Part One: How Conservatism Won reveals how the 1964 Powell Memorandum orchestrated a corporate counteroffensive against liberalism. Funded by business elites, this strategy utilized think tanks like Rand to manufacture consensus, exemplified by Leon Gower's flawed Vietnam analysis that justified escalation. By financing intellectuals and capturing courts, corporations successfully shifted norms toward trickle-down economics and deregulation. Ultimately, this coordinated effort transformed American institutions, ensuring corporate power remains unchecked while normalizing policies that harm workers in favor of wealthy interests. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Behind The Bastards Intro00:01:46
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human on paper.
The three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses.
We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes, which by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
We're pretty close, though.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Saturday, May 2nd, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas.
At our 2026 iHeart Country Festival, presented by Capital One.
Tickets are on sale now.
Get yours before they sell out at ticketmaster.com.
That's ticketmaster.com.
Cool zone media.
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is just disastrously hungover right now.
Birthday Colonoscopy Chaos00:02:53
I am not doing well, everybody.
It is the day after or around my birthday happened at some point in the last 48 hours, or perhaps right now.
Hello, Dave.
How are you doing?
Woo!
Can I read the text message you sent me at 4:05 in the morning?
Yeah.
I have alarms, but if they don't wake me, you can call me.
You not spelled out like you normally do, which was my favorite part.
Was it like E-W-E?
You can call me.
We did just have another U yesterday, so that would make sense.
I can't believe it was your birthday.
Happy birthday.
That's lovely.
Dave, it was a happy birthday until I had to wake up.
Well, yeah.
I mean, that's yeah, it's life, man.
You know, just pummeling, just pummeling us.
But the hits keep coming.
Just celebrate today.
Yeah, just to say, I'm really glad you were born.
Good job.
Oh, thank you.
If anyone at home wants to celebrate my birthday, just, I don't know, send me some of your fingernails.
All the fingernails.
I want as many fingers.
No, you're right.
Someone will do that.
Someone will do that.
We probably shouldn't.
Dave.
Yeah.
It bell.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
David Bell's here.
Hi.
Co-host, co-impresario of the gamefully unemployed network network.
That's Kookmerk.
My former co-worker at cracked.com.
That's cool.
Manabout Town at Some More News.
That's cool.
How are you doing today, Dave?
I'm good.
I'm living the dream.
I'm wheeling and dealing.
I got to figure out, I got to schedule a colonoscopy.
Ooh, you're hitting that.
You know, just doing the things.
You know, just living it, living life.
Yeah, that's good.
That's good.
You know, I do, do you have, is it a recreational colonoscopy or a necessary one?
Can it be both?
Yeah, okay, that's fair.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
No, I mean, I probably have nothing wrong with me.
I just, you know, I'm hitting 40.
I have like a slight family history and I talked to my, I got a new, I got a new doctor and I was like, what about them colonoscopies?
And they were like, yeah, let's do it.
Let's fucking do it.
And then we're doing it.
We're doing the colonoscopy.
Yeah.
Excellent.
Yeah, it's exciting stuff, you know?
Well, I have not had a colonoscopy yet, although soon.
But you know what is the moral equivalent of having a camera shoved up your ass?
Ooh, what?
Living in the United States in an election year, 2024.
And a big part of why it feels that way is because of a little concept that you might be aware of, Dave.
Liberal Republican Think Tanks00:15:10
The think tank.
Ooh.
Yeah.
What do you know about the think tank as a concept?
I mean, I always picture like a SeaWorld style tank filled with brine and just a giant floating brain that a group of scientists sort of circle around and that brain is hooked up to computers and then the data gets printed out and they take that data and then they use it or ignore it and then they just do whatever they want to do politically.
Wow.
It's amazing.
That's nearly the opposite of what it really is.
So what a think take really is, is a way in which to generate paper.
And then that paper convinces journalists that your policies are real policies.
And then you take over the Supreme Court.
Right.
Now, I know this is going to sound kind of eluded.
We're talking about how the Republican Party kind of won and specifically how they turned around the situation that existed in this country in the United States that we don't talk about much.
It's very, especially because on the right, there's this need to believe that the 50s and 60s were this like era where everything was better and like the whole country was more conservative.
And then there's this need among liberals on the left to believe that like they have kind of been ascendant lately and sort of the last couple of years of resurgent right-wing stuff has been a severe disruption of the norm.
And neither of those is really accurate because the reality of the situation is that in the 50s and 60s, basically any commentator who was looking at it honestly would have told you that like, well, liberalism has clearly won.
And when we talk about liberalism, I'm not talking about like what the way we kind of talk about liberals today or the way liberals often like to see themselves as progressives.
I'm talking about like an economic and kind of social set of political beliefs that was the dominant way in which people viewed politics by the 1950s.
Liberal economic policy and social orthodoxy reigned supreme in the post-war era.
And it was like it had such a degree of capture of the system that literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, in the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole intellectual tradition.
He claimed there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation, only, and I love this term, irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Now, a bunch of people are going to be like thinking about all the fucked up shit that they knew the government was doing in the 50s and 60s, like overthrowing governments in Latin America and getting into Vietnam and being like, well, how can you say that liberalism was dominant in this period?
And I can say that because like, well, it was liberals doing a lot of that, right?
Like it was JFK who got our asses into Vietnam and LBJ, the great society guy who accelerated it.
So I'm not, yeah.
Right.
And like, I don't know what's considered liberal or leftist.
Yeah.
You know, 50%.
Definitely not leftist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it's always going to be different, right?
Like what, you know, I you look at Star Trek, which is considered pretty progressive, but then you go and look at TNG and you're like, man, they're almost there, but they still don't quite, you know, like, I don't know.
They wouldn't let Riker kiss a dude, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And he wanted to.
Jonathan Frakes was in.
Of course.
Yeah.
I mean, he fucked everything.
My favorite is the non-binary aliens.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where he immediately, like upon meeting them, is like, oh, I have to fuck one of these.
I don't care which.
I got to check off this box.
Oh, poor Riker.
But yeah, so when we're talking about this, we're talking about the idea that like, and it makes some sense if you think about like what happened to the right is as a result of World War II.
Both like in the pre-war period, you have this kind of like isolationist reactionary strain that really has to retreat because we go to war with the Nazis and they're like, oh, shit, we have to, we have to get very careful about how we talk about some of the things we believe.
So it's just this very like fundamentally different period.
And one of the few things that is kind of similar and sort of how we look at liberalism from then to now is that it was, and actually much more so back then, defined by this kind of embrace of public spending and huge public works projects, right?
That was pretty universally accepted as what the government ought to be doing to the point where I can look at like Dwight D. Eisenhower, famous Republican president, builds a massive interstate highway system, right?
Which is not a thing that you would get a Republican supporting today, like a public works project on that scale.
It's kind of inconceivable now, but that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about how like people, a lot of people in public policy at the time were like, well, yeah, this kind of liberal trend towards what the role of the state should be in society has clearly won.
And there's not really any other game in town.
It's funny you should frame it this way because I've actually, I've talked about this with friends and stuff before, and like people always frame it kind of not like, oh, you know how they used to be liberal.
It's more of like, you know how what's considered quote unquote leftist or liberal used to just be the norm?
Where it's like, you know, we used to fix our highways up and that wasn't seen as a political thing.
Yeah.
It was just, it was just a thing you have to do when you run a government.
Like, would you, would you agree with that?
Or would you say that they were, they were, it was seen at the time as very liberal?
Because I feel like these are things that other countries do too that aren't seen as political leaning at all.
Yeah.
And part of the story today and why we have think tanks is to make all that seem more political than it used to.
But it's also just a matter of like when you're when you're looking back to that period of time, you're looking at a period of time in which like the Republicans had a very strong liberal arm of the party.
There were like Rockefeller was a liberal Republican.
There were like that that was like a dominant part of the Republican Party.
There were liberal Republican presidential candidates who did pretty well.
Right.
And that's a really different situation today.
Like now, and again, I'm not saying none of these people you would call like a leftist.
Although they are all people who, if they ran today, would be called leftists by Republicans, right?
Like that's the thing.
It's so hard to like separate these words anymore.
Yes.
Yes.
And I know that's a frustrating part of this.
I think I've, I like, I don't even know what to call myself.
I'm certainly, I don't think I'm a liberal.
I'm very left-leaning and very progressive.
But like, I think I've accidentally called myself just a liberal because they're all like leftist liberal.
