reasons we will discuss? Fun. That's exciting, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so in 2015, an Associated Press investigation uncovered about 1000 officers in the United States who lost their badges over A6 year. For sex crimes or misconduct such as like this is. This is a quote here which I disagree with framing here, but this is this is a quote propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on duty. Intercourse, which is a pretty ******** way to frame that because basically you're it's it's police ****** people and police officers being accused of, like, using their power over people to rape them is extremely common. Yeah. And it's often just like, yeah, well, the person said OK and it's like, well, they said OK to a person with a gun in the legal power to murder anyone they want or put them in jail. Yeah. Like, like there's a lot of stuff. Yeah. You know, I would argue you can't consent to sex. With a police officer who's on duty and in uniform because it's who have the power to murder anybody they want or or who just arrest you like like there's a lot of stuff. So like there was a study at least a few years ago that analyzed data like a 550 arrest cases from the years of 2005 to 2007. So just just two years and and a 400 officers employed by like 320. Not non federal law enforcement agencies located throughout. 43 States and findings indicated that a police sexual misconduct includes a serious forms of sex related crimes. And the victims of sex related crimes by police are typically younger than 18 years old. So it's it happens a lot with minors. So there's a lot like like more like a ridiculously common like if if you if you Google this, which I honestly don't recommend, but you can find like dozens of stories coming out like basically like not. You'll find at least one news story every month of a kid getting raped by police. It happens pretty commonly. So over the past ten years in the Washington State Patrol, they've investigated and confirmed 4 cases of what they call sex on duty, according to the agency. And this is including including Sean Carr. Now, Sean Carr's case is particularly sensitive for the agency because he was married to the the daughter of the Washington State Patrol chief and and Sean Carr was also himself a Sergeant, so he was connected to like the big leagues at the Washington State Patrol. So Carl met a civilian woman who also works at Washington State Patrol, but as like you know, like has like an office job, so this isn't isn't a trooper. They met in 2012 and struck up an online friendship. And a few months later, they both of them told investigators that the relationship did turn sexual. Card admitted to six sexual encounters for the next like five years with the woman of five of which happened when he was on duty and like on state property or driving a vehicle or while in uniform. But the woman recalled as many as 20 and all but one of them were when he was on duty and while. And so the woman said that most of their encounters were were what she would describe as consensual. But she described 3 incidents where Carr did a push the boundary and she she she has described being raped by him. Multiple times, yeah. So there was there was an incident, I think the first one happened at the beginning of 2017 with inside his patrol car in a church parking lot. The the woman had recently started dating another man and Carr wanted to know who it was. When she wouldn't say so, he he grabbed her arm hard enough to leave bruises and the woman said that car made her pick from two options. Give give up the name of the man or give car oil sex. Ohh God cool, great guy. Carr later told investigators that he said this in a quote joking context. Ohh that's the you know I was thinking because that's almost exactly my my Type 5 for my stand up set. Some some comedians for some reason do like making jokes like that and not not not great usually not great to normalize that kind of thing. So the woman said that she did like like seat to his his like commands and she's which she said were were like very much not done and was it considered. Yeah and she said was very much not consensual. She told investigators that he raped me on the side of the road and if and if it was anyone else besides car she she she she said she would have called 911. So the the second time it happened, when a car backed her into a corner of a highway away station and forced her to have sex with them. She called it a coerced coerced that consent was mutual. So despite the sexual assaults and and and like, and, you know, and and like assaults, you know, like, you know, grabbing someone's arm hard enough to leave a bruise, she said. The woman said she kept in touch with car because she was going through a difficult time in her life and she needed somebody to talk to. Yeah, sure, sure. It's complicated. That's yeah, that that this even abuse is not like people who are abusive can also be emotionally supportive sometimes. Like that's one of the things about abuse that's such a real, real ************. It's not simple. Yeah. Car may not have gotten in trouble had the woman not confided in another patrol employee after she left her job. Then the other other patrol employee mentioned the situation to someone higher up, triggering an investigation. And then in 2019, the woman formally reported car. To to to like the A patrol office of Professional standards. So records show that the patrol pretty quickly confiscated cars, badge and gun and placed him on home assignment where he remained until he and he resigned voluntarily. The patrol gave gave the case to the Sheriff's Office to investigate because of the criminal nature of the allegations. So cars personal file includes other on job violations, including using a Taser on a drunk driving suspect who was handcuffed. And records show that in February of 2013, Carr was accused of a frequenting a coffee stand and making unwanted advances on an employee by waiting near her car until her shift ended and making derogatory comments about her boyfriend. So he was also stalking this barista, is what it sounds like. Yeah, yeah, that's that is what that sounds like. Pretty terrifying. So yeah, so car after the woman told investigators that she was raped after 2019. The the the county sheriff's recommended charges be filed, but she wasn't willing to. She wasn't willing to testify. She did not want to. She did not want to do that. But but she did tell prosecutors that she did have one wish that that car again the the son-in-law of the State Patrol chief be not not allowed to police again. Pretty reasonable request. Carr of obviously denied all the accusations of nonconsensual sex and assault, but, you know, it did admit to A to a consensual sexual relationship on duty as well as other, you know, like patrol regulation violations. He he resigned in July 2020 before the patrol could decide whether or not to fire him. And then the state went about trying to strip him of his law enforcement. Certification. A requirement to carry a gun and badge and be hired as law enforcement in Washington. Getting decertified for misconduct by the criminal Justice Training Center in Washington is very hard. Very few people have actually been decertified. Yeah, and to to be certified, the panel must be a panel must be convinced that on duty, behavior rose to the level of official misconduct and constituted a crime committed under the color of authority. As a peace officer, that's the, that's the under the color of authority is a an interesting way to phrase that. So it carries attorneys argued that the state failed to make to meet this high bar and there was, quote, no legal basis to decertify car. Meanwhile, the CJTC, the criminal Justice Training Center, alleged his behavior did constitute official misconduct and failure of duty, but without action, they didn't actually include the sexual assault allegations. Instead, it contended that he used state resources for his own benefit or neglected to do his duties when he was engaged in sexual activity. On duty. So they didn't actually include sexual like assault or anything. And this they just said you were basically like you were because you were doing. Because you were having, like, sexual activity on duty, you weren't doing your job, and that's the reason that we wanted to decertify you. So the state of Washington has about 11,000 certified officers at any given time, and since 2003 they have decertified like 230. And at least four of them for on duty sex. And one of those cases was overturned on appeal. But in 2021, around mid-May, the CJTC Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one meant mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price. Four. None of that for anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just 15. Twice a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind that's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind now, a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble, stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just, you know, can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy. And better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. Therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit better help. Com behind today to get 10% off your first month? That's better. Elp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. B, in its final order, said that cars constituted a crimes of of failure of duty and official misconduct by, among other things, quote intentionally choosing to pursue his own sexual gratification rather than using his on duty time to perform his lawful responsibilities as a peace officer. So he he did get decertified, but again, not actually discussing the actual, like assaults and rapes, yeah. So the the the the Sheriff County prosecutors office designed declined to pursue charges on the case last year when the woman was unwilling to testify. But the the the deputy prosecuting attorney did say that she she believed they just happened like, like, she believes this, that stuff happened, but because of the lack of evidence due to time of passing and the woman not wanting to testify there, it's hard to prove guilt in court. So they're not going to pursue these charges at the moment. Yeah, that scans so that that is that is Sean Carr. So yeah, he he's not, not not allowed to police as of May of 2021. That is the a cursory glance at the stuff in the Washington State Patrol. Oh, I guess one other thing I found out today is that so Washington State Patrol has a has a psychologist for recruiting for basically for if you want to join the patrol you have to go like through like a psychological screening. Sure that makes sense. And he just just resigned because he was, he was he was probably going to get fired. This was after Seattle Times and Public Radio. Northwest News network UH published a piece showing that since 2017. The psychological screenings rejected where is it rejected 20% of white candidates over the past four years? But the psychologist that they hired rejected 33% of black candidates, 35% of Hispanic candidates, and 41% of Asian candidates. So again, I'm not pro people being police in general, but there is a a clear disparity on who they are wanting to become police like, who like, who are they? They're letting in a lot more white candidates than they are letting in candidates of color. So this, this, uh, this psychologist Screener is is no longer on the job as of like a few days ago. Yeah, so just another another level of stuff because, yeah, you know, there's they want there to be more white officers than anything else. So, yeah, that is that is the Washington State Patrol. I guess the one other thing I want to do is I'm going to again send in the group chat. They're their current logo. Their current logo, current and seeing you're smirking. I hate it when you do this. I'm afraid I don't know, Sophie. Maybe it'll be fine. I mean it's actually, it's, it's, it's kind of fun. That's their logo. That is their current logo. They design it in like paint. They yes, they probably they probably did decide it in Ms Paint. Ohh, man. Yeah, that that looks like it belongs in an Angel Fire website. Garrison. Do you know what Angel Fire was? I do not. Oh my God. You ******* teenagers. Yeah, that looks like it belongs in an anger. I will. I will let all of the other people who feel very old right now know that it looks like something you'd see in an Angel Fire website like shittily animated, blinking across the screen. Say something from a 1990s website. All right, well, now I'm both angry about the police and I feel 1000 years old, so this is good. What a good, what a good feel. What a good feeling. Well, that that wraps that that wraps it up for today. And hey, again, I, I have heard that they are recruiting and they should have a new psychological Screener soon. So great. There we go. I'm imagining the primary psychological screening is you're white, right? That's that's that is what it used to be. I mean, I'm imagining that's what it's going to be still, but probably Garrison, maybe not. All right. Well, this has been. A great time. I'm sure everybody's feeling good. Goodbye, bye. Get out of my house. Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about, and we are here to change that. I'm April Dinwoodie, host of the new podcast navigating adoption presented by adopt US Kids. Each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them, with commentary from experts. Visit adoptuskids.org/podcast or subscribe to navigating adoption presented by adopt US kids, brought to you by the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, and the AD Council. Here's to the Great American settlers, the millions of you who settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills and you just kind of fell into it and, you know, it's like, totally fine. Just another few decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself. Of course, there is something else you could do. If you got something to say, you could, oh, I don't know, start a podcast with spreaker from iheart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love. And maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com, that's a SBREAKER. Hustle on over today. I'm Colleen Witt. Join me, the host of eating While broke podcast while I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official Princess of Compton, Asia, kidding, and Asia. This is the professor we're here on eating while broke and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to eating while broke on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the shed cast. This is a crypto podcast where we talk about the best NFT investments and how you can get rich too bro, if you just accept the wave of the future and decentralize your finance and invest in a bank that can take all of your money overnight and disappear because it was really just being run by a guy in Macedonia and he. It was just a rug pull the entire time and you lose your life savings and you have no recourse. And that's the ******* future of investments, bro. Hey, bro, you're fired. Yeah, that's fair. In the room this is it could happen here podcast about how things are bad sometimes a podcast about how to make them less bad. Today we're talking about the former, how things are bad, and we're we're talking about financialization and specifically the financialization of like, human beings and the endeavor to create art. And so March is art is a broad, broad term. I mean, I said the endeavor, too. I'm sure they all want to be creating art. Well, this won't make any sense. People yet. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna give a brief overview. There's an article in the Atlantic that dropped on November 29th called what happens when you're the investment. It's by Rex Woodbury, who I hate. So as a note. I OK let me just get the the the the nut of the article is and there have been a couple of other articles on this guy. His name is Alex Massage and he is a French kid I think who decided to tokenize himself and what that means is so like. You've got the Ethereum blockchain, right. He basically he's, he's putting, he's carving up aspects of his like potential future earnings and he's putting those on the Ethereum blockchain as like tokens that people can buy. And the idea is that this kid had wanted to like start a business and be an entrepreneur, but he didn't have any money. So using like on the ether blockchain, he turned himself into tokens basically like his potential future earnings and his time and basically. People are able to buy up coins effectively. I mean, not coins, but tokens, shares of the. Yeah, yeah$ Alex is like the name of the token, which basically shares they're buying. He's turned himself essentially into a publicly traded company, kind of. And holders of his coins are like, he's splitting up 15% of his income for the next three years basically among people who like, hold his coins. And he raised like 20 grand this way. And it's not just like, it's not just his future earnings. That are being kind of tokenized. You can also use tokens to like buy retweets from him or one-on-one conversations or. And here's a line. I love an introduction to someone in his network and and it's it's the way this is usually sold as a good thing. In fact, I should probably just read a quote from this Atlantic article to give you an idea of how mass measure is or of how the art the author of the article, Rex Good Woodbury is A is trying to sell this **** we all have. Be slightly annoying friend who insists that she knew about so and so before they were even famous. When it comes to Taylor Swift, I'm that friend and I'm more than slightly annoying about it. I was a Taylor fan in her pre fearless full on country days years before Conway interrupted her on stage at the VMAs. But in our current construct of fandom I'm treated no differently than a fan who discovered SWIFT on SNL a few weeks back. This would be different though. If Taylor had done what massage did and turned herself into an investment. She could have issued a social token whereas non fungible tokens or in FT's are so-called. Because of the uniqueness of a digital asset, social tokens are fungible. In other words, each Alex Token is interchangeable with every other Alex token, just like a dollar bill can be traded for any other dollar bill. Say Taylor issued had issued her own token, let's call it$ Swift, and say she had sold$ Swift to her biggest fans. Yeah, say I was one such fan. Over time, as Taylor's popularity grew, the value of the SWIFT token would have appreciated. As an early believer, I would have shared in the financial upside of her growing fame the SWIFT token I bought for $100 in 2007. Might be worth $100,000 today, the Taylor Swift mini economy would serve both the singer and early fans like me. As an artist, Taylor could have funded her work by selling dollar signs or SWIFT tokens. She might not have needed to sell ownership of her masters, and she might have not have been forced to rerecord her albums to take back control over her art. Taylor's fans, for their part, would have been rewarded for a decade of patronage where all evangelists for our favorite artists yet we captured little of the value that we helped create. And then there's a lot that, like, I find unsettling there. One of them is the. Idea that like. Yeah the fact that I was a fan of someone earlier means I should get some sort of reward for it. Like I should be treated differently because I liked it earlier which you might recognize like the thing that everybody has been ******** on for like a fandoms for years now. Like it's been a it's been a huge thing. We're like yeah you're being an ******* if you're if you're talking about like if you think you have some additional ownership of Star Wars because you watched it 10 years before the fans today and so you like different stuff in it like that's we all recognize that as like toxic. But the the whole argument of this article is that like. No, this is how the entire future of creativity should work. Yeah, find unsettling. And it also, it also ties into like, a really concerning development in parasocial relationships of, like, be able to, like, invest in someone, to buy a conversation with them in, like, this really weird way. And the fact that young artists are going to be pressured into this kind of thing is really scary. Yeah, because there's like one of the things mass mesh did as like. As an experiment was like, allow people who had bought his tokens to make life decisions for him, like tell him when to wake up in the morning and whether or not to eat red meat and stuff like that. And he stated that, like, well, none of this is binding, right. Like, I, I'll, I'll, I might do what they say, but like, I'm not going to do anything crazy or whatever. But also, this is like the first iteration of this. And I like this Atlantic article, which I think is unhinged for reasons we'll get into. But it's purely talking about like. Look at this incredibly successful person. Imagine if they'd gotten to be incredibly successful using this method instead, and it might have, like, spared them this thing. But what I keep thinking about is like, OK, well, the vast majority of people like, there's no reason to invest in them. Like, yeah, maybe if you come out with a great song or a great video, like, yeah, you could get investments. And I'm sure that could work out. I'm sure, like, Taylor Swift is a successful enough person. I'm sure she could have found a way to succeed under that system, too. But what I think will be much more common. Because there's no real reason to anticipate that the average person will have an earnings potential if you give them 20 grand that's greater than 20 grand. The most likely thing is that, like, people just buy shares in poor people to make them do ****** ** ****. Yeah, it's gonna be you. How would you not? How would that not be where it goes? Right? That's that's the only way that this is going to get, like used on a large scale. Young people just selling themselves. People are going weird way. People are going to use the ether blockchain to like crowdfund and crowd cast a new ******* basically. Like it's going it's not going to be like 1000 Taylor Swifts all tokenizing themselves. It's going to be like millions of people in the global S issuing tokens to like vote on whether they roll down the hill in a barrel or in like a ******* porta potty. Like I it's just it's a nightmare to me to contemplate people actually adopting this. You know there's there's a lot of really the thing I think is the most incredible part about this is that like. OK, so it basically doesn't matter. What like? Economic theory. You used to look at it. It's like every single one of them tells you something just, like, absolutely ****** about it. And like, you know, cause, I mean there there's, there's there's some extent to which I look at this and it's like. This isn't that much different than the fact you know it's like, OK, so you're paying someone to do whatever you want, but like, OK, like, that's not that much different than just a job. Right, like it's it's not it's not inherently that much different than the fact that everyone is forced to just do wage labor. But also like. There's. What was interesting things to me that I thought about this when it was what I was reading this was. So do you know what capitalization is? Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is just capitalizing a person, right. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, it's, it's literally, yeah. Taking a person public effect, putting, yeah, turning them into like a tradable share, that's like an investment. Yeah. I mean, this is all one of the things that like a Forbes article I found pointed as like this is another kind of unregulated securities trading. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what's interesting to me about it is that like, OK, so, you know, this is also already how accounting wise every corporation sees a person, right? Like every, every person in the asset book is, you know? Yeah, you know, like a wage is just capitalization, right? So how much will you pay now for this much money later? You could, but it's like people are doing it to themselves now, which is like. This, yeah, you could argue that like elements of this are how like banks treat you when you get a mortgage, right? Like, but but also that's. A much more rigorous and limited like the limit has that it has like regulations and it has rules for how those things work. It's not some like 12 year old getting a like like going onto Coinbase and buying part of you as a joke with your with like his dad's money, right. Like because it's like, yeah because what if it's like there's no law against a 17 year old? I guess if that maybe their parents may need to consent, but there there's no law against the 17 year old getting a facial tattoo of like, the the doors of a concentration camp on their face. But what if some kid Tokenizes himself for 40 grand so he can drop an EP? And that's what like a bunch of four channers who buy up his his shares want him to do. And maybe the ******* kid does that because he knows it's going to get him because his brain's not done and he knows it's going to get him a bunch of ******* social media clouds and like. It's there's a lot of, and there's no way to regulate that. Like, it's just an inherently toxic proposition that I don't think the government would. I don't know what side of this the government would even step in on. Like, what is the regulation of people deciding I'm letting random strangers who pay me money vote on what I do with my life? What do you ever think it reminds me of? A lot is like the the microlending stuff from the 90s. Where it was like, Oh well, like, empower these people, but we'll go in and we're going to give them like a small amount of money and they have to pay it back. And it was like, you know, and all of the same stuff that you were reading, all the arguments about why this is a good thing are exactly the same as the micro lending ones and that stuff, you know, there are two ways it turned out. One was. Basically you get the scenario where both sides are scamming each other. Yeah. Where you know all the people who are getting these micro loans are just taking the money and walking right. Like that's you know they're they're they're things. Oh this is I can just get money like this and we can just keep. I just keep not paying it back and so this I'm so I'm scamming them. But then on the other side you have these people who are like, oh cool, I can give this person this loan and turn him into a debt peon. Yeah. And it and you know and and the the really depressing side about it is so the people who couldn't get away, like, I mean. We're literally reduced the debt, peons. And, you know, there's a huge wave of suicides in, like, India, probably staples, wave of suicides, people drinking pesticide. They couldn't pay off these loans. And so and and the thing that's different about this is that, like, I mean, you're doing it to yourself. But then B, again, there's no regulation. But that also means there isn't any way to force someone to do what you say you're going to do. Yes. It's unclear how it's going to be enforced. And the other thing is. There is like, what does losses look like? Like what? What happens when Someone Like You cannot make back on like an investment, but if the investment is a person, how does that work? And if someone's, like contractually obligated to give a certain share of their income, what happens when there's not enough income for that? Like, you know, those types of things? Yeah, I mean, there's no answer to that. And there's nobody like the money that's going to be whatever made in this is going to be made before. Anyone steps in to try to answer that if anyone ever does like? It's it's gonna be the next because I think we're I think we're heading for a crash with with NFT's. Like there was just an article today about how, what is it? 97% of NFCT trading is done by like 10% of people. Which further back because the allegations of NFT's is that most of what's happening isn't people actually buying them. It's people like the same person using multiple wallets, basically trying to Jack up the perceived value by throwing a bunch of other Internet money that they already have. So it's these, these whales who have like a bunch of crypto. Gaming the system, and we've seen some evidence. The biggest NFTS sale ever, was like half a billion dollars, and it was a guy selling it to himself and then transferring it back into another wallet to try to make it look like it was worth half a billion dollars, even though no one had actually really paid that for it. Umm. So I and I think you know that and kind of what we've seen with the the regulations the government financed for NFT's, I think that's a problem for them in the near future. And I wouldn't be surprised to see this take off next, especially given like the creator economy that we're seeing on, like the kind of that Tik T.O.K specifically. Yeah, tik T.O.K. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw a rash of big Tik T.O.K stars tokenizing themselves. And, like, I'm not even sure I'm sure it would be a mix of. The person making the tokens being the one doing the scam and the person receiving or the people buying the tokens being the one doing like. I'm sure it would be a mix of different kinds of exploitation, but. It's not going to be good. I mean, and and just like on TV, it's gonna make like, I don't know, 50 people super rich when they when they first start trying it, right? Like that. That is. That is like when this happens, like when a tik T.O.K star with 25 million followers, when they do this, they will make boatloads of money. It's just unclear what happens after that. Yeah. We'll flee to Mexico. Yeah. I mean, that would be the the smart thing. That would be the smart thing to do. Yeah. In this Forbes article I found, which is 1000 times better than the Atlantic article, like, even though it's written by someone I think who's also into crypto, it's just it. Actually. It asks some of these questions we've been talking about and it cites David Hoffman, who's the CEO of a of a tokenized real estate platform, on what he sees as some of the problems. Like what he as a guy who's supports aspects of this kind of thing, seizes the problems with this and. It's yeah yeah one SEC. Hoffman reinforce returning to his core problem with the personal token model model. Hoffman reemphasized that the assurances and utility that come with some of these tokens don't exist for with with certain kinds of tokens don't exist for like these personal tokens. How risky this investment is is completely defined by the individual. In his disclaimer he's and he's talking about one of the guys who's token himself, this guy named Kerman. In his disclaimer he says this is a highly risky investment and that you could lose all your money, which is a terrible thing to say because with personal tokens. The issuer is in complete control over exactly how risky the investment actually is. It's largely up to them whether there are risks or not, which is like a kind of illegal securities trading that I don't think we've ever anyone's ever done. Like it's this. It's this fascinating new. Con where you're literally. The the part you're you're doing securities trading, but instead of it being over a company, it's just you. And technically there's no consequences if you just take the money and run. Like, I don't know what kind of contract, like you couldn't have a contract that says like you could say they're you're obligated to pay out your future earnings, but you couldn't have to work like that's not enforceable. You can't like contractually obligate someone to to. Like work, like you're allowed to quit a job. I mean, I guess you could put penalties in it, but I I don't like none of the current ones have any. I mean, or they could go to jail for all. The other option is, is that they could go to jail for fraud. If they try to share, if they try to not follow through on the investment, if you say, like, yeah, I I invested in you and you said that you would do these things, you didn't do them, now you can go to prison. That is the other thing. And I think