They're all L-words that are just like, eh, they mean like, I don't know.
But it's just interesting because like the idea of a liberal Republican, I'm just like, I don't even know how that works.
But then I think about like, you know, Nixon, I think it was Nixon created the EPA.
Yes, that's a great example of how things have shifted where like a guy like, and Nixon went to China and normalized relations with Mao, right?
Like another thing that you wouldn't really, I mean, Trump kind of tried to do his version of it with North Korea, but it was not really the same deal, you know?
No, not at all.
And like, I don't know.
A lot of this stuff to me just seems like just things you have to do, right?
Where it's like, we need to protect our like forests and national parks.
It doesn't feel like it needs to be political at all, but it's just funny when you start trying to figure that out, those labels.
When I quote these like guys from the 50s and 60s saying, well, like liberalism is clearly one, that's kind of what they're referring to is right.
So much stuff that is now seen as political, spending any amount of public money on anything to help people is deeply political, right?
And it sounds like to some people it was political then.
So it needs there was a tiny number of those people who thought of it that way.
And they were mostly very, very wealthy business owners, primarily people who had inherited businesses and whatnot from their families.
And they're going to be kind of the folks who actually wind up creating the network of think tanks.
Like that is the story we're talking about today, because this was all started as a way to shift public consensus away from the idea that like the government can do things to benefit people and towards the idea that like any public spending is communism, right?
Like that's, that's a big part of what we're talking about today.
And there's a number of reasons why we went from like FDR being the most beloved president in American history to like, I think he's still broadly, people have fond memories of him.
But if anybody pushed policies today, like this, you know, like FDR did, they would be called a dictator, right?
Like it would be like unimaginably controversial.
And there's a number of reasons why the status quo here started to change.
One of them was the Vietnam War, right?
And how much fucking money it cost.
And by the time you hit like the mid to late 70s, you've got, you know, the economy sort of grinding to a halt, inflation rising, stuff that will never happen again.
And there's, there starts to be this awareness among like public policy people in the United States that like, oh, the unlimited money train from after World War II isn't going to keep going on forever.
Right.
And so, yeah, we're going to talk about that because like getting us from FDR to LBJ to Ronald Reagan and then to Trump was in part the result of a concerted effort to shift the culture by building a robust system for generating conservative thoughts and then pumping them into the culture at scale so they looked like they had scholarly support and public support.
And they kind of did that until they made it true.
And I think a good place to start is with the development of the concept of the think tank.
These are not a uniquely American institution, but they are uniquely influential and powerful in the United States.
There's not any other nation on earth that has its public policy or political culture shaped so much by think tanks, which are basically dark money sinks where intellectuals who are bribed generate the illusion of consensus in exchange for money, right?
Like that's that's what they are.
They're for people who don't like reality, right?
Like it's the idea of like, I have a thing.
I want to get richer doing this thing or I want to support these people.
But like reality, like studies and facts are showing that like it's bad to do this.
So let's let's recreate studies and facts to look like they're pushing this thing I want.
And one of the ways in which because you have think tanks that are more intellectually rigorous and they all charge for their shit.
And a lot of the shitty think tanks that are like funded by the oil and gas industry give out their papers for free.
So you'll have like journalists writing articles and they're like, wow, I need two different opinions on whether or not we should frack the oil fields in fucking Texas.
And one, you know, think tank that actually does real research will say, you have to pay us $1,200 for our papers on what will happen.
And the Heritage Foundation says, here you go.
Here's a thousand pages of shit that you can cite in your articles and it's all free.
That's like a simplified version of the game that's going on here.
Right.
It sounds a lot like studies.
Like there's studies where like you start looking into them and you're like, wait, this doesn't actually say the thing that the headlines are saying.
And again, sometimes it's done insidiously.
Sometimes I think it's just people misinterpret things or like they're trying to like you're saying, like actual, actual like work takes money because it takes people.
And that's not very sexy.
No, but you can, you can have a fancy name for an organization and just put out papers that say whatever you want them to say.
And if you do it with like a good letter ahead, people will trust that there's there's something to what you're saying.
It's amazing how far a good font will get you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the idea that like we would have, and it's kind of worth going back a bit and talk about how like the field of public policy analysis, which is kind of where think tanks as a concept come out of how recent it is.
Because for most of the history of governments, you didn't have professional people who like analyzed policy and looked into how it was working.
Right.
Like progress was sometimes you'd get a king who was like reasonably smart and sometimes you'd get an inbred royal king who would either like take things back a couple of decades or be weak enough that like a couple of smart guys can move things forward.
You get a done.
You get a tunnel.
You get a done or two.
You get a couple of world wars.
And then in the 20th century, after we finally invented cigarettes, people got smart.
And that's when we start doing actual policy analysis.
It's really not until like the 1900s that we actually start in kind of a concerted way, like looking at a lot of where you have these guys who are like, I'm an expert in urban planning, right?
I'm an expert in like energy policy, right?
You had like guys who were kind of doing that in the 1800s, but it starts to actually become like systematized in the 1900s.
Right.
Yeah.
It's a bunch of people who's like, I'm a pervert for this one thing.
Yes.
All of a sudden.
Yeah.
And I can I can exist that way.
Yeah.
It's like, cool, you weird little freak.
That's great.
We'll consult you when we need questions about that thing.
And that's kind of like, that is kind of a quietly revolutionary concept because it implies that like, well, whatever our society is doing right now might not be the best way to do things.
And so we should always be looking at doing them differently.
And most that's, that hasn't always been like a thing you could expect from a society, right?
Right.
And there's a, there's a really fun 1991 doctoral dissertation by Dr. Susan Marie Willis I found that notes that in the period leading up to World War II, there was this kind of turning point in the federal government's willingness to solicit expert advice in solving the nation's problems.
And as a result, quote, the country's intellectual magnet shifted from New York City to Washington, D.C. during that time.
The shift is placed on reliance on policy experts earlier during World War I, when many businessmen and academicians played key roles in wartime management on the War Industries Board.
It is certainly true that Roosevelt had the help of his famous Brains Trust in formulating some New Deal policy, and also that Woodrow Wilson took selected scholars with him to the Versailles Peace Conference.
In both cases, these were individual consulting scholars and economists, many drawn from Harvard, but not associated with any formal census of group or policy research body.
So, this is kind of when you start to get the idea that like the president would not just bring in his own people specifically, but might like actually pick experts who were at least ostensibly independent and they would advise him on stuff, right?
That's when this starts to become more common.
Experts And Political Authority00:04:58
Right.
And that just seems like good leadership for the most part.
It seems smart, right?
Yeah, it's bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I like, I remember in film school talking about, or like being a manager, right?
Where it's like part of being a good manager or a director is to consult the people who are very ultra into specific things and hear what they have to say.
I mean, now we got Wikipedia.
So we don't need any of that.
But you can see how there could be a good and a bad side, right?
Where if the president's trying to like, I don't know, deal with the aftermath of World War I, yeah, you should probably bring an academic who knows something about like fucking Austria-Hungary, like and its different political factions and whatnot.
That makes sense.
Seems like that guy should be there.
Yeah, but they shouldn't necessarily, I mean, it's only as good as the person, right?
If your expert is, say, a racist, then everything they're going to do is tinted that way.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's why people look to like the idea of computers as being impartial.
But then also you need someone who has instincts on something as well.
Like being an expert in something should also mean being able to interpret that information in a, in a good way.
And also kind of the problem with this is that when it's just seen as like, well, yeah, we elected this president and he and all of the people in his administration are all like, you know, members of the same team.
When you start to see like, well, no, some of the people giving him advice are like independent experts and they're just trying to do what's best based on the facts.
Well, are they?
Like they won't always be.
Sometimes they'll be just as political as anybody else the president might hire.
But if you start thinking about them as like possessed of some sort of objective wisdom that's above the fray, you can also wind up not being critical enough of like what they're actually doing.
Yeah.
They also become, it's that thing.
It's, we've seen it a million times where someone's really smart about one thing.
Yeah.
That doesn't mean they're smart about everything.
And so like you have to know how to use that person and that information.
Yeah.
And like know what to do with that information, the broader consequences of that.
Because experts, I mean, there's a reason why there's that weird stereotype of like, yeah, these snooty college types, right?
Where it's like, yeah, I sort of get it.
Like, you know, we're used to having a lot of authority in one thing.
You start acting with that authority on everything sometimes.
Yeah.
And kind of on the other side of things, if you're like some scholar who's a weird, wonky expert in different kind of obscure European political conflicts and shit, and the president comes to ask you to help him at a peace conference, you might just kind of try to figure out what the president wants to hear and tell him that.
Right.
You know, because, you know, it's noteworthy that Wilson took all of these scholars with him to Versailles, but like we all know that didn't go well.
That wasn't a good peace treaty, right?
Like that was, it's like a famously bad peace treaty.
So this is sort of the prehistoric era in think tanks.
If you're thinking about like your evolutionary chart, this is when like the fish gets on to land, right?
And the fish is eventually going to be named the Heritage Foundation.
It's a good fish name.
But this period, you start in kind of the period after Wilson, you get this groundwork laid for what's going to come after.
It becomes the norm that private economists, lawyers, and experts will be brought in to advise presidents and Congress about like, you know, just over time during like their entire periods in office, but also about specific issues, right?
It becomes more normal.
And again, this isn't like a clean break.
You could find examples of this, you know, in earlier decades and centuries, but it becomes normalized that like, well, we're debating this bill on like setting up, I don't know, fucking phone infrastructure for the country.
Let's bring in an expert on that, right?
like an actual like policy expert to like talk about how this should go or what they think will happen with this thing.
And it becomes really desirous for experts to get positions like this.
And organizations, specifically corporations who have a lot of vested interest in some of these like different bills being put for building infrastructure, start to realize that like, well, if we fund experts, if we like have experts that we have paid to get to that position in society, that could really help us out when it comes time to like, we want to make sure that these laws are written in such a way that we get some of these government contracts, right?
You know, you get all of this happening at once, both this positive benefit of like, yeah, we actually have people who know what they're doing being consulted about laws.
And also these people are often deeply corrupted because they need money before they hit that point.
And there's always corporations willing to pay for people to become experts as long as they, you know, know who buttered their bread.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, so money.
Money is a real problem.
Like it seems like it shouldn't be involved in everything we do.
No.
There should be things we do that don't have to be motivated by money, but you know, no, that's the, that's the beautiful dream of Star Trek that sometimes we could just act purely based on whether or not Will Riker wants to fuck something.
Untraditionally Lala Laughs00:02:35
And Will Riker always wants to fuck something.
His dick is its own currency.
That's right.
Speaking of Riker's dick, these ads.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditionally Lala.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes.
But over here on my podcast, Untraditionally Lala, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
I've been full on oversharing with fans, family, and former frenemies like Tom Schwartz.
I had a little bone to pick with Schwartzy when he came on the pod.
You don't feel bad that you told me I was a bootleg housewife?
I must flipped a pizza in your lap.
Oh God, I literally forgot about that until just now.
Sorry, I don't want to blame all of that.
I got to blame that one on the alcohol.
This is about laughing and learning when life just keeps on laughing.
Because I make mistakes so that you guys don't have to.
We're growing, we're thriving, and yes, sometimes we're barely surviving, but we do it all with love.
Listen to Untraditionally Lala on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
There's this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Wow.
This program.
I'm a guide.
Open your free iHeartRadio app.
Search the Ceno Show.
And listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
Sage Foundation Controversy00:14:43
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for a pitch, it's like, what?
Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Brook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Oh, we're back.
Now, before you can have someone who's an expert in like any kind of policy field, you have to have, I mean, I guess you don't have to have this, but it really helps.
You have to have like the ability to get degrees in stuff like economics and political science.
And that wasn't always specifically like graduate degrees.
And that was not always a thing.
Like it was kind of a process of consolidating these broad fields of knowledge into discrete fields of studies.
And it was sort of a thing that kind of happens along kind of the late 1800s, early 1900s, where you actually start to get like graduate schools and a university system that looks like the one we have today.
Right.
And we'll be talking about like what happens to the university system because this is really going to piss off a lot of people.
But you start to get the very first like kind of modern looking colleges that aren't just, you know, among other things, aren't just a place for rich kids to go, right?
Where it becomes more normal for like regular people to go and get degrees.
And then they can become experts in fields and influence public policy.
And that is kind of a quietly radical change.
It has a lot to do with why around the time of the Great Depression and the New Deal, you get all of these to us seemingly radical policies is because you have all of these people who were educated in a time in which like there wasn't really education wasn't politicized in the kind of way that it is now.
It still obviously had plenty of biases, right?
It reflected the biases of the culture that it was in.
But you did not have like right-wing schools.
You did not have like this kind of like culture war shit over schools.
And so as a result, educated experts tended to overwhelmingly be progressives.
And again, these are people who in a lot of ways we would consider deeply reactionary today, but they were all pretty supportive of like widespread the idea that like, yeah, you should use the government's money to help people, right?
To like do things, to have a society, you know?
That was the normal view of this kind of group of people.
I mean, yeah, it's that feels like that's the point of a government.
It's a group that basically has taken control of land and went like, all right, we're going to make it easy for everybody to live here.
And, you know, in exchange, you won't chop our heads off.
Yeah, we should have roads.
Oh, everyone is starving.
We should give people jobs and just have them build stuff for a while until this Great Depression thing shakes out.
Yeah.
I'm not trying to be like, and all of the experts were progressive.
So the world was perfect.
Because no, everybody was still racist as hell.
We did all sorts of fucked up stuff back then.
Progressive then did not entirely mean the same thing it does today, but there were certain things that just like weren't controversial back then, right?
Yeah.
And among the first great think tanks of American society was the Russell Sage Foundation, which had been established in 1907 from a $10 million donation.
And I'm going to quote from, and that was a lot of money back then.
That's like in about 20 something to me.
It's a lot of money for a dude.
Yeah.
That's not a lot in think tank terms back then, but I'm going to quote from Willis again.
It brought together amateur social investigators and charity volunteers with professional social scientists for the purpose of applying new research methods in the permanent improvement of social conditions.
There was a particular concern with child labor laws, child and family and health services and education.
The staff of educators, sociologists, and settlement house veterans comprised few academicians, but they compiled statistics and other pertinent information on social problems and abuses.
These data were made available to the general public as well as to state and local governments to guide them in practical policy formation.
This pamphlet was the most typical publication of the Sage Foundation at the time, and traveling exhibitions, which visited county fairs and schools, were also sent out.
So, this is you can see some similarity in that a lot of these today, these kind of like particularly more political think tanks will put out stuff that's meant to be widely consumed, information that like, you know, is meant to be sort of disseminated via social media or whatnot, or be like widely quoted in the news.
The Russell Sage Foundation is taking a more direct route because there's not as many organs for people to get that kind of stuff out.
So, they're just like handing out, they're looking into like, hey, how should we actually like educate children?
Is it bad for little kids to work?
We put together a pamphlet on this.
Like, let's all look into the.
And again, these people were extremely, and when I say, I said earlier, it wasn't really controversial to be against child labor or be in favor of public spending.
It was among like very wealthy people.
Obviously, the business owners in America are going to stage a coup against FDR in the early 30s, right?
But not among these educate, like these academics and stuff.
It's controversial.
Like controversy, you know, it's the implication that there are multiple competing views.
And it's weird when we count the views of the people who directly stand again.
You know, like it's weird to be like, it's, it's weird to say like, there's controversy amongst like the victims and the criminals that did this.
Like, like there's controversy amongst the bank robbers and the bank.
Yeah.
Crime love us.
Crime hate us.
Can't agree about armed robbery.
Yeah.
It's just like, I mean, it's just a group of people doing something bad and then a group of people saying like, yeah, what you're doing is bad.
And they're like, I disagree.
And it's like, oh, there's controversy.
We'd like to keep doing it.
When it comes to the term think tank, which again, kind of the Russell Sage Foundation is one of the first organ, like institutions you could call a think tank.
They weren't using that term back then.
And I wanted to look like try to figure out like where the phrase comes from, because as you noted when we started this, it sounds like it should be a big tank full of brine with a brain in it.
And that's actually pretty apropos to the history.
One historian traces it back to the 40s as a just a slang term for brain.
Like someone like my think tank's not ticking too well today.
Oh my God, that's such a good slang for brain that I'm kind of mad that they took that away from us.
We can take it back, Dave.
We can take it back.
Pour some knowledge into your think tank, folks, with this podcast.
Yeah.
I've heard another historian trace it to World War II, where it referred to like a war room, right?
Like you get all of your military experts together into your think tank and they figure out how to do a Normandy like a tank for sure.
Yeah, yeah, maybe that too.