that'll at some point, like, there will be scams. And some of that will come in, but like none of these current ones, none of them are saying, here's my specific I'm going to make this. It's not like. Like if you like, like with a Patreon, right, you're you're paying a little bit at a time on an ongoing basis for a very clear product. Generally, yeah, this is so far. These aren't that. They're just like, I'm going to try to do something that makes money and if it does, you get a cut of it. And that's it's so much like there's nothing that's stopping mass message from saying like, hey, my, my and my attempt didn't work. So we're done. No, no money for anybody like that. And I you're not. There's no accounting requirements. There's no, there's a bunch of ways in which it's ****** ** from a financial except it's not, it's not his, it's not, it's not you're not investing in his business, you're investing in him. So even if even if he takes another job, they're still, it seems to be contractually obligated to still get that. 15% of his income, yes. And I think that's that's the area in which I think it would be abusive for the person being tokenized because most people aren't gonna like most people don't make that much money. So they raise someone manages to like raise 5 or 10 grand and then just winds up for years giving a cut of their income that winds up being more than they got initially to a bunch of like it's almost like a like a payday loan that you've. Yeah. Blockchain. Yeah. You know, OK. This thing, this thing about cause so that there's, I don't know if I talked about this on the show, but there's a thing in China where they've been kind of cracking down it now for, you know, something like 2019, like literally every single app like had a, like had a payday loan thing in it. So like like your flashlight app would have, would, would offer you a payday loan. And it was basically it was, yeah, they were originally tied in with like people who buy, you know, it was really tied in with like the the, the, the, the services that you like their version of Amazon. For example, would like, oh hey, we'll give you a loan so you can buy this, you can order fried chicken. And I was always wondering when this would come to the US. And I think it might never hope. I mean, hopefully it never does. And I think it might not just because of how like powerful or payday loan industry is, but it's like we've we've now invented it. It seems like it's going to happen, but like Dumber, like our our version of it is like this thing, which is just. You know, it's what, what if, what if? Payday loans, but on the blockchain. Except, you know, everyone. I guess this is the everything you know that that we've been getting at. Is that the difference between this being a payday loan and this being you scammed a bunch of people is what the enforcement mechanism looks like. And you know, this, this, this comes back to some other things. I think interesting about this one is that. Yeah. So the whole the hotline FNFG grift, right? Is, is is based on convincing people that there's value in ownership right there. Like ownership itself has inherently has value. Yeah. And yeah, but but this this is not that. This is this is, you know, this is going back to know your value. Value is built on labor, right? Well, yeah, it's like sort of Labor and like like personhood, like, like you as a personal brand is is the thing that they're trying to get at. But the thing, the thing that's missing here, though, is that. In order for you, like, you know, in order for like labor to produce value right in, in in this way, there has to be like, there has to be a way for you to force them to pay you like. You need, you need coercion for it. And if there's no coercion, then, you know, you just take a bunch of money and leave. And and that that I think is like, this is, this is going to be the battle over like if this becomes a thing, it's gonna be, you know, the the the people who buy these things are going to wind up like trying to, you know, I think they're the ones you try to push a regulation because they're going to, you know, they're going to go in the coercion for it. And if there's no coercion, then, you know, you just take a bunch of money and leave. And and that that I think is like this is this is going to be the battle over like if this becomes a thing it's gonna be you know the the the people who buy these things are going to wind up like trying to you know I think they're the ones you try to push regulation because they're going to you know they're going to go in they're gonna be I want to get my money back. And that could end really, really, really badly, right? Like if you know, I mean it probably will. I like, I don't know how popular I think this will be because I think that I hope it does. This is a maybe if they've never been like Patreon or something, but the actual use case of this seems to already be well served by the existing capitalist infrastructure like people. I think more people wanted back a creators Patreon. Then they went to like own pieces of a person's time and earning potential like that. That seems like a more niche and weird desire to people than just like, Oh yeah, these guys make a video I like every week, so I'll throw him $3. Well, I think. I think the difference though, is that Patreon money gets you money from normal people. This gets you money from like, Tech Bros and that, you know, that's always yeah, yeah, it's a grift designed to get money from them. I want to dive back into this Atlantic article because it's so bad. Comprehensive way that I think it deserves analysis. That's what what? Put a pin in what you said. But I want to start with like how the person writing this, this Rex, ************ like his, his concept of the the history of the Internet, because it's completely wrong. Quote. We're on the precipice of the third era of the web. The web's first era was about information flowing freely. Think Google giving you access to the world's knowledge. Most of us were passive consumers in this era. The second era was the social web. Facebook, Instagram. Twitter people began to create their own content, and that content became the lifeblood of the big platforms. We became active participants, but the platforms devoured all the profits. The promise of the Internet and the Internet was to erase the gatekeepers. Instead of waiting for a record label to sign you, you could share your music on Spotify. Instead of asking a publication to share your words, you could tweet. Instead of being tapped by a studio exec, you could become a YouTuber. But what happened is that these platforms became the new gatekeepers. The third era of the web is about riding the ship's social capital. Becomes economic capital. Value no longer accumulates to brokers and intermediaries. That's number one, completely wrong. But one thing the first era of the Internet, I would say, was about the idea that information should flow freely. And Google came in like a decade or more into that. Like I had been on the Internet five years before. Google hopped into that **** and Google was actually the start of of the end of that. And it's it's the idea that, like the social web was people. Creating their own content. Most of the social Web's initial capital, and like all of its initial money, came from taking content that people were being paid to make on legacy platforms that had existed before social media, taking that content, putting it on social media, and then monetizing that without paying money back to the people who made the content. The money in social media did not initially come from people making their own content and the way that they mean it. Like, yeah. You at college humor or whatever, we're making your own content and sharing it on social media, but you've been doing that before social media. Social media just actually made it less profitable eventually. Like the way he summarizes this is so wrong because what the social web actually did. And the other thing I'd argue is that the first era of the Internet, the like early days when things are happening on like forums and and weird little Angel Fire websites and like even Myspace. Which I think is kind of Myspace kind of straddles the 1st and 2nd eras. Uh, that was fundamentally much more an era of people creating their own content. Because the the lifeblood of social media today isn't people really making their own content, it's people reacting to content that other people made. And again, it just shows the fact that he's he's summarizing it this way in a way that I think is so wrong and inaccurate to how things actually developed is is characteristic. Of his attitude towards this stuff, where he's kind of seeing the only real meaningful evolutions in in in the Internet through the corporations that monetized it. Which is just telling of like, how this guy actually sees the way the Internet has developed. And you will not be surprised to know this ************ is an investor at index ventures. Yeah. Yeah. Like he's he's he's a guy whose business is capitalizing things. And so that's the only way he sees the development of the Internet, even though that's not the accurate way of looking at how the Internet evolved. And I think, I think that there's one more really important thing that he leaves out here, which is that because, you know, we're talking. Oh, this is the third day of the Internet like, no, the third day of the Internet started like, I don't know, the mid to early, mid 2010 S when I would say when Gamergate hit is when I would I would. I mean it's going to be a little off. It depends what you it depends what you mean by age. So one of my friends works in advertising. And he was talking about this where, you know, we can, we can talk about, like, Gamergate and sort of fascist models, but there was something else happening back end, which was the Internet of Things stuff, the Internet of Things stuff like, you know, like, nobody. It's kind of a, I don't know, like, I think we mostly think about it as like, it's kind of a joke or like, it just sucks. But really what it was was that that that was the period in which people figured out that the thing that the the actual money to be made on the Internet was selling people's personal information and that and the Internet of Things like just dramatic, like just indescribably. Increased the amount of data that you could extract from people. Yeah. And that that was, that's the actual, that was the actual change of like that that that's that's that's the 30 of the Internet. And that that era of the Internet will last basically forever until we destroy it, which is that, you know, the, the, the, the, the commodity is just all of all of the information about who you are, where you go, like what you buy, who you talk to that just being sold off to, to advertisers is, you know the thing that he's very, very carefully. Not talking about. And instead focusing on, oh, it was users creating content and it's like, no, the Internet, they just they they they sold, spying on the entire world. Yeah. And I I think there's there's two good ways to, to divide the Internet into ages, and the ages would be slightly different. Each one is kind of how you're doing it is the way in which it was monetized. Right. That's that's that's one way to and and then if that's the case, it's going to start with it was not at all. It was an entirely public project and everybody on it was on it through like a university and like people did not pay too. Access it. Other than that, you had to be at an institution or a university and then like we get to the kind of the.theerabeforethe.com, boomandofthe.com boom. And then like the early pre social Internet stuff like something awful and like having stumbled upon and and whatnot. And like those sending traffic to sites like where I used to wear cracked and and then kind of the social media, which is the start of, as you said, like the data being monitored, monetized like individuals, data being the thing. Either that's being directly monetized or it's being used to deliver like targeted ads to you. And then there's like, if you think about it in terms of content, it's it starts like the first era wouldn't even involve Google because it would be like the start of Usenet up to eternal September in 1993 and then, you know, on from there. But either way, this guy doesn't like everything he says about the history of the Internet is is dumb. It's just a very simplified version, and you don't actually look at, like, the interlocking systems. Because, I mean, yeah, I I don't know why he describes it this way, because it is. It is like, it's accurate if you squint and don't think about it. But it's weird because, like, this article is like, it's four tech Bros. So I I don't know why he describes it this way, because I feel like he could describe it a lot more accurately if he, if he wanted to. Something I'm going to get into, I'm going to say this like twice episode I'm going to get into in the neoliberalism episodes that I'm writing. But the one of the key features in neoliberalism is that they lie. Is that the neoliberals have to have two versions of what they believe. They have the version that they tell everyone else, which is completely a lie and is not what they believe at all. And then it has they have the version they tell to each other, which is what they actually believe, and they completely contradict each other completely. They mostly believe things. Everything they say in public is just a complete lie and that I think that's what he's doing here, which is that this, that like that history of the Internet is the one you sell to public consumption. Because, yeah, that that's that's that's the lie. You tell people to take money from them. And then he has a thing that he believes but which he will not ever tell you because. You know, if if he tells you what like he actually wanted to do, you would run screaming from the room and you can you can read between what he wants you to believe, I think is made very clear by how he divides, by the fact that when he starts, like dividing up the ages of the Internet, he says the first one is the time in which people wanted information to be free. And what he's kind of saying by doing that is saying, like that was an infant stage of the Internet. And obviously the natural evolution of the Internet is for every single thing on it to become monetized. And because I also believe the Internet should be every aspect of our lives like, this is a megaverse guy or a metaverse guy like, I think the Internet should should be involved in every aspect of life. That means every aspect of life should be financialized, and that's extremely radical. But it does not sound that way when you describe it that way. People's heads go over it. But like, what he's saying is deeply radical and I think also like. Again, you want to talk about like the first the and not just the early age like because the the first people who kind of built the backbone of the Internet were mostly like very radically anti. Capitalizing on like, there was this idea that, like, it absolutely should be as free as possible. Like, Steve Wozniak, the guy who functionally invented the personal computer, had a background like, as a phone freaker like literally robbing phone companies to get, like, free phone calls and stuff like these. Like, most of the early Internet pioneers were like some kind of criminal. And the early ages, like Internet content being monetized, mostly started with people doing **** for free. Like that was how the people who made money on it, that's how all of my bosses, and that's how ******* I got started, was like, you would just start making **** and you would put it out for free. And eventually like that would get enough traffic that you, you, you, you draw ads to you and whatnot, and you'd make money. But it was always like all of the content that that made the Internet and all of the content creators who were huge now mostly started. Doing so, like even was just like throwing up videos on YouTube, right, or like going on. And that's that's less the case with the zoomers now because a lot of them got started on at things like like Twitch where the idea is to from the beginning be trying to monetize yourself. And while you're like building a brand, you're constantly monetized. But that's a really recent change and I actually, I find it kind of unsettling because that was. I don't know it's it's a mix because I'm certainly not of the. I'm not of of the of the mind that like if someone is asking you to do work, you should be getting paid for it, but if you are trying to. If you were trying to, like, build a life as a creator, the best way to do that creatively is to just make the things that you think are cool and then make like if, if other people like it, you make money. Like better things get made than that. That, yeah, like that. That is the way the best art gets made. I think there's a few things going on here because, like the way I think, like, I think actually the reason why he frames it this way is because he's trying to get back to his idea of freedom, right? He describes, like the Golden Age of the Internet being information flowing freely. He thinks that the blockchain is the new version of that. So that's why he's framing it in this way. The second thing is in terms of like artists and creators. If you think about like, yeah, like like the when the early age of what, what he calls like this of what we, we kind of all been referring to is like the second area when like era of like when social media and like content creation, like sites are a thing. It's like just use YouTube as an example because there was a low saturation and content. It was easier for someone to rise up and gain a platform, let's say someone like Bo Burnham, right? Sort of is just a kid and now is like a very popular comedian. Yeah. But then YouTube, instead of backing creators like that, which they did a little bit, but they did not as much, they instead started a like the thing that happened was like YouTube really incentivizing sharing, like late night content and sharing like, like TV, like clips of TV shows and like using, like doing, using Legacy media on their platform. And that's the things they really back. That's the things they really pushed into your feet. Like Tonight Show clips. So a lot of those original, original content creators kind of got left behind an hour, are now like just their own are running on their own personal brands. Some of them use Patreon, for example. But it's also it's impossible to do this now because there's an oversaturation of content. The only thing that's done this recently is Tik T.O.K. Because it was a brand new platform, there was again a new, a new opportunity for a lot of kids to gain, to gain a lot of audiences really quickly. I mean I just, I based on what you're saying, I think that like Tik T.O.K is the closest to how. Cool **** happened on the Internet before everything got because it is like you're not starting from a like, everyone starts, I guess, knowing you could make money, but that was the same way that you start because like, you're doing a thing and if that thing takes off, then there's ways to monetize and like that. Yeah, I think that's probably why part of why it's so popular. Generally growth on Tik T.O.K is pretty, is pretty organic. It's not, it's not, it's not boosted by big brands the same way, you know, stuff like YouTube is. And now it's probably going to be edging in that direction, but it's it's it's not, it's not there yet. So, and his argument in this is to get back to just being like a small content creator getting your stuff seen, his solution to this problem of like YouTube and stuff backing like these large like late night shows and backing like these large. Corporately funded things. His solution is that if you're a small, if you're a small content creator, you should sell yourself as an asset to other people on the Internet, right? So because like his, his whole idea is that he wants to get rid of the gatekeepers of the Internet and go back to how the Internet was. But his solution for doing that is just by selling you as a person brand to other people on the Internet who are like tech pro investors. So that's why it's framed this specific way. So I think when we're all like talking about like, why does he describe it this way? What's all this weird stuff going on? It's because that's how he's rationalized it in his brain is for how what he thinks being a free artist is, and he thinks this is going to be the new method to get there. There's another important. Sort of macro thing to think about this here, which is that the underlying basis of all of this right is the assumption that. Everyone is an entrepreneur is that, you know, like everyone is doing all of their stuff at all times because they want, you know, in order to be a business owner. And this has been like. You know, this, this has been the great ideological victory of the right in the last 50 years is that they convinced everyone that like every single person is, you know, like you're mean something temporary embarrass millionaire syndrome. It's like even people who like are working jobs, right, like working wage labor jobs think of themselves as, you know, content creators and content creator. You know is, is, is a small business owner. And this has an immensely coercive, while coercive 2 but corrosive effect on, you know, anyone working together to do something. Because you know, oh, you're not, you're not, you're not a worker. You're just like, you're a content creator. You're, you know, you're a small business owner. You're like, you know and that's, you know this, this is a very long running. Thing that a bunch of incredibly powerful people have been trying to do really since like, I mean arguably like the Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes there are answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world, and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart, 30s but. The, the, the complete success of that and the way that you know they're there, they're selling exactly the same thing that they were selling in like the 80s. But now it's this like, you know, you're trying to get people to do it to themselves and also they throw all of this like sort of. Nonsense, tech jargon at you to get you to sort of like, stop looking at the fact that this is just sort of. You know this is, this is, this is just. The the new, even worse version of everyone being a worker who thinks that they're like. You know, also going to be a small business owner someday. Yeah. I don't know. I don't have anything else really to say about it other than this, but like, I mean, this was a good amount to say. I just think this is so. I think it's such an example of kind of the way in which the worst people in the world are trying to steer the Internet and by steering the Internet, steer the soul of, like, the human race. Like, this is a vision of the future this guy is sharing. And this article that isn't isn't positioning itself as radical, but includes some like deeply radical ideas about how the world should go. And by the way, I should also note that he's also just, like, blatantly wrong. Every time he brings up a number like he talked, he he points out in this article that 46 million Americans own cryptocurrency. The real number is more likely about 21 million, kind of at at most. Like by every credible, I have no idea where he's getting 46 million Americans own cryptocurrency. And again, this the stat just came out. But, and that's part of his argument is that like obviously people love the blockchain and these tokens and like this is this is inevitably going to get more and more popular. And when again the reality is that every real thing that's happening on the on the blockchain is pretty much versions of a security scam that the government has just announced they're going to finally start regulating. But yeah I want to. So the the, the study the study that just came out today was that analysis of 6.1 million trades of like 4.7 million FT it shows that the top 10% of traders. We're responsible for 97% of trading, which again is more evidence that all that's happening is people boosting prices. Also, the average, the vast majority, like more than 90% of NFT sales, are for less than $200.00. Some of them are for just pennies. Like what the the stuff that you're hearing about is all ridiculous outliers, and it's outliers specifically because people are pumping stuff up in order to try to con someone. And that's the whole basis of this guy's the structural argument. The reason that he's attempting to argue that, like there's actually desire here, and that this is in fact the future of the Internet, is based entirely upon like numbers that are either bad, or he's or he's deliberately using. He's deliberately lying about the numbers because there is no credible number evidence I've ever heard that 46 million Americans currently own cryptocurrency or even have ever owned cryptocurrency. Yeah. And I think the other kind of nail in the coffin for this idea and why I don't think it's going to catch on the same way these guys think it think it does. And this is something he acknowledges in the article is like, not a lot of people know how the Stock Exchange works. Like very like he he he says. I think it's like, I know, like he I, I forget what number he says, but but he he says like. Not tons of people actually use or know what the stock Stock Exchange is. And the reason why Patreon was so successful and why it's so useful for content creators is because it's a very intuitive system. It's very clear how it works, it's clear what you're doing. There's no really questions about where your money is going or what's happening. This I don't think this is ever. I don't think this whole personal investment thing is ever going to actually go off because people don't understand what the blockchain is and it's too much work to explain it to them. And just because of how much work it is to wrap your mind around, like, so where is my money? Going what do I have to set up? How does that work? That's way too much of a headache because in order for this to actually work you need to this to break out of the tech bro bubble. Or else this is just going to be this small tech bro thing of people handing over the same $100 to all their friends in a circle, which is what it is currently. And I in order to break out of that circle, they need to get you know, your grandmother to to learn what crypto is and how blockchains work and that's not going to happen. So I think that is the one other nail in the coffin for this type of idea is like. Patreon is easy. Patreon makes sense. This thing, it is not nearly as intuitive for supporting a YouTuber you like. Yeah, oh OK, cool. I actually found evidence on where that 46 million Americans number comes from. Yeah, so basically, number one, I found like a a ******* crypto news source pointing out that, like when people started tweeting that 46 million Americans is based on a study, which we'll talk about a second. But like, when people started tweeting about this, like, the immediate response in the Bitcoin subreddit was like, well, that's not *******. Ossible. One of the people in the Bitcoin subreddit said sounds very high. I don't know a single person who owns it, and this says one in six or seven people own it. Yeah, and and it comes from a study conducted in January by the New York Digital Investment Group surveying 1000 participants with incomes over $50,000. So that that seems valid. Wait, they just said it's over 50? OK, this method, yeah, this this method. You'll get a few like Pew released to studies suggesting that, like, 16% of Americans have used cryptocurrency at some point, and like all of what's coming out. Kind of sketchy all of the data there's like. Reasons to be kind of unsettled about it, but also like one of the things the Pew study showed is that the vast majority of Americans have heard of cryptocurrency and most haven't used it. Like the vast majority have not chosen to get involved. Like, however accurate you think this is. Like there's another article coming out that says that came out and I guess may of this year. That said, that's based on a Gemini study, which is Gemini is a crypto exchange that over 50 million Americans are likely to buy crypto in the next year. Which doesn't seem to have happened. Uh, like I I just don't see there's all sorts of, like, weird little studies commissioned by weird little groups, but it it it really doesn't. It seems like it's it's, again, kind of part of the grift. Like, I'm not seeing a lot of rigor in any of this. Anyway, whatever. We've talked enough about this ****. I just. I think we all, as soon as we read the article, we're so, like, appalled by it that, well, we should probably talk about this for 45 minutes, yeah. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times Bestseller Fair play and find your Unicorn, space activists on the gender division of Labor attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor Aditi Nerurkar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, time out, a production of iheart podcasts, and Hello Sunshine, we're uncovering why society makes it so hard. For women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us. Listen to timeout a Fair Play podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Raffi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So who is the man behind baby beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of finding Raffi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Robert Sex Reese, host of the Doctor Sex Reese show. And every episode I listen to people. Talk about their sex and intimacy issues. And yes, I despise every minute of it. I mean, she she made mistakes too, right? I mean, she killed everyone at her wedding, but Hell is real. We're all trapped here, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me. Won't you listen to the doctor's sex free show every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts? Welcome to it could happen. Here, a podcast about how society is falling apart, and about how to put it back together again. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and today, and for the next few days. We're doing something a bit different. We're going to take a deep dive into some of the people who got us into the mess we're in today. Now, when we've talked about our enemies, and it could happen here, we've mostly focused on fascism, and for good reason. But for the next few days, we're focusing on a different enemy, though. Don't worry, the Nazis will show up. That enemy is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the single most successful political movement of the 20th and 21st centuries. No other political movement in human history is directly controlled so much of the globe. It has outmaneuvered, outlasted, or simply destroyed every ideology that sought to oppose it, and has remained virtually unchallenged for 50 years. After exploded on the political scene in Chile. The victory has been so total that even the erstwhile opponents have adopted its core principles. Margaret Thatcher famously bragged that her proudest accomplishment was creating Tony Blair, basking in the irony that neoliberalism would be implemented across the globe in large part by labor and socialist parties. Today, even erstwhile communist countries maintain so-called special economic zones. With the laws of neoliberalism are allowed to run rampant in exchange for GDP increases, and their communist supporters in the West have come to believe that capitalism is a far more powerful engine of economic development and the state planning advocated by their forbearers. Thus internalizing the greatest principle of neoliberalism even ethically and to oppose it. All of this, of course, raises 2 questions. What actually is neoliberalism and how did it come to rule the world? Today we're going to try to answer the first question by looking back at the original neoliberals and examining what they believed. Because it's not what you think. There are many places you can begin the story of neoliberalism. I'm choosing to start in France in 1938. Now. The 1930s are a bad time to be a free trade market liberal. And just to clear this up early liberal in the European context, which is where a lot of the beginning of the story takes place, does not mean the same thing as it does in the American context. European liberalism up to this point is about free trade markets, individual liberty and rights, etcetera, etcetera. But it's anti state interference. To be somewhat reductive, it's kind of closer to what conservatism is in the US, but it's not identical, so bear that in mind as the story goes on. Dirty saw the rise of fascism and social democracy and communism, each with its own form of government spending and economic planning, which liberals absolutely detested. Now, the 1920s and 30s have been full of liberals gathering to try to figure out what to do next, and in 1937, Walter Lippman, an American writer who would become most famous for inventing the term Cold War. Wrote a book called an Inquiry into the principles of The Good Society, which argue that totalitarianism is a product of not having individual private property, and the state needs to be limited to administering justice and not, you know, giving people things that they need. And so a lot of liberals read this and go, oh cool, we should organize a conference to talk about this book and our ideas. And the product is in 1938, Lippman Colloquium. Now, a bunch of extremely important neoliberals show up at this conference, including one Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Ropke, and Alexander Rusto. And they start talking about the need for a new kind of liberalism to oppose communism, Keynesianism, fascism and what they call Manchester or laissez faire liberalism, in which the state didn't intervene at all in political life and let the economy run on autopilot. Now, with the German sociologist Alexander Rustow, we're going to talk about more in a second. Comes up with the term neoliberalism. It's important to understand two things from the outset, because the neoliberals are going to spend the next 50 years lying about this. One, near liberalism favors a strong state to make the market work. And two, near liberalism is not the same thing as classical liberalism. Now neoliberals essentially invented the whole I'm a classical liberal thing in the 50s. But if you read the original stuff that they wrote, if you go back to 1940s, if you go back to 1930s and you read what they write, the neoliberals are extremely clear that they are not classical liberals, and that in fact their political project is different from the 20th century and 19th century liberal project, in which the state is supposed to be a night watchman and not actually interfere in the markets at all. The neoliberals originally, before they, you know, start lying about their actual origins. Reject this principle and come to believe that, in fact, a strong state is necessary to ensure that markets work O. Now you have neoliberalism as a thing, but nothing really happens much until after World War Two. Because during World War Two, almost everyone is just doing state economic planning. And so, you know all of these people rambling off to the side about how, oh the the market is the most efficient way to plant a system. Nobody listens to them because they're fighting a war, and the way you fight wars is doing state planning. And after World War Two, the situation for neoliberals is even worse, because having, you know gone through the experience of. Entire societies turning their entire. Economies and systems and planning agencies in order to, you know, mobilize a Total War effort, people after the war come back and go, oh, hey, we can do this to other parts of the economy. So this means that everyone, and this is not just a Communist states, this is, you know, this is Britain is doing Keynesianism, they're doing planning, they're doing state welfare programs. And the New deal is spreading also across the globe. Now, in response to all of this, Hayek and his allies to two things. The first is found in the Chicago School of Economics. And the second is to assemble The Avengers of taking food from children, the Montpellier on society. The Mongolian Society is the central neoliberal institution, which is a weird thing because in a lot of ways it's essentially just a closeted debate. Society intended to allow needler balls to work out their political principles behind closed doors. Now, at this first meeting in 1947, a lot of the people from the Littman colloquium are there. But unfortunately some of the French members of the colloquium and some of the people from Germany had collaborated with the Nazis, so they were out. And this meant that Hayek had to find new people to bring in. And the montelione societies first meeting is the first time you actually have all three major schools of neoliberal thought in the same place at the same time, arguing with each other. And they can't agree on ****. The only thing they can actually agree on is to look into more stuff. And to get a sense of how far away from moderate neoliberalism the arguments that are being had at the Napoleonic society are the Monteleone society has only ever once actually released a single statement stating its principles. And this statement was the only thing that could be agreed on at the first meeting of the Mongolian Society. And I'm just gonna read it. This is what they agreed to research. One, the analysis and explanation of the present crisis so as to reflect its essential moral and economic origins, 2 the redefinition of the state's function so as to distinguish more clearly between the totalitarian and liberal order. 3 methods of reestablishing the rule of law and assuring its developments that individuals and groups are not in a position to encroach upon their freedom of others and private property rights are not allowed to become a basis of predatory power. For the possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market. 5 methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance of Creed's hostile to liberty 6 the problem of creating an international order conductive to safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of harmonious international economic relations. You know, just by looking at this you you can immediately see signs of how far things are going to move. I mean, you know, one of one of the things that they're talking about is, again, they're trying to research whether or not it's possible to just give people things without the markets. And it's it's it's not just the sort of left, quote UN quote wing of the neoliberals who are arguing about this Hayek in in probably his most famous book that wrote to surf them. I mean explicitly says, yeah, you should just give people food and housing and stuff outside of the market and you know, like today if literally anyone who says this will be accused of socialism. This is the neoliberal, this is, you know, a large part of the neoliberal position in in 1947. Now, I've mentioned briefly that there are three schools of neoliberalism and we're going to spend some time looking at them because people have a tendency to look at neoliberalism and assume that, oh, it's it's it's just the Chicago School of Economics, you know, which is the neoclassical schools. Most famous member is Milton Friedman. And it's true that Chicago school are neoliberals, but and and this is critical, there's other intellectual schools involved in here. And it's not just, it's not just economists. Neoliberalism from the beginning is a multidisciplinary international project. You have lawyers, you have political scientists, you have journalists, you have philosophers, you have anthropologists. And the product of this is something is an ideology and a philosophy that is much deeper, much richer, and much more dangerous than just Chicago school alone. The second of the major schools is the Austrian school, which is led by Ludwig von Mises and Hayek. And maybe most importantly, but least well known, the third school. That we're actually going to be talking about today is the German auto Liberals, led by Alexander Rustow, who again invented determine liberalism, and wilheim rupke, who almost no one has ever heard of but are incredibly important. And I'm going to I'm going to insert a disclaimer here before I get yelled at by by nerds. Yes, I'm aware of the public choice theory at the Virginia School. I am also aware of that a group of the details is called the Geneva School, even though they're just regular or the Liberals. And there's also the rump of the NEO institutionalists. I don't care about them because they're not relevant to this story. Please do not yell at me on Twitter. Now, these people have wildly divergent beliefs, and so I'm gonna do my best to do one sentence summaries of what these people believe. So the Chicago school of neoclassical economics, humans are all knowing, calculating God's rationally optimizing their behavior to get the most out of every single human interaction they engage in to maximize the utility, the product of this infinite freedom to choose economic equilibrium. The Austrian school humans are pig ignorant ***** who know literally nothing and therefore must be made to bow down to the ever changing disequilibrium of the market, which is the only thing that can actually process information. Ordoliberalism. The markets won't create or balance itself because these uncultured proletarian swine keep asking for raises instead of focusing on the magic of the family. So we have to use the state and laws to force people and companies to do competition, and these are obviously simply comical summaries of it. But these are very, very different conceptions of what it is to be human, of whether the market occurs naturally or not of. What? The market actually is is it a product? Is is it an object in and of itself? Is it a product? Is it just an inevitable product of humans doing whatever humans do? And this is part of the reason why it's always almost impossible to get the original neoliberals agree on anything. But. This is actually one of the strength of the Neolita project. The project only works because it uses the products of all three branches. You have neoclassical attacks on the welfare state, ostring attacks on central planning and order, liberal theories of the state and sort of cultural and the non economic nature of markets. And you know when one school essentially fails as an explanation for something, they could go to another school. And this gives them a very wide range of abilities and move between. Crises and move between people attacking any of the individual schools because they can simply pull out another set of theories. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about each of the schools, and we're going to start with Chicago school because again, it's the most famous. And because I uh, I think there's a there's another very interesting story here into how the Chicago school changed from its origins. So one of the people who was supposed to be a founding member of the Chicago school was a Mandarin Henry Simmons. And Simmons is unlike the rest of the Chicago school because he actually believes in things. So I'm going to read a couple of quotes. From him thus the great enemy of democracy has monopoly in all its forms. Gigantic corporate trade associations and other agencies have price control, trade unions or in general. Organization and concentration of power within functional classes. Here's another 1A monopolist is an implicit thief because its possession of market power leads to the exchange of commodities at prices that do not reflect underlying social scarcities. And you know, you can see this sort of one of one of the classic neoliberal arguments, which is that, OK, so you have you, you have the market, the market is efficient and trade unions get in the way of the market because the monopoly. But Simmons has what kind of looks like a, from our perspective, a left wing critique of monopolies, which is yeah, OK giant corporate monopolies are thieves because they they, they use their market power to, to rob people by charging higher prices. And it it's it's. I genuinely can't say how differently things would have gone if Simmons had actually been around to see the Chicago's go through because he commits suicide in 1946. And unlike every single other person who was going to be involved with the Chicago school from the beginning until now, Simmons had a genuine commitment to democracy and anti monopoly principles. But unfortunately he he dies in 1946 and by the by the Chicago school is really up and running in the 50s. Almost everyone involved in it is overtly Pro Monopoly, Pro Corporation and are, you know, they set up an antitrust school. But the thing at the antitrust school is arguing is that monopolies are actually essentially impossible because competition will just take care of everything. And if you try to stop monopolies from happening, it will interfere in the economy. Now this is this is the line that Milton Friedman takes, and it's also the line of the Volcker Fund, who are a sort of. I guess you could call them a charitable organization, but it's basically a a billionaire slush funds that funds the school. And they've had real fights with Simmons because Simmons is like, well, OK, monopolies are bad at Volker is like, well, we're a monopoly, so you guys need to actually work for us. And by the time Friedman essentially takes over the Chicago school and night take it over, they're not just intellectual mercenaries. They're extremely proud of the fact that they are, in fact, pure intellectual mercenary hacks with absolutely dogshite economics if you've ever read. Just a or, you know, if you've ever been forced to take an economics class, you took microeconomics. That's basically just what Chicago school believes. It's everyone's a rational actor. Every, every human being spends all of their time trying to calculate the maximum utility of anything that they do. Everything is a market. Everything functions by supply and demand. Crickets are perfectly efficient if you just let them alone and don't interfere with them. Everything the state does interferes with the markets. Etcetera, etcetera. This is. This is the thing that is sort of classically understood to be neoliberalism's core content. But it's extremely important to understand that these are not the only neoliberals. And in fact, not only are these not the only neoliberals. This set of political principles, to a large extent, is not what the neoliberals actually believe. This kind of stuff is essentially what they feed the rubes. Small states taxes bad, regulation bad everything is a market and has always been a market, and all human interactions will inevitably produce markets. But to understand what neoliberals actually believe. We need to talk about the order Liberals. Now the two most important order liberals are Wilhelm Ropke and WW Rusto, who were both exiled during the Nazi regime. Now, a lot of the other order liberals who stayed in Nazi Germany collaborated with the Nazi regime, which is something that's kind of just overlooked and brushed to the side when people write about them. But rope key and Rousseau's status as people who, you know, fled the Nazis gives them a kind of social cachet that their colleagues don't have, and they become extremely important. Now, in some ways, the order Liberals could be considered the left wing of of the neoliberals. They are significantly less harsh on the welfare state than other forms of neoliberalism, and this is in large part because the order of liberals. Are the first neoliberals to ever actually hold any power. And I think people most people tend to think that the first time the liberalism was ever implemented was Chile. But that's not really true. The order Liberals are actually very powerful in in 1950s Germany now. The problem they face is that. The left is powerful enough in 1950 Germany that they cannot actually just completely eliminate the welfare state. So. Their solution is to create this thing called the social markets. And the order Liberals get accused of like being crypto socialists by a lot of the other neoliberals, but that's not really what's going on. The very important thing about the order Liberals is that, unlike the