Yeah.
It makes sense.
And it's also possible that it comes from a guy named Burton Pines, who is a historian who wrote about the traditionalist movement in the early 1980s.
And he used the analogy, gathering different fish into a tank and concentrating the brain power.
Dave.
Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say that's that's the dumbest, right?
That's the dumbest.
That is the dumbest.
I wanted to try it because whenever I hear like an insane analogy like that, like this is just a book about like traditionalists by this historian.
And I'm like, why the fuck would you use that analogy?
I haven't been able to get a copy of the book that he says this and it's not like online in a way that I was able to find it.
That's like a, I don't know what the context meant here.
Was this person a child?
Was they were they because that's the sort of thing like when you're a child and you hear about like ear wigs, you assume it's a wig on an ear.
Like that's, that's what a child would think when they hear think tank.
It's like, oh, yeah, like a bunch of fish are thinking.
You need to track down this person, Robert.
I do.
I kind of think maybe he was making fun of the traditionalists by being like, they're as dumb as a bunch of fish in a tank.
But that's also an insane way to call someone dumb.
Like, why would you do it that way?
Just say they're silly.
Man.
Yeah, you need to track this person down and find their family.
Yeah.
And have them on the show and make them answer for themselves.
See, usually, Dave, when I suggest finding someone's family, someone then posits something that's a crime.
You're the first person to just say we should have them on the show.
I'm not going to praise you.
You can do a crime while they're on the show.
It doesn't have to be a crime against them, but like there'll be crimes, you know?
See, this is why you're a pinch hitter, Dave.
Thank you.
You're able to swing left and right.
Yeah.
So I don't know what the fuck, why the fuck he used this phrase.
It's baffling to me.
But the development of what become known as think tanks, you know, really starting in the 80s primarily, happens before we have a name for them.
And a big, like, a guy who's kind of influential in the development of this concept is Frederick Taylor.
If you've ever heard of Taylorism, it's this thing that in kind of the mid-century is going to become increasingly common in every different field of endeavor.
We tailorize police forces, which is when we're like, well, what if we standardize police training?
And what if we try to have like metrics for police officers and see if we can make them, you know, work better and more efficient?
And we do the same thing with factories.
We're going to tailorize this factory.
It's, it's scientific management, right?
Frederick Taylor is that guy.
You're talking about like standardized technology.
Absolutely.
That all is in that same tradition.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's optimizing organizations and workflow for efficiency.
Taylorism is going to be a big deal.
It's where we get Deloitte and McKinsey, these consulting firms, right?
Like they all have Taylorism in their DNA.
And one of Robert Taylor's friends is this guy named Robert Brookings.
And does the Brookings sound familiar to you, Dave?
It does.
Yeah.
He's, this is the Brookings Institute guy, right?
And the Brookings Institute is from this earlier generation of think tanks that actually think about things, right?
They're not just going to put out stuff to like make one politician or the other happy.
Among other things, the Brookings Institute are the people who like help put out the Vietnam papers or the Pentagon papers.
Like they're the guys Ellsberg is working with.
And that doesn't make anyone in the government very happy, right?
Like that's just actually something that needed to get out.
So we're talking kind of about like the pre-evil days here, although they're also not purely good either.
Robert Brookings had spent time in German colleges in the early 1900s.
And like a lot of Americans who did this, he came back with the thought that those Germans are on to something, right?
Surely their mechanistic obsession with pushing the limits of efficiency will only lead to good things for Germany.
It's 1913 and I'm very optimistic.
Coming back to America like those Germans, they're doing something over there.
They're on a run.
Exactly.
So Brookings, unlike most Americans who come back from Germany with ideas, he just gets into the dry goods business.
And he does well enough in dry goods that he becomes very rich and he gets a position on the war industries board in World War I, which ironically puts him directly opposite Germany.
The whole process of having doing a world war and of advising the government through a world war, because we had never had to mobilize the military, the closest thing was like the Civil War, but that had been quite a while before.
So this is like a big deal.
And it convinces him that having the government bringing in experts like me really helped the process of doing World War I.
So maybe we should make that normal across the board, right?
Maybe when the government wants to face, when Congress is voting on what the national budget should look like, they should talk to experts, right?
And so he decides, I'm going to put a bunch of my money, this wealth that I've got, into building an institution that can provide the government with the best possible information so it can make better choices, right?
That's his dream.
And that's where we get the Brookings Institute.
And he gets a bunch of his rich friends together and he's like, put some money into this thing.
And it's important.
This is going to be basically the same way think tanks work in the modern era, where you get all of these think tanks that are paid by a company.
Hey, we're ExxonMobil.
We want you to put out a bunch of research saying that gasoline is great for the environment, right?
The Brookings Institute looks like the same thing.
It's not quite because at this point, there is not really the expectation that by putting money into this thing, it will only publish information you want it to publish.
That's not really the case yet.
And people are going to get pissed about this as time goes on.
But yeah.
Sorry, this seems like a good idea on paper, right?
And you can immediately kind of see, like, what if we do this like direct channel to the government through experts?
Like, that won't get corrupt or like go bad, right?
Like, they'll accept the information we give them, even if the information is like, let's not do a war.
Like, they'll listen to us.
We keep going back to Star Trek.
It's kind of like the Borg, right?
Where you shoot at them once and you can fuck them up, but the second time their shields will have modulated.
So for a little while, the Brookings Institute actually works the way it's supposed to.
Rich people fund it and it puts out information.
And it's usually just information based on like what these experts, they're not perfect, they make mistakes, but it's what they actually think is best in these different fields of endeavor, right?
It's actual like attempts at analyzing policy and impact.
And it's not, again, this is not always good.
For example, the Brookings Institute is going to oppose much of the New Deal because they're really market driven.
And Roosevelt is saying we need more central planning, right?
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
But by the time Nixon's in office, you know, they are seen and derided a lot by Republicans as the liberal think tank, right?
And again, by the time Nixon's in office, these are the guys who published the Pentagon papers.
So like they are the symbol of like liberal progressive like ethos by the 70s.
And the fact that they switched like this is not because like there's much of an ideological capture.
It's that they're they're actually the people here are actually generally trying to do what they think is right.
Again, that doesn't mean they're always right, but like they are actually trying to analyze policy here.
For sure.
There's always that like I mean, when people, you know, there's, there's been a big push about like, you know, colleges and schools and being liberal and stuff, where it's that weird situation where you're like defending this thing, but you're like, I'm not saying it doesn't have problems.
Pentagon Papers History00:14:56
Yeah.
It's that weird in between where it's like, yes, it's more just that the criticism goes so over the top that you're just like, no, they can be criticized, just not for the shit you're saying.
Jesus.
Yeah.
It's like when we talk about like, oh, the good old days when progressives were ascendant.
It's like, well, people called Woodrow Wilson a progressive and he was like maybe our most racist president.
Yeah.
Like we had presidents who were slave owners and Wilson might have been more racist.
Like he was a terrible man.
There's a lot of nuance that gets lost in these conversations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not trying to paper over like, oh, to go back to the good old days of the progressive 50s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, so in the, it's one of those things where like the partly like after World War II in particular, like the Brookings Institute is kind of a little bit more what we might call conservative prior to World War II.
In the post-war years, like half of the world's money, literally half of all of the wealth in the world is in the United States.
Right.
And so for a period of time, debates over stuff like the budget and fiscal policy, like part of why Eisenhower is able to do these massive public works projects, part of why there's not that much organized resistance to the idea of public funding is that we have all of the money there's ever been, right?
And so stuff like you don't get a lot of people worrying over the budget so much in the 50s, you know?
One article I found from The Atlantic in 1986 by Greg Easterbrook describes the economy in like the mid-century as a dead issue and writes, social justice in Vietnam, and this is by the 60s, dominated the agenda.
Brookings concentrated on those fields, emerging as a chief source of arguments in favor of the great society and opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
In the Washington swirl, where few people have the time to actually read the reports they debate, respectability is often proportional to tonnage.
The more studies someone tosses on the table, the more likely he is to win his point.
For years, Brookings held a monopoly on tonnage.
Its papers supporting liberal positions went unchallenged by serious conservative rebuttals.
And so that's part of why there's not much counterweight to like a lot of these liberal ideas about like how money should be spent is that the only people researching them is the Brookings Institute.
So if you're going to like look at, well, what's the evidence on whether or not we should, you know, engage in this policy where you've got like 300 pages of shit from the Brookings Institute and nothing else.
So I guess it's easier to make that case, right?
Right.
Now, this is going to start to change by the period of the Nixon administration.
And part of what changes it is that this first wave of think tanks and expert advisors, a decent chunk of them had been intimately involved in like convincing the government that it was the right time, that Vietnam was a good thing to get into, right?
This was going to go well.
And these are not Brookings Institute people.
Again, they are pretty much pretty consistently like, this is a dumb idea.
We're like fucking ourselves over by sending troops to this war.
But it's another think tank that's going to be heavily involved in us getting into Vietnam.
And that think tank is called the Rand Corporation.
You heard of these guys?
These fun dudes?
These cool guys?
Were they right?
Were they right about Vietnam?
Yeah, it is really well.
Yeah, I just read Biden just signed a treaty with Vietnam.
So it must have gone well.
I haven't, this is, this is the last piece of history about Vietnam I read until a week ago.
So it seems like it all went well in the end.
It all went well.
Why would we be at peace with them otherwise?
Yeah, exactly.
So the Rand Corporation is founded right after the big dub-dub dose, and they're like a defense industry think tank.
And their initial obsession, they come out of this period.
We've just nuked Japan.
The Russians shortly thereafter get their own nukes.
And we're like, we should probably have some smart people figuring out what might happen as a result of the fact that we all now have these weapons, right?
That's a good idea.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
It's not a bad idea, right?
We all have doomsday devices.
Maybe get some of them brainiacs to work this way.
What do you think about this?
Is this a good idea?
And what's going to happen is the Brainiacs are going to be like, no, everything's bad.
And they'll be like, cool, thanks.
I mean, we're not going to do it.
We're just going to keep them.
But thanks.
Yeah.
That is, if they'd had, this is kind of, the Rand Corporation is kind of the first really influential think tank that is funded by a deep, because they're funded by the U.S. Air Force.
So they are not, in fact, going to be like, perhaps we shouldn't have these things.
You know what this is all reminding me of is when you go out with like friends, I'm sure you can relate, and you're making a series, you're like, you're drinking or you're doing whatever, and you tune to your friend and go like, I can have more drinks, right?
And the friend goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're looking to someone to just justify the bad decision you know you're going to make.
Yeah.
And that's what friends are for.
And these think tanks are like they're good friends now.
They go to them and go like, it's fine that we're doing this right.
And the think tank is like, yeah, yeah, it's fine, man.
Experts say it's fine.
Escalating our involvement in Vietnam is like me saying last night, yeah, I can get up at 10 a.m. to do this podcast.
Yeah, why not?
And you did.
You did it.
So Vietnam was fine.
I have felt like this is my Vietnam since about when I ran out of coffee.
Yeah.
So the initial obsession of the Rand Corporation is thinking the unthinkable.
That's kind of like their unofficial tagline, right?
Which is planning for a nuclear war, right?
The idea here, and it's interesting.
So they're right in near where we used to work, Dave.
They're kind of in between like Santa Monica and Hollywood.
Oh, we should have went and seen them.
We should have gone.
I don't know if they're still there, but they were for a time.
In fact, they were across the street from Mary Pickford's beach house.
And one description I've read at the time said that they, quote, did little but sit, think, talk, write, pass around memos, and dream up new ideas about nuclear war, which sounds like a fun life.
It kind of does.
Yeah, I could do that.
Yeah, sure.
Why not?
Bring me on, guys.
And again, like everything here, it's easy to see how it's like, well, yeah, that could be a good idea, right?
You probably want someone thinking about this for a living.
There's this romantic idea of like the quote unquote like scholars, right?
This idea of like, okay, there's so many humans and we have so much money and we've built the civilization.
People don't have to worry about just how to survive day to day.
What if we have a building where just a group of people get together and think about stuff and just like read all the books and like when we need an expert, we go to them and go like, what do you think?
What if we put all of the smartest boys in a room?
Yeah.
How would that work?
It's a romantic idea.
It's just that people are always going to be people too.
Yeah.
And that's the problem.
Dave.
Number one, they're funded by the Air Force.
And number two, the kind of guys who are both interested in and able to get a job thinking about nuclear war all day, they're the kind of people today we would cordon these people off from the rest of society by getting them into Warhammer 40,000, right?
Right.
This is where, by the way, instead of expert or enthusiast, I often say pervert because that I think really breaks it down, which is like, they're a weird little sick freak who's into this.
Yeah.
I think of.
There's nothing wrong with that.
You just have to remember that, right?
Yeah, I love that idea, Dave, because think of how different decades of like nuclear weapons policy would be if instead of bringing like nuclear weapons expert, it was like nuclear weapons pervert comes on CNN.
Yeah, where they would make a recognition and they'd be like, thank you.
I mean, we're all aware that you're a weird pervert about this, so we're going to take it with a grain of salt.
But thank you for your advice.
Yeah.
So the Rand guy wants to jack off onto more ICBMs.
Let's now talk to a not getting murdered expert.
Yeah, exactly.
No, not getting murdered pervert.
Yeah, perfect.
You're right.
You're right.
We got to be, we got to be consistent, Dave.
Otherwise, we have nothing.
So the Rand guys are a bunch of, they're war gamers, right?
Like a lot of them literally are, but that is the kind of guy that is drawn to this job.
These are like game theory nerds.
Yeah, exactly.
And they didn't have anything better to do in the 50s and 60s because there weren't many good war games than give the president bad advice about Vietnam.
Secretary of Defense and A-list war criminal Robert McNamara got most of his top aides from the Rand Corporation, and they provided more recommendations on U.S. policy in Vietnam than any other organization.
In fact, Rand reports were critical in influencing every stage of the war in Vietnam.
And this is where we really get into the think tank evil.
By the mid-60s, LBJ was trying to decide, should we escalate U.S. involvement in the war or not?
At this point, like 64 or something like that, the U.S. could have backed out, right?
We could have left.
We could have said like, sorry, this regime is bad.
We made a mistake.
Let's go.
And North Vietnam probably would have been like, hey, that's great.
That's all we ever wanted.
Like, we're good.
No, no more conflict is necessary.
This is not what happens because a researcher named Leon Gower, who was a project head at RAND, published several papers on morale among North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.
He like spends months traveling around the country talking to captured North Vietnamese soldiers, Viet Cong militants who had been like captured and stuff during like actions, and also just a bunch of like villagers living in kind of around the line of contact at the time.
And his conclusion, based on these interviews, is that Vietnamese morale is right around the corner from collapsing.
If we just stick it out a couple more months, victory is inevitable.
That we've got them on the ropes.
Now, we have them on the road.
They talked to prisoners and it was like, I talked to all these people that were captured, and I predict their morale is low.
They're really sad.
I think we're winning.
Talk to all the people who would be sad.
That's ridiculous.
Of course not.
Yeah.
You talk to the talk to the British people who were captured in 1940.
Yeah, they're probably pretty bummed about the way the war is going.
And this is the thing about experts or sorry, perverts, which is that like it's so tunnel-vision, right?
Where it's like, it's all so academic that a lot of the time the big thing they're missing is like the big obvious thing or the human factor.
And that happens, you know, that's like, I think a legit criticism of like colleges and shit like that often, too.
It's just a legit criticism of the way human beings analyze.
Like there's that famous study of like World War II.
They're looking at like all of their planes that get damaged.
Like, where are they getting damaged?
Those are the parts of the planes we should reinforce.
You can see that diagram that's got like, here are all the areas that planes are most often damaged in.
And then they like realize later, like, well, but we're just counting the planes that actually made it back.
So actually, those aren't the damage.
That's not the damage to focus on.
It's the planes that went down we should be paying attention to.
That's such a good example.
Yeah.
That's what's going to happen with all of Vietnam.
And I'm going to quote from a report in Ramparts magazine, which is a thing that no longer exists but was fucking dope for a very long time.
And this is their report on the Rand Corporation in Vietnam.
It was Gower's analyses that provided the scientific underpinning for the light at the end of the tunnel mentality that was so crucial to the escalation of the war and the devastation that followed.
In 1966, his work was identified by Carl Rowan as the study which lies at the heart of President Johnson's strategy.
The implications of the Gower study are profound, for they indicate yet another aspect of the erosion of democratic decision-making process that has attended every phase of the present conflict.
For both the RAND interviews of the NLF Cadre, the most complete portrait available of the other side in this war, and the reports from Leon Gower were classified and kept securely within the contact between within the contract between the warbent executive and the private corporation and thus and thereby unavailable to the American people.