Chicago school, they're not economists. Both Roque and Rusto are social scientist, Russo sociologist. And they argue that the state and the market alone cannot maintain market society, because market society produces dislocation, you know, produces atomization. It destroys social cohesion. And this means that you need a social, political and sort of cultural framework to maintain it. And their major focus is on providing stability and security for the working class and a new sense of sort of identity and cultural cohesion. Because I think if the working class is essentially left to itself, it will create massification cultural decay and eventually the working class will turn into the proletariat, and that will give you either communism or fascism. The order Liberals believe that there's there's there's a kind of natural hierarchical order that they're trying to preserve and that this is essentially what Ordo means. It means literally order which accords with the essence of humans. This means an order in which proportion, measure, and balance exists. Now they have a few ways that they're going to do this. Rock is obsessed with something called structural policy, and structural policy is basically the argument that the conditions for markets have to be specifically created. And again, they're not just economic positions or social conditions, and this is fused with rostos. Vital politique, which is essentially about that the power of anthropological and human aspects of culture and politics are beyond the forces of production. That they think are vital to the functioning of society. And part of what they're doing here is that they want to give some people a cultural thing to focus on. So they stop talking about like wages and welfare and who owns production. But the combination of of vital politics and structural policy gets you order liberalism. So nominally they focus on individuals, but really what they're focusing on as the family, as this quote UN quote decentralized engine of economic capitalism with small businesses and hopefully small family farms as a sort of apolitical social support. Race for capitalism, which they're going to promote and set against the radicalism of the sort of industrial proletariat. And this, this sort of middle class that they're aspiring to build is extremely important for a number of reasons. Partially as a way to diffuse working class tension, partially as a way to sort of offer workers something to aspire to, and partly as a way to fuse the sort of traditional natural hierarchy with conception and baracy. Now Roque in particular also begins to look for systems outside of justice, the democratic state, to sort of create this legal apparatus that the neoliberals want to use to impose markets. And this is extremely important because a lot of where neoliberalism blinds are coming from is not from national governments, it's from this sort of international bureaucracy. It's from the IMF, it's from the World Bank, it's from the World Trade Organization. And those groups are controlled by by neoliberal lawyers. And Roque is the person who essentially first has this idea. Now, the goal of using these international legal institutions as a way of creating law, the laws, to sort of enforce neoliberalism is using it as a way to sort of get around democracy. And I'm going to read this quote from Roque because. Oh boy. Does he absolutely not believe in freedom and democracy in the way that he and everyone else talks about publicly? It is possible that in my opinion of the strong state, I am even more fascist fascist sister than you yourself, because I would indeed like to see all economic policy decisions concentrated in the hand of a fully independent and vigorous state, weakened by no pluralist authorities of a corporatist kind. I see the strength of the state in the intensity, not extensiveness, of its economic policies. How the constitutional legal structure of such a state should be designed as a question in and of itself, for which I have no patent receipt to offer? I share your opinion that the old formulas of parliamentary democracy have proven themselves useless. People must get used to the fact that there is also a presidential authoritarian. Even yes, horrible thing to say. Dictatorial democracy. O what he's saying there is that he's sending a letter to one of his friends and he's going, yeah, I'm, I'm even more fascist than you are. I think that democracy is actually a threat to the markets and that in order to avoid authoritarian democracy we should in fact concentrate all economic decision making power in a in in the hands of a narrow elite, in a strong state which is, you know, the opposite of everything that neoliberals opened the claim to be supporting. But. Behind closed doors and we will get into more of this in a second. This is what they actually believe. Now, Roque is somewhat unique among neoliberals in that he is racist. By neoliberal standards, he's just enormously incredibly racist. So, for example, he's he's a massive apartheid dude. And again, I need to point this out. Rogue is one of the things is one of the most important neoliberals. He's one of the founding members of the Montpelier on society. Although he gets kicked out for well, he eventually leaves because of some disputes he has with Hayek. But you know, I'm going to read some of the things that he says about South Africa because they're horrible. Quote the South African ***** is not only a man of an utterly different race, but at the same time stems from a completely different type and level of civilization. He also calls ending Apartheid quote national suicide. And you know, so she starts saying this stuff and the other neoliberals are like, dude, what the ****? So the neoliberal he used newspaper like he wrote for for 30 years. Which is like what? And publish a bunch of students going stop this, this is you. You cannot seriously be supporting apartheid like this. And his response and newspaper is called the NZ and his response is quote these NZ near intellectuals will not be satisfied until they let a real cannibal speak. Now Roque is one of his friends and other MPs member named Honnold. So Hayek looks at Rope case support for apartheid and he's like, what the ****? Like no absolutely not. Like this is horrible. Why? Why are you doing this? You know 22 high X credit that this is. The extent of the credit I will give Hayek in this episode is that he looks at just the the open. Overt racism of Rogaine is like no and. When when he does this, rookie friends huddled, says that Hayek quote now advocates one man, one vote in race mixing. Now you can see a lot of things here about, OK, that are extremely scary, and one of those things is that the the language that he's speaking this the West is committing national suicide. The clash of Civilizations, race war stuff, you know, this is, this is essentially the the, I mean literally the national suicide thing is what white nationalists say today. And Roque is in a lot of ways a white nationalist. He just sort of a German one. But. What's what's really scary about Roque is that she's not sort of bound by, by the sort of strictures of of of a neoclassical, neoclassical economist. So, for example, he won't propose that, like the dating market, like like dating should be on market and that rich, like men should be able to, like, I go on an app and like, like, every, every every single time a person gets into a relationship, it should just be entirely based on market exchange and stuff like that. Because, you know, he doesn't think like an economist. He thinks about cultural factors. He thinks about sort of. Social factors. But he also he's cracked the code for how neoliberalism is going to be implemented the way you do. Neoliberalism is neoliberalism plus racism. And he realizes that you you need to, you know, neoliberalism's actual sort of. Policies right will cause atomization, will cause, social dislocation, will cause. That the existing social structures of society sort of implode. And he realizes that in order to get this to work, you need you need a spiritual base, you need some kind of new thing. That you can use to to sort of bring all these people together. And he fixed Catholicism. Which doesn't work because. I mean, there's a number of reasons for this, but, you know, partially it's too early. Partially it's because he picks Catholicism and not evangelicalism. But this is how the neoliberals are eventually going to take power. By aligning themselves with the evangelicals who promised to solve the atomization they're creating with religion and family and the patriarchy. And he figures this out in like the 60s. But it's just, you know, like 20 years before the rest of the levels figured out. Now there's the he also has like a bunch of very similar stuff that he thinks about this about Rhodesia. But interestingly, he has more support for his positions on Rhodesia than he does for his positions on South Africa. And now I'm going to, we're going to jump back to Chicago school. We're going to read some Milton Friedman stuff about Rhodesia, because dear God. Quote Majority rule for Rhodesia today is a euphemism for a black minority government, which would almost surely mean both the eviction or exodus of most of the whites, and also a drastically lower living level and opportunity for the black masses of Rhodesia. Here's another one where he's describing the system of one person, one vote quote, a system of highly weighted voting in which special interests have far greater role to play than does the general interest. You know, so that's a scription of what democracy is. In contrast, he thinks the market economy is, quote, a system of effective proportional representation. Now treatment also thinks that you know, so there's a blockade like economic blockade of Rhodesia going on because. They're Rhodesia and they are maybe the worst people ever. That's probably my only only in biology. Exaggeration. Yeah, it's just, you know, absolutely fanatical. Like, what's the premise of government? And Friedman also calls the isolation of Rhodesia, quote, the suicide of the West. And, you know, he's doing this on racial lines, but he's also. Doing this along the lines of this argument that. Democracy itself is actually bad. And this is the place that he can express it because, you know, he can leverage racism to get away with it. And I'm, I'm, I'm going to read another Friedman quote because. I I think it's it's important to understand what the neoliberals actually think about democracy. Quote this was sometimes emitted by members of Mount Pelion in public, but only when they felt that their program was in the a sense. Let's be clear, I don't believe in democracy in one sense. You don't believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy. Meant Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year. 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Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people and so alleviating poverty? Is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Your miraval matte courage already runs in your blood. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. Sisters of the Underground is a new scripted series about fearless women exploring the life and legacy of the Mirabal sisters, Dominican women who were brave enough to challenge decades of oppression. Together, they led their country toward a revolution against Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. No, please, please help us has blood on his hands from executive producers Dania Ramirez and Eva Longoria. That's me comes the powerful retelling of this all too relevant narrative. Listen to sisters of the underground as part of Michael Toura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I find it hard to find anybody who will say that if democracy is interpreted as majority rule, you will find it hard to find anybody who will say that. 55% of the people believe the other 545% of the people should be shot. That's an appropriate exercise of democracy, but I believe is not a democracy but an individual freedom in a society in which individuals cooperate with one another. So he's, he's making a sort of what's in some ways a kind of anarchist argument against democracy, which is that like, yeah, OK, so if if you interpret democracy as prematurity rule that a majority can just do a terrible thing, that minority. But, you know, what the neoliberals actually mean by this is that at 55% of the population. But for example, I don't know, take money from the rich small part of the of the population and distribute it around, and they think that is totalitarianism. And in order to stop that from happening, they are in fact absolutely and perfectly willing to just back dictatorships. And, you know, that's in essence what they what they what they actually want. Is a state, the sole function of which essentially is to ensure that nobody ever does this, and you know if you could do this inside of a democratic framework. Fine. But if you can't, well, I don't know. It's time for a coup. We're going to turn to to Hayek and the Austrians because Hayek also is known as the sort of like, as a libertarian, as this person who sort of believes in spontaneous order and like things that I you should only have sort of small, decentralized political institutions. And so we're going to watch Hayek. Quote a bunch of stuff from and agree with a bunch of stuff from Carl Schmidt, which is again incredible because Hayek elsewhere described Schmidt as quote the Nazis chief jurist, which is true. But here here are some other things that Hayek has said about Karl Schmidt. Quote the weakness of the government of non deponent democracy was very clearly seen by the Extraordinary German student of politics, Carl Schmidt, who in the 1920s probably understood the character of the developing. Well, government better than most people. And, you know, Hayek believes a lot of the same things that Schmidt does. So, you know, one of them, the things that Schmidt is like big on is that liberalism and democracy are opposite things. And Hayek also believes this. And OK, so so I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read some Schmidt, and I'm gonna read some Hayek. And they're going to be saying the same thing. So here's Schmidt. Only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free market. Only a strong state can generate, generate genuine decentralization and bring about free and autonomous domains. Here's Hayek, if we proceed on the assumption that only the exercise. This is of freedom. That the majority will are important. We would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom. So what height? What? Hayek. Yeah, Schmidt is saying that only a strong state can can support a free market and decentralization. Hayek is saying if you let a democracy exist that has majority rule, it will create unfreedom. Now we will get into this more when we talk about like, Chile, because oh boy, is there some other **** that Hayek has to do with that. But most neoliberals hate democracy no matter what they say in public. And, and this is the other important thing here, neoliberals lie they like constantly. They lie to the point where sorting out their actual beliefs becomes almost impossible. And even their intellectual enemies believe the lies they tell. Well, most people think the neoliberals believe is that, you know, they want a small government and liberty in an unregulated market that will occur naturally through spontaneous. There because it's human nature to what the truck and barter and rationally calculate things. And the neoliberals don't believe any of this. This is just what they tell to the groups. What they actually want is a large and powerful surveillance and legal state and a massive bureaucracy to enforce essentially pro corporate policies at gunpoint. I'm gonna read close out the episode by by Reading a list of. Things that Philip Mirowski use in economic history do studies neoliberalism, whose work I've used a lot for for these episodes, wrote about the the the sort of the the sort of 11 principles of what neoliberals actually believe. One, free markets do not occur naturally, they must be actively constructed through political organizing. 