In fact, to this day, Gower's reports are unavailable to Congress and will have to be read, and you will have to read them in ramparts.
And it's like, so that is the that, like, this is the by far like the best collection of information that we had at that point on North Vietnamese people's thoughts on how the war was going.
And it was entirely filtered through the lens of this very biased man who was being paid effectively by the U.S. Air Force, but was in a private corporation.
And so none of his work or methodology was open to being scrutinized by the public.
And his analysis that we were right around the corner from winning in Vietnam had the biggest impact on LBJ's decision to escalate of any like individual factor.
That's bleak.
That's it's really bad, right?
And she probably shouldn't do it like that.
Right.
It's like according to this expert who literally like it's asking an expert to look into whether or not they should continue to pay this person and he should have the job too.
Like it's that's like when one of the possibilities of like your study means that you no longer get to do the thing you're doing, you shouldn't get to do that study, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's the same thing with like police departments like inspecting each other, investigating each other over crimes.
Yeah.
Probably shouldn't let it because it is it is like as the as rampart said it's really anti-democratic, right?
Because you've got a bunch of people saying, I don't think we should be involved in Vietnam because why in the fuck are we sending soldiers to Vietnam?
And then you've got the president saying, well, look, you're all a bunch of casuals, a bunch of yehus who don't know anything.
I've talked to the experts and they say we're about to win.
You know?
Yeah, this is, it's such a tricky, this is where nuance comes into play because there's this idea like, you know, very recently we had something that happened in this country where a bunch of experts were saying, everybody needs to do this thing.
And people were like, ah, screw the experts.
Yeah.
And there was sort of this battle over it where it's like, sometimes experts, like when it's very, when it's very black and white, it's just like, yeah, you know, you should probably just do what they say, right?
Like, you know, if someone says, you know, don't lick toilet seats.
Well, I probably won't.
Yeah.
It's very tricky because I understand why over years and years, there are people who are like, ah, fuck the experts.
Because then you get these cases where it's like, like you're saying, undemocratic, where everybody's sort of saying, like, we should do these.
I should have the freedom to do these things or I believe we should do this.
And it's like, no, we're going to consult this handful of people to make the decision.
Feels very undemocratic.
And for the most part, it's just like it's, there's no right answer across the board, right?
Where it's like, I wish we were undemocratic about like climate change.
Like, I wish governments would just go, listen, this is what we're doing because otherwise we'll all die.
Climate Change Undemocratic Thinking00:03:15
But that's very dangerous thinking across the board.
So it really is like a case-by-case situation.
Yeah.
I mean, the overwhelming lesson of history is that there's actually no good way to do things.
Yes.
But the right way certainly isn't the one we're doing.
I think we can all agree on that.
And you know what else we can all agree on, Dave?
What?
Products and services.
Oh.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up cups at Surah may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes.
But over here on my podcast, Untraditional Le Lala, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
I've been full on oversharing with fans, family, and former frenemies like Tom Schwartz.
I had a little bone to pick with Schwartzy when he came on the pod.
You don't feel bad that you told me I was a bootleg housewife?
I must flipped a pizza in your lap.
Oh, God, I literally forgot about that until just now.
Sorry, I don't want to, I don't want to blame all of that.
I got to blame that one on the alcohol.
This is about laughing and learning when life just keeps on lifting because I make mistakes so that you guys don't have to.
We're growing, we're thriving, and yes, sometimes we're barely surviving, but we do it all with love.
Listen to Untraditional Ila on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
There's this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Open your free iHeart radio app.
Search the Ceno Show and listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
1964 Capital Bombing Study00:15:41
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back, Dave.
The Rand Corporation.
When we left them off, they had just told LBJ, hey, man, just a few more guys, just a few more hundred thousand U.S. troops, and it'll win us the war.
We're right around the corner.
Like the Vietnam's on the ropes.
Northern Vietnam can't hold out much more.
They're just about to give up, right?
Right.
And then we won.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As we all know, 1964 was the last year of the Vietnam War before our glorious victory.
And we started airdropping McDonald's's into the jungle.
So when you look at like the kind of analyses the Rand Corporation was providing to the U.S. government, the Johnson administration during Vietnam, they kind of dispassionately advised this kind of ladder, a ladder of escalation is how it's usually described, right?
Where like, if the enemy does this, then you add more troops.
If the enemy does this, then you carry out an offensive.
If the enemy does this, then we launch another bombing campaign, right?
It's a ladder of escalation.
Yes, yes.
An escalator.
I don't know if they had them back then.
It was the 60s.
It was the 60s.
We hadn't invented science yet.
Right.
They were throwing spears out of planes.
That's how the Air Force worked.
And all of this, this like ladder of escalation that Rand advises, it's based off of their belief about what Vietnam would do in response to us ordering a bombing campaign, right?
Of the North or of like, you know, of their capital, right?
And it was based on their understanding of this is what an opposing government would do in this situation.
So they're thinking, if our capital was bombed, how would we act, right?
Well, we would probably seek to sue for peace or whatever because like Americans would not put up with the capital being bombed.
You know, that would be a real issue for us.
Yeah.
We'd freak out.
We'd call French fries Freedom Fries for a while.
We would lose our minds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Things would get very embarrassing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Actually, I mean, the idea was that I think you've actually predicted what happened here, which is that like, well, when they bombed our capital, we went insane.
We didn't, we didn't seem to, we didn't go for negotiations.
But the Rand Corporation is like, well, if we bomb the capital, North Vietnam will want to come to the negotiating table.
They'll make concessions to us then, right?
Yeah, it feels like we were riding high on nukes, which is that like, I get why, like, well, I mean, Japan had already surrendered, right?
I'm pretty sure.
Or like, no, no, no, no.
I mean, that's a whole separate nuance of that.
It's all to say that, like, nukes was a new thing.
And so seeing a nuke and not knowing what it is, I can imagine a government being like, oh, okay, we're done here.
You know, like, I don't know what that is.
Yeah.
Because like the nukes are such a, you know, we drop two nukes on Japan and the government sues for peace, right?
That's the reality of what was going on is a bit more complicated than that.
But because that's like kind of the last thing that happens, you do get this attitude that like, well, we can bomb our problems away with enough bombs.
And the reality is that, yeah, we bombed the shit out of Japan prior to that and they didn't surrender until the nukes.
And we bombed the shit out of Germany and they didn't surrender because of the bombing, right?
Bombing doesn't make people surrender usually.
And it doesn't in the case of Vietnam, right?
The Rand Corporation has utterly misread North Vietnam.
Like they are not going to respond to the ladder of escalation the way we expect they are, as David Landau wrote in Ramparts.
Underlying almost all of Rand's work on the war in the late 60s and early 70s was the unquestioned assumption that the enemy in Vietnam would behave just like any other sovereign power at war, that he could be lured by attractive negotiating offers, which fell short of his stated position, or that refusing to negotiate, he could be brought to the peace table with the threat and use of force.
It was a universal failure to grasp the unique nature of the insurgency in Vietnam.
In other words, the kind of guys who work at Rand, who are like war gamers, who were obsessed with their own careers and like rational thought, could not accept that like, well, there's people over there that believe in things, right?
The people running the war effort in North Vietnam might not just come to the table because they get scared because of a bombing.
They might actually have principles that they're holding to, you know?
Yeah, that seems like an oversight that's common, which is like looking at them like NPCs, you know, where it's like, if we do this, then they'll get scared.
Yeah.
It's dehumanizing the enemy, right?
And the thing about doing that is it often screws yourself over, where it's like, if you're not thinking about them like human beings, then you don't actually know how to deal with them.
That's exactly it.
And it's the same thing you get with like, we're seeing with the Houthis right now, right?
Where it's like, okay, well, we sent, we started bombing them.
Oh, that hasn't changed what they're doing.
They're still throwing cruise missiles at ships.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, you could even scale it down.
Like, I think like that, that whole libs of TikTok interview where she just froze up to me has that stinks of like, they have this idea in their head of like a liberal journalist, this straw man.
And then when you actually sit down with these people, or like Elon Musk and Don Lemon, where it's like, then you realize like, oh, they're completely unprepared for this situation because they had this straw man in their head that they thought like, oh, this will be easy.
And then, so like, it's this, yeah, you can scale that up to war too, where it's like, it is like the same psychological, like the, the, the Rand Corporation in Vietnam are in the same position just like, yeah, Elon Musk in that interview or the libs of TikTok lady when she got like it, this happens repeatedly.
I mean, it's the same.
You could go back to like Nazi Germany, right?
When they invade Russia being like, because they're very much, if you look at like the Rand Corporation is telling LBJ, they're right around the corner from collapse.
Just push a little harder and they'll fall apart.
Hitler invades the USSR being like, yeah, if we just kick in the door, everything's going to collapse.
And it's like, no, it never quite works that way, does it, guys?
No, especially not with Russia.
Anytime you're trying, you should think about this when people talk about like, oh, you know, the Republicans, you know, don't have any real straight, like we outnumber them by so much, you know, Trump is on the ropes, right?
All we have to do is push a little harder and we'll beat them forever.
Yeah.
Anytime anyone's telling you that about your enemy, no, people believe in things.
It's hard to actually win a fight like this.
It's wild how we keep doing it because like this, not to deviate too far, but like the Oscars this year, they like read a Trump tweet on stage and everybody had a good laugh.
And it's like, do you remember the first election?
Like, you guys got to stop.
Like, there's such hubris.
And it's like, when does this ever worked out for you?
Jesus Christ.
Part of it, this reveals something like fundamentally like kind of horrible at the center of a lot of the human experience, which is that a huge number of people don't want to think that there can be other people who believe wildly different things from them and really believe it.
Are just like doing it to be like evil or like try to like get, but like actually have our like that is the center of their being.
Like the idea to a lot of these guys, the idea that like, yeah, in Vietnam, there are actual committed communists, nationalists who are willing to die, lots of them for a cause and are not willing to compromise on that cause, right?
You almost can't believe that because then you have to kind of accept that like people can live in a way that is wildly different from how I do.
And they're just as much people.
They're not like brainwashed or anything.
Like this is actually just a deeply held set of beliefs, right?
Right.
And even if you think they're doing it, like they don't fully believe it or they're doing it massive, I mean, we have like what sunken cost fallony or a fallacy or I call it being pot committed, which is like that idea that when you've put so much into it, you're not going to back out.
Yeah.
And that's, that's, that's really where we're headed here.
Um, because the Rand Corporation is very, very much integral in the U.S. getting pot committed to Vietnam.
Um, obviously, you can trace a lot of people's deaths back to the Rand Corporation's work there.
And this has two major effects on domestic politics in the United States.
One is that think tanks and experts, the concept of expertise, you brought up sort of like the way in which everyone, a lot of people reacted to experts talking about like what we should do with COVID.
A big part of why there's such a rapid backlash to like very basic public health shit, it all kind of starts with the backlash to Vietnam.
All of the experts say, we're about to win, throw some more shit in here, right?
Throw some more money behind it.
And they're horribly wrong.
And that kind of that helps sort of fuel this anti-expertise backlash in American popular culture, right?
And it is, you have to say, this is a big part of conservatism today.
It's not wrong for there to be that backlash, right?
You should be really skeptical about people who claim to have expertise in this shit.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's all about the nuance where it's like being able to think critically about these things is a good idea.
It's just that that's not often what people do.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, the response for some people is like, well, since all the experts are crooks, I'm just going to vote for the angriest man I've ever seen.
You know, it's like, well, that's not really a good idea either.
The other equally important takeaway, though, and this is kind of, it might seem like it's separate, but a lot of people recognize both these things is that think tanks have power, right?
A bunch of eggheads writing policy papers helped provide support for an insane escalation in Vietnam.
And that means there's a lot of power in having eggheads write policy papers, right?
And if you pay for those policy papers, maybe you can get eggheads to support any insane policy you want to push in American society, right?
And this is deeply attractive to the oligarchs who had fought like hyenas against the New Deal.
These people had been infuriated by the great society as well.
That's LBJ is right alongside Escalation of Vietnam.
LBJ is pushing some of the most like substantial social welfare programs in the history of our country.
And these people who had kind of who had fought against the New Deal but had given up were like feeling kind of hopeless at like, we can't stop the anti-war movement from rising.
That's continuing to frustrate them in like the mid-60s.
And also we couldn't stop this like raft of social reforms from going through.
But what they sort of start to realize is that because the liberal establishment has gotten so in bed in Vietnam and in bed with this kind of like cadre of experts who backed their stupid ideas for what to do there, there was an opportunity, right?
An opportunity to actually reverse this kind of feeling that conservatism is always on the back foot and start taking strides forward to become the dominant ideology in the country, right?
This is like a thing that's starting to happen in the mid-60s.
You could be forgiven if you had thought that like the ideological battle between conservatism and like liberalism was still had still been won by liberals in the 60s.
It would have looked that way because 1964 is when we get the candidacy of Barry Goldwater.
And Goldwater is, he's like the craziest person anybody has ever seen in 1964 in politics.
I talk about people will always point out on the subreddit, well, actually, he was like pretty, pretty moderate on a lot of things.
By the end of his life, he was like pro-gay marriage and pro-weed and stuff.
And like, all of that's true.
But in 1964, he is the guy who is, he's coming up on stage and he's saying like, extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.
Let's lob a nuclear bomb into the men's room at the Kremlin.
Lazy, dull, happy people want to feed on the fruits of somebody else's labor, right?
He comes up when he, when he gives his speech at the RNC in 64, he, he talks about how like the Democratic Party and the network news programs are under the direction of Marxist ballet dancers and that like their god is Mammon, right?
Like who is money?
Like money is the god of the liberal establishment.
He is kind of a maniac, right?
Yeah.
He's very reasonable compared to like modern Republicans, but this is how people think about him at the time.
And Goldwater, like this is a very scary moment for anyone paying attention because what they'll notice, people who are at the Cow Palace, which is like the place in San Francisco where the RNC is happening then, will note that like his followers are, they're proto-Trumpists, right?
They are, they are into him and excited about him in a way that like nobody was for presidents, right?
Like it was like this weird Hitlerian kind of cult of personality that he had.
And it was small, but the extremism with which he was embraced by these kind of what will become known as the new right was really concerning to a lot of people for good reason.
And it might have looked because Goldwater loses badly.
LBJ gets 61% of the popular vote.
So you can see how some conservatives were like, well, this means we're fucked forever, right?
This guy Goldwater has set us back generations.
You know, we went too hard too fast and we lost badly.
And like we have to go to the middle, right?
That's certainly what like if this were reversed, if you had an actual like hardcore leftist presidential candidate get defeated that badly, the Democratic Party's lesson would be we can never ever do anything again, right?
Like it's back to the future.
I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet.
Yeah, I guess you guys are going to love it.
That is what happens here.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, this plays into like, I've talked to like punks who were sentient in the 80s when Reagan was elected.
And they talk about this idea of like, when Reagan got elected, I thought, oh, the world's going to end.
And then it didn't.
And this is kind of what they did to that movie, Oppenheimer.
That idea of like, yeah, it kind of did.
Like, that's the thing we don't realize is when we say like, oh, Trump's going to fucking destroy the world or whatever.
It's like, not immediately.
It's more about the fact that these people are going to set us. into this direction that's just going to keep snowballing, where we've now said, oh, it's okay for this person to have, to even run for, even just running for president.
We're basically saying like, we're now entertaining this idea.
And maybe it wasn't, maybe people didn't go for it this time.
But okay, let's just slowly roll it out a little slower next time, you know?
There's some people on the left who are like actual, like, like Lewis Lapham of Harper's, who I'm quote from, seems to recognize what Goldwater means.
Yeah.
You know, you get a bit of that.
Hunter S. Thompson is kind of one of the people who sees Goldwater and is like, oh, fuck.
Oh, fuck.
Because he's just got a pretty good understanding of like American culture.
And like, okay, this is going to keep being a thing.
It's only going to get bigger.
A lot of the people who had been Goldwater backers, a lot of these, these guys we're talking about, this cadre of like super conservative multi-millionaires, most of them who had inherited their money, they are like, they kind of have this brief flash of hope, a lot of them, for Goldwater.
Bohemian Grove Memorandum00:15:19
But there's also like this deep crashing like frustration when he fails and this sense that like, well, we've lost forever.
We just can't, we're not going to be able to stop communism from taking over the country.
And in his article for Harpers, Lewis Lapham describes a meeting of these guys at Bohemian Grove in 1968, which sets the mood of this particular cast well.
In the hearts of the corporate chieftains wandering around the redwood trees in the Bohemian Grove in July 1968, the fear was palpable and genuine.