2 The market is an information processor and the most efficient one possible. More efficient than any government or any single human being could be. Truth can only be validated by the market. 3 Market Society is and therefore should be the natural and inexorable state of humankind. The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state, but to take control of it and to redefine its structure and function in order to create and maintain the market friendly culture. Five, there is no contradiction between public politics citizen and private market entrepreneur consumer, because the latter does and should eclipse the former. 6 the most important virtue, more important than justice or anything else, is freedom, defined negatively as freedom to choose. Most importantly defined as the freedom to acquiesce to the imperatives of the market. Seven, capital has a natural right to flow freely across national borders 8 inequality of resources, income, wealth, and even political rights. Is a good thing. It promotes productivity because people envy the rich and emulate them. People who complain about inequality are either sore losers or old fogies who need to get hip to the way things work. Nowadays, 9. Corporations could do no wrong. By definition, competition will take care of all problems, including any tendency. Monopoly 10, the market engineered and promoted by neoliberal experts, can always provide a solution to the problems seemingly endlessly caused by the market in the 1st place. There's always an app for that 11. There's no difference between is and should be free markets. Both should be normatively and are positively the most efficient economic system and the most just way of doing politics and the most empirically true description of human behavior and the most ethical and moral way to live. Which in turn explains, justifies, and justifies why there are versions of free markets should be, and as neoliberals build more and more power, increasingly are universal. Yeah, we, we've, we've, we've read a long list of things. But essentially the point of this is that the Liberals want to transform everything into the market because they think the market is a more efficient way of doing things in a better and more moral and more just way of doing things than anything else you could possibly imagine, including, you know, things like democracy. And, you know, and any problem the system produces will be solved by the system. Now, this is this is an incredibly radical political program in a lot of ways. In that it well. You know, you can, you can, you can argue whether it's a radical or reactionary program. I mean, I think, I think it's it's a deeply reactionary one in some ways, but it is a is a program that is vastly different than anything else that has come before it. Now. The challenge of course, was getting anyone else to agree to this. And the answer is that it's really hard to, it is extremely hard to convince people that, you know, everyone should bow down to the market, et cetera, et cetera. And so the the the only way they can actually do this is by lying. Now. As as Mirowski describes, the neoliberals operate an incredibly sophisticated intellectual and political network that forms a sort of matroska doll with malt polaron Cydia Center and an ever expanding group of more and less specialized think tanks, the shell layers. So in this way that they mirror the vanguard structure and sort of front group networks, they're Communist opponents, but they have significantly better financial backing. And this means that, you know, they can run the American Enterprise Institute and, you know, with with with copious amounts of coke money. They can run this entire enormous network of think tanks that allows them to sort of act as a government in waiting and. The other thing that they're going to attempt to do? Is take over the global regulatory bureaucracy, the IMF, the World Bank, eventually the World Trade organizations and. Force people to do this at gun points by using those organizations. Now all they needed was a crisis that they could use to implement their policies, and next week we're going to look at the crisis that gave them exactly what they wanted. This has been naked. Happened here. Find us on Instagram and on Twitter at happened here, pod. Find the rest of our stuff at cool so and goodbye. The Gangster Chronicles Podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around underworld criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement. We cover all facets of the game. Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify promoting mission activities. We just discussed the ramifications and repercussions of these activities because after all, if you play gangster games, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes. iHeartRadio is number one for podcast, but don't take our word for it. Find against The Chronicles podcast on. By heart radio app or wherever you get your podcast. Make sure to check out drink champs you're #1 music podcast on the Black Effect podcast network host NO R&D JEFN sat down with artists and icon yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos, and I don't want to have to be the villain, but when I went and did the donda thing, yay returned, and everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out drink champs conversation with yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday. On the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's? I mean, that's that's all I got today. Who's who's taken over? Come on. I did my part. I guess it's me. I guess. I guess it's me. All right. Well, then what what show is this and what do we do? This is it could happen here. We talk about. Things being bad and also what you can do about them. But this is a this is a things are bad episode and not of what you can do about the episode. Specifically, this is Part 2 of what I guess you could call our miniseries on neoliberalism. And so, you know, yesterday we talked a lot about who the original neoliberals are. They, they, they they have a bit of power in Germany in the 50s, but in the 50s and 60s and up to the 70s, if they're kind of nobodies, they're, you know, they're, they're, they're, they have a couple of think tanks, but they're kind of just siloed off in the corner and they yell at people and people kind of ignore them. And what they're waiting for, essentially, is the right crisis. And in the 1970s they finally find that crises now, I think. It's kind of hard to remember in a lot of ways because of how the 80s went. But in the early 1970s things are not looking good for capitalism. I mean you have so, you know, I end date wins this election, 1970 we'll talk about. What happened there in another episode, but, you know, it's it's not just that in, in in 1940, nineteen 74. Well, so through the whole early 1970s, umbilical carbaryl is just absolutely annihilating the Portuguese army. And he, you know, he he wins, he fights one of like one of history's greatest guerrilla wars. And this basically destroys the entire Portuguese state and causes the Carnation, Carnation revolution. The Portuguese colonies get free, the dirt takes part in Ethiopia and the 1975 the North Vietnam. Winds up the like the war in Vietnam and now you know the product of this is that. Cambodia falls, Laos falls. There's now there's five social estates in east and East Asia and Southeast Asia. And you also Mongolia, but nobody really cares about them. And as as all of this is happening as these sort of as the anti colonial armies are sort of marching their way through the world. There's an enormous economic crisis. And. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things happening at the same time. One of the ones I think is probably the thing that people remember the most is there's just unbelievable inflation. And. You know, and and economic growth starts to slow down, although. Something I think that we do need to keep in mind is that when I say economic growth slows, so economic growth from like from 1967, nineteen 69 to 1979 is about 3.2%. From 2000 to 2007 it was 2.3% in the US. And so you know what I say, there's an economic crisis going on here. Like economic growth in the 70s is better than any decade. It's sense. But it's still considered the crisis decade because there's much inflation. And, you know, everyone has their own theory as to why this is happening. Because. The, the, the sort of Keynesians who've been in power whose thing is, Oh well, we can, you know, if there's ever an economic crisis, we can sort of, we can spend money in that, you know, the government spending money will drag everyone out of the crisis. But in Keynesian theory, like there's not supposed to be inflation if. Like if if unemployment is increasing and this economic crisis is not supposed to be inflation, and suddenly there's both, and so the Canadians have nothing and they're sort of just running around. Like, just with like basically like chickens with their head cut off. Like, oh God, we have no idea what's happening. We know what's happening. And so into this gap steps a bunch of weirdos. And so I'm just going, I'm going to go through a few of the theories as to why this crisis happened because. I don't know. And I think there's elements of truth in most of this stories. Ish, kind of. But you know, it's this is extremely complicated and there's still no consensus on it. So I'm going to start with the most crank. Which is so, so the, the, the, the, the Ron Paul people. Whole thing is yeah, every everything went to **** has been **** ever since because the US abandoned the gold standard. And, like, they're right into the extent that this happens. So basically, Nixon's been trying to pay for the Vietnam War and he can't. And, you know, the the US dollar has been pegged to a certain amount of gold, right? And you can do this thing where if you get it, you have an American dollar, you can exchange it for that amount of gold. And so Charles de Gaulle just is like, OK, we're just, we're going to take all of this gold. And so if he does, and the US starts running out of gold and so by, by, by in the early 70s, Nixon is like, **** this, you can't actually exchange dollars for gold anymore. And now every single libertarian starts every rant with Fiat currency. But you know, this, this, this does have an effect on the economy, which we'll talk about more in a bit. There's, you know, there's there's a lot of other explanations for this, the modern monetary theory people if you listen to them, and also Peter Thiel, weirdly. We'll argue, oh, it's all because of the oil shock. Because oil prices increased. Uh neoliberals will spend neoliberal essentially they blame too much government spending, welfare programs, and then, like wages being too high and also bad monetary policy, there's like an entire. There's there's like 17 different marches explanations for it, some of which are all I'll talk about, like 1 1/2 of them. That are more plausible. One of the explanations has to do with how. Essentially, so the everything that's happening in the 1670s is that minorities and women are entering the workplace and they're, you know. Actually demanding to be paid the wages that white men have been being paid. And corporations essentially just can't afford this. And so, you know, they they have two choices. It's either we pay these people actual wages or we just murder everyone. And they took the second one. So it's something that that has also been happening this whole period is that? Profit rates and manufacturing just keep collapsing, and there's a whole thing here about some Marxist theory stuff, but the thing that's important is that. And this this does happen in the 70s. Eventually you hit a point where manufacturing growth becomes 0 sum. And, you know, so you you can have manufacturing growth in one country, but you can't have it in another because at a certain point you're producing too much stuff and people start getting kicked out of the labor process. And this has a bunch of effects. One is it means you get a bunch of people who are employed, and two, it means that. There's just a bunch of money floating around that nobody can actually invest in places. And this is, you know, like all of the weird stuff the Saudis do. Is just basically from this money, there's this whole piles of oil money that are just sitting around that nobody can invest in anything. And that's going to cause, you know, that that, that, that that that's gonna cause a lot of stuff down the road. But. For now, yeah. We'll talk about the debt crisis causes sort of next episode, but. For now, I'm going to try to pull all of these together and like have something have a coherent thing that makes sense, which is essentially by the end of the 70s, profit rates are declining and then Nixon pulls, you know, Nixon pulls the dollar off the gold standard. And this causes the value of the dollar just plunge. And this this is the thing that sets off the 1970s oil crisis. So the national crisis is weird because it's not an oil crisis. Every everyone looks at the oil crisis and goes, oh, is it oil crisis is a crisis because it wasn't enough oil. And it it's it's not. It's nothing to do with that is literally nothing to a supply of oil at all. What actually happens is that. So you have OPEC, right? OPEC is this sort of is the alliance of oil producing cartels and they have this extremely complicated system where they. They they they sell oil to oil companies, and then the oil companies sell that oil, they refine it and sell it to you. And they have this incredibly convoluted tax structure on it. And eventually so the oil companies. Are having like the price of oil starts to rise and the oil companies are basically just taking it all off the profit from this and so OPEC goes, OK, you guys are going to pay taxes? And the oil companies just refuse. And so OPEC, just unilaterally, just you know, OPEC just unilaterally is like, OK, you guys are going to pay taxes and we're going to make you pay taxes by Inc by just increasing the price that we sell you oil at. And this gets remembered as like. OPEC increasing the price of oil even though it was literally just them saying you're gonna pay taxes. Now. This is the part that's very weird, which is that. OK, so if you do hear you too. Heard of the oil crisis, like the story? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I the way it's always gone in textbooks is you talk about like the stagflation of the 70s and the ******* you know, lines of of cars at gas stations going back blocks because of. OPEC *******. And yeah, that's how it's always framed, is that like, there's this big political crisis over OPEC that led to the gas supply getting throttled, and it came at a time when the economy had already slowed down and everything got terrible. And then a few years later we got RoboCop. Yeah, well, we we do get real pop. But the important thing about the story is that every single thing about that story is wrong. Every part of it. Well, I mean, there were lines at gas stations, yeah. I mean, there are lines, gas stations. But the lines at the gas stations have literally nothing to do with OPEC. There's just nothing. So on October 16th, 191973, the Arab members of OPEC are like, **** it, we're going to make the oil companies pay more for oil and then the rest of the rest of OPEC follows them now. Two days later or is it? Yeah, the the next day there is a completely unrelated thing to all of this, which is that while while this is going on, the Young Kippur war starts and so Egypt and Syria attack Israel like basic attack the Israeli occupation forces in their country. And the the war is going really badly for them. They're, I mean, it's, I mean it's not going, it's not going as badly as like the previous wars had gone for the Arab powers. It's not going great. And so on October 17th, 6, Arab oil producing countries declared that they're cutting the amount of oil they export by 5% per month until Israel returns as territories it occupied in 1967 and they have an embargo on the US. But, and this, this is the very important part, this has nothing to do with OPEC. This is not OPEC at all. It's not it is. This is, this is, this is just a couple of random Arab countries are like we're going to do this and you know and and I think what I think is interesting about Robert you're talking about is is OPEC *******. You know is how this gets remembered. And this is this is one of the things that that neoliberals used to, sort of. Push their model of the world right, which is that everything functions off supply and demands and oh look, hey, the Arabs cut the supply of oil and that's why the prices rose. But it's just it's just wrong. It's empirically wrong. The price cut happens. I mean, the price increases happened the day before. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the price increases the day before the embargo and the embargo and the oil price. People are different groups. They have nothing to do with each other. But. You know this, this gets sort of system like this. This is this is how it's it's remembered. And you know, it's not just how to remember. Like the Encyclopedia Britannica has the date in which all of this stuff happens wrong. They have the sequence of events wrong, like all of the most of the people who write about this. Remember this whole thing wrong and and this is this is part of the sort of an enormous propaganda effort that the deal liberals are able to do at this moment, which is they convince everyone that, Oh yeah, the price increases and the the really the gas shortages. Are are are about OPEC, but again, also like the the US only imports like 7% of its oil. From from the countries who are doing the embargo at this point. So the actual thing that's going on has to do with price is it's a weird thing as with price controls and gas, companies are hoarding gas because they don't want to sell at a price control levels and stuff like that. But you know the the the oil price increases, you know, they yeah like it it it is bad. Like the price of oil does go up and there are shortages, but it it has nothing to do with. Like it has nothing to do with the embargo, is nothing to do with, you know, like the supply of oil going down. It's just. Companies didn't want to pay taxes and so they started hoarding the oil instead of selling it and they passed the price, the tax increase on to the consumer instead of paying it. And as we talked about before, once this sort of like tax increase goes that OPEC that, well some of the OPEC countries want to do, goes into place, like the price of oil does increase. And this does **** the economy even more. But the economy had already been sort of a mess before this. And it has one other very important effect. And, you know, this is, you know, I guess, I guess the theme of this episode is that the oil embargo matters, but the oil embargo matters because people think it matters, not because it did anything. And the other so it matters in the US because everyone thinks that, oh, the scary Arab nations are coming for us. But it matters in the rest of the world because. Everyone else looks at this and goes, wait, hold on, you can actually use commodities. Essentially, you can use commodity prices like countries that like have. Raw, you know, commodities can use this control to actually go fight. You know, pick to like to go fight the West, to go fight the capitalist and go like, you know, get money for themselves. And this leads us into something. Robert Carson, do you have you ever heard of the G77? Is that like the 77 countries that have the most money? Well that that that's the, that's the G7. Well yeah I was I was assuming no it's 7 might be just a longer list. I know. So yeah so so this is this is the other thing from this. That just is is completely lost almost completely lost to history and the 77 is actually still around but what what they are was. So. In in the 60s, you know you have all of these countries that have recently gained independence. In 60s and 70s all countries have gained independence from their sort of colonial overlords and they start to band together into a basically a voting bloc in the UN and also this is the other weird part about the story is that so in 1970s and 60s, seventies, particularly the UN actually matters. Like it's it's a, it's a it's a thing that people actually that like 20 ish years after World War Two where people were. Yeah, maybe. I mean, a good example of the degree to which the UN actually used to be meaningful is watch the 1st Street Fighter movie because the good guys in that are clearly based off the UN and nobody thinks it's ridiculous that the United Nations are actually doing something. It's fine to have Jean-Claude Van Damme be the leader of the United Nations, fist fighting a guy that that makes total sense. Yeah 1990s and you know and so and and part of talk about this more next episode but basically so the reason the UN is a joke right now is because of. What the US was doing to stop the G77 from doing anything. I mean I would argue that fail, massive failures in Rwanda and Bosnia had a huge impact on that tattoo. Yeah, a couple of genocides go down and people are like, well, what are these guys doing? But yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is, this is, this is how they got dysfunctional to the point where you can get that, which is so, so, OK, so you have, you know, you have a bunch of countries that call themselves, you know, the, the the term they use for themselves is the third world. And they come together to form this group and it's it's it's a really weird ideological mixed bag. Like, I mean you have, you know, you have, you have like actual socialists like Tanzania, Julius Neray and Michael Borley and Jamaica. You've also got like Gaddafi in the Baathists. And like both, Doctor was a socialist. Come on. Yeah, just paradise. Gaddafi's Libya, Libya. OK, my, my, my, my, my most contrarian hot take is that slack Jadid was like actually kind of an ML. Who was that? He was. He was briefly the the the the Bathurst in charge of Syria, and then he got overthrown by Hafez Assad. But both of them, there's definite like, actual like. Marxist, you know linen it there's some like especially in the old school Bathurst like there were aspects of that there was socialism kind of within it it just it would be nonsense. Like for example, call Saddam Hussein's Baath socialist guys. Yeah. Yeah. And you know and you see like this is, this is, this is, this is a real grab back and you have there's also just a bunch of random Latin American countries like none of whom you can call socialist. And then there's also Saudi Arabia and Thailand are are in this group. OK. Get a sense of how fractious this is. India and Pakistan are also both part of this and they fight two full scale wars while they're both in the G77. Actually, that's true. There's two full scale wars and then there's like another half war they fight in the 90s. Yeah, this, yeah. Like all the people in this thing are fighting are literally fighting wars against each other. It's kind of a mess. And you know, it's fun, it's fun in in the mid 60s and until 1974 it's kind of their whole thing is we have moral authority. Like we're. Yeah, like we're, you know, we're, we're like we we we we have the authority of all of these nations, have colonized us for a long time and we're going to use that. But in in the 70s, you know the oil embargo happens and a lot like most, I think all most of the OPEC states are, are, are, are in. Umm. Are, are, are in the G77 and they look at, they look at the oil embargo and they look at OPEC raising prices and they go, wait, we can do this too. When the OPEC states are like, oh, hey, we can use this to push the, you know we can use it to like push the whole power of like of the third world. And they, they, they're planning to do this is something called the new international Economic Order, which is also something that no one has ever heard of. That is extremely important that. Has just. It's I guess the spoiler alert is that this this movement gets crushed so thoroughly that nobody knows what the new economic order is, and the third world is now a slur. But, you know, the thing that they're trying to do is create a new era calls the new international economic Order a trade union of the poor. And so it it's, it's this thing they're trying to get passed through the UN that would, you know, just designed to sort of ensure the economic sovereignty of these developing nations. And I'm going to read a list of the stuff that's in here. So a an absolute. Right of states to control the extraction and marketing of their domestic natural resources. B. The establishment and recognition of state managed resource cartels to stabilize and raise commodity prices. See the regulation of transnational corporations had no strings attached. Technology transfers from north to South, E the granting of preferential trade preferences to countries in the South, and F forgiveness for for certain debts that states in the South owed to the north. So this is like. This, this, this thing, if the international economic order had ever been implemented at all, it would have completely reversed the basically completely reversed the balance of economic power. Shifting it basically from countries like the US, like, you know, Western Europe, like Japan that are these giant manufacturing powerhouses, two countries that produce, you know, raw materials and they would have, you know, everything that happened from this is. You have these the no strings that you have a debt relief for the global S and also these these technology transfers. And the plan is basically to. Create a a bunch of mini OECS for just not even mini OPS. Create OpEx basically for every commodity. So you know you have like an OPEC, but it's for like bauxite or like copper. And you know, they would use, they would, you know, you have all these opacs and each one of them uses their power and they all cooperate to to to, to make sure that there's a stable price for all of these commodities. And another part of this is that it's supposed to basically enshrine the right of countries to be able to just, like, nationalize resource companies. So, you know, you have like a British oil company. I was like, Nope, we just take it out. Now it's ours. And the thread of this is great enough that if you read conservatives in the era, they will say things like the Soviet Union is no longer a threat. The greatest danger to the West today is the G77. Yeah, it yeah, this is this. Yeah, it's it's these these people are enormous right past that. Yeah. No, no one even remembers this anymore. And and it's it's because largely, it's because of how just unbelievably badly these guys got stopped. You know, and one of the other things that happens out of the product of this is this is where the G7 comes from and it's originally, I think that's another thing. Oh yeah. The other fun part about this. So the G7 is originally a secret alliance like through this, the whole 70s, nobody knows G7 exists. It's basically it starts just like secret meeting of a bunch of finance ministers. Eventually they add Canada and I think Japan to it goes up to seven members and. You know, they, they, they they have a couple of things we're trying to deal with, to try to deal with the economic collapse. But one of the big things, like one of the biggest things are dealing with is the G77 and OPEC. And this, this. The result of this is this, these enormous series of fights in, implausibly, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Which is, I think, this, this is this is the last time ever that the fate of the entire world would be decided in a battle in like a subcommittee of the UN. And there's there's years and years and years of negotiations. Between. Well, the the G7 hasn't like openly declared itself as G7. It's sort of just it's basically the the, the the the the rich European countries. So it's Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the US and Japan like four form this alliance and are like. Locked in together in order to stop the G7 from 77 from doing anything. And this is this is the, this is the other, the other. The other crisis that the neoliberals are responding to is it's. It's not just. And in many ways, this is the one that scares them more. Because. You know, it's not just there's an economic crisis. It's not just that, like capitalists are afraid because of losing money. It's. If this stuff goes through. The entire balance of power. In the entire global economy is going to change. And it's going to swing into the favor of a bunch of non Western countries, and probably more most importantly from the Liberals. They're going to enshrine the right of states to take things away from corporations and regulate them. And this is just. Absolutely, completely unacceptable to both the neoliberals and just every single other organization that's even tangentially involved with sort of the Western nations. So the neoliberals. I talked about this a bit in in the last episode, which is that. They they've been working on a strategy in order to take power that doesn't rely on States and So what they've been doing for about. 20 years is essentially infiltrating and working their way up through it, like basically basically taking over the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank who. In this. And this is everything I think is is very weird and hard to remember, which is that the IMF and the World Bank. Like there was a time when they weren't completely evil. Like, like, the IMF was basically set up to make sure that countries wouldn't just run out of money. Right. It was supposed to give people like, yeah. And the World Bank and it's it's turned into sort of this, like international debt system for poorer countries where they're. Yeah. Always. Yeah. And being forced into austerity measures and the like. Yeah. Yeah. And and that. But that that didn't used to be true. It used to be, you know, the IMF had a bunch of Keynesians in it and same with the World Bank. And both, both the IMF and the World Bank's leadership for a lot of this. Wanted to negotiate. And you know, and I think this is this, this is, this is, this is where we're going to leave it here. With basically the the the the the the the entire world isn't in Apocal crisis. There is the all the economies are collapsing the the the the the the armies of of the anti colonial like world are are moving. And the the the G77 looks like it's it's literally on the verge of of you know completely restructuring the economic system in a way that actually would have been slightly more fair and just than what. The system that existed then, which was also infinitely more just and fair of the system that exists now. And next episode we're going to talk about how this all fell apart and how there was a choice in the 70s between either corporations can make money or people can have things. And the the the the product of what the neoliberals are going to do in the next episode is that they are going to. Their solution to this problem is to tell the entire rest of the earth to eat **** and die. And yeah that's that's that's the episode. It's yeah. Yeah, history. Yeah, it's it's a time. OK, well, we got any, uh, we got any? Any plegables? What do we? Yeah. Yeah, history. Yeah, it's it's a time. OK, well, we got any, uh, we got any? Any plegables? What do we what do we do at the end of episodes? Sophie? Where are we? Thank you. Are we? Thank you for listening. We'll be back on a day at a time maybe. We're not hearing you, Sophie. I think you're muted. I'm not muted. I'm not muted. Oh, there we go. I'm not muted. I haven't been muted the whole time. We didn't hear you. Yeah, I just randomly halfway through because that's so weird. I said we'll be back on a day or a time, and, yeah, at some point, we'll be back. Find us then. Yeah, and find us tomorrow. Unless this comes out on Friday, in which case is gonna go Friday. Be with your family. Be with the ones you got. This is dropping on. Adopt A cat. Adopt 2 cats, maybe 4-3 cats. Four adopt 4 cats. Yeah, get a number of cats greater than the number you have. Put them in your house. We'll see you on Monday. 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