The croquet lawn seemed to be sliding away beneath their feet.
And although they knew they were in trouble, they didn't know why.
Ideas apparently mattered, and words were maybe more important than they had guessed.
Unfortunately, they didn't have any.
The American property holding classes tended to be embarrassingly ill at ease with concepts that don't translate promptly into money.
And the beacons of conservative light shining through the liberal fog of the late 1960s didn't come up to the number of clubs in Arnold Palmer's golf bag.
The company of the commercial faithful gathered on the banks of California's Russian River could look for sucker to Goldwater's autobiography, The Conscience of a Conservative, to William F. Buckley's editorials in National Review, to the novels of Ayn Rand.
But that was kind of all they had, right?
Was these, this kind of like utopian conservative fiction because it seemed like the situation was so bleak.
But salvation was not far away.
Nixon is going to win, right?
Yeah, he sure is.
Yeah, he's going to become the president.
And that's going to be like kind of a fucking disaster.
But they couldn't really see that coming.
It didn't seem likely until a bunch of other shit falls into place later that year.
So it's a desperate time for these guys.
Obviously, though, shit starts to go their way pretty soon after this moment.
In 1971, a Richmond corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memorandum.
He had been an intelligence guy in World War II.
His whole thing in World War II, Lewis Powell had been like, he'd written lovingly about the bombing of Dresden.
Like, this is, we did a great job with Dresden.
This is really like the finest hour of our air power, you know, really murdering all of these civilians and not getting the Germans to surrender.
After the war, he'd chaired the Richmond School Board, where he, Richmond, Virginia, where he had fought like hell against the attempts to desegregate public schools.
And then once he failed at stopping schools from desegregating, he took a job representing the Tobacco Institute during the height of its evil.
So this is like a guy, this is a man whose business is being the devil, right?
I was about to say, when people ask, what do you do?
He's like, you know, like evil stuff.
I'm evil.
General evil.
Yeah.
Sundry evil.
Um, so this is like a pretty, pretty impressive bastard memorandum.
And so after, after Nixon gets into office, you know, a couple years in, conservatives are like happy about some things, but there's also like, especially the hard right, the Goldwater right, doesn't really trust Nixon because even though he made his bones as an anti-communist, he's like going to be friends with Mao.
You know, he establishes the EPA.
So there's still this feeling that like, even though this guy's a Republican, we're still losing the ideological war if a Republican is doing all this stuff, right?
Right.
We need to get a real Dick Nixon is too sane and even-handed.
We need a real maniac in there, you know?
And so Lewis Powell in 1971 writes what becomes known as the Powell Memorandum.
So this is, you know, to kind of provide some additional context.
Powell is this, he's, he's a very prominent lawyer.
He gets asked by Nixon in 69 to join the Supreme Court.
And he's like, I don't really want to be in the Supreme Court.
Right.
And so a couple of years later, Nixon asks again.
And in 71, Powell is like, yeah, I'll join the Supreme Court.
And in kind of the period before he actually takes that job, one of his friends, who's the education director of the Chamber of Commerce, is like, hey, before you become a Supreme Court justice, I need you to like write a memorandum on how we can win the culture war in the United States.
And so Powell writes this thing titled Attack on the American Free Enterprise System that gets distributed to the Chamber of Commerce as like the body in the government that interfaces with all of the corporations, right?
That's the basic idea of what the Chamber of Commerce is.
So he writes this memo and it goes out to all of the people running the biggest companies in the United States.
This memo from this guy who's going to become a Supreme Court justice.
And he is not going to disclose that he's written this memo when he's being confirmed as Supreme Court justice because of as I describe the memo, it will become obvious why he didn't want to talk about this.
Wait, so nobody knows he wrote it or he just all the rich people know he promoted.
The public does not know.
So he's like Jerry McGuire, all the rich people.
Yeah.
So the memo starts with him talking about like Ralph Nader, you know, as this like boogeyman.
He's like, we have a bunch of demons stalking the property classes in America and chief among them is Ralph Nader.
Because in 65, Nader had published this book called Unsafe at Any Speed, which forced the automotive industry to include seatbelts and shit, right?
Like he writes this book, Everyone is Dying in Their Cars.
There are no safety features and everyone has one.
We should probably make it mandatory that there be safety features in cars.
This used to be what he was known for.
Yes.
Like before he ran for president.
Like this was his thing.
Yeah.
And it was a great thing to do.
And it's this is part of this whole like sense of doom they have that there's no stopping progressivism because this book comes out and immediately like there's not like this massive counter punch to it where people are like we need to cancel nader for being too woke everyone's like oh yeah we should have seat belts that seems like a good idea and And automotive companies are like, but this is going to cost us a lot of money, right?
And Powell describes himself as terrified about the reaction to Nader's work because he sees it as like evidence that socialism is inevitably taking over the country, right?
The first thing corporate power is a pillar holding up American greatness and they're eroding it, you know?
That's how he describes it.
It's wild.
This attitude we have about corporations that we see them as like a deity because this idea of saying, you've made something that's unsafe.
We need you to make it more safe.
And then corporations go, but that's going to cost us a lot of money.
The proper reply to that is, okay.
Yeah.
Like, you still have to do it.
Like, we're still going to make you do it.
You know, like, you don't really have a choice.
You're making a product.
It's going out into the public.
It needs to be, it has to meet these standards that we've deemed safe.
That's it.
End of discussion.
And so it's wild that there's an entire political party who's like, no, we can't do that to corporations.
And these guys up to this point, they still, they had felt that way the whole time as the New Deal and Great Society and all this shit is going on.
They had felt like we shouldn't let them do this to us and our sweet, sweet money.
But they didn't have a concerted way to counterattack.
Right.
And what Powell says in this memo is like, we, the, the corporate class in America, the people with money who run our businesses need to be attacking people like Nader.
We need to build a mechanism to go to war with Ralph Nader, right?
Otherwise, they're going to inevitably bring this country to communism, right?
Another guy that he rails against is William Kunstler, who's a civil rights lawyer.
He had a hand in everything from the freedom writers to wounded knee, very influential guy.
And guys like Kunstler and Nader are the enemy, right?
They're these sinister forces aligned to create a world in which people have access to food and medicine.
Against such foul enemies, the only response, Powell wrote, was the ideological equivalent to war.
And I'm going to read a summary of his memorandum from a speech in the Senate by Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
The language in the Powell report is the language of battle, attack, frontal assault, rifle shots, warfare.
The recommendations are to end compromise and appeasement.
His words, compromise and appeasement.
To understand that, as he said, the ultimate issue may be survival.
And he underlined the word survival in his report and to call for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.
Man, there's something about when we talk about all these think tanks and experts and stuff, I really think for the average person, the best metric really is like, who's always wrong or who's always right?
What is actually the result?
You know, like this think take with the Vietnam stuff.
It's like, how did that work out?
Does someone consistently...
And so with this stuff, it's just like, did we slide into communism to have seatbelts?
Did this cause like what is actually going on right now?
Do you think?
Do you think deregulating everything and making corporations get to do whatever they want?
Has that made things better?
Are products better?
Do things cost perhaps a lot?
Is it, you know, like look at today and be like, what is the problems today?
What do you think caused that?
And then perhaps, should we listen to the people or the institutions that caused that problem and continue to cause problems?
It's just so obvious.
That's all.
Yes.
It's very silly.
It ought to be.
But, you know, the thing is, it's silly to like pretend that this is good for anyone but the people with money.
But Powell isn't doing that.
Powell is saying, hey, people with money, you are a threatened class in America.
And we have to organize to destroy the majority of the country who wants your money to buy medicine.
Which we still, we see this today, right?
That the oh, the billionaires is a slur or something like that.
Exactly, exactly.
Where it's just weird that there is, it's not just a class, but it's like a weird culture, right?
Where we're rooting for corporations, we're rooting for rich people, where like Elon Musk is a figurehead, or like people go, oh, Disney versus Sony.
And it's like, fuck all of that.
What you're talking about, Dave, is the result.
Like that state of affairs is the result of the Powell memorandum's success because he is laying out a battle plan for these guys, for these rich fail sons and the companies that they run.
And Powell's vision here is nothing less than a plot to take over the U.S. government from the inside to damage its institutions so severely that no one would ever be able to take them back.
He directed this letter at the oligarchs in American society, people who are frightened of any limit to their wealth and power.
He wrote to them: strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, and the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations, right?
And his attitude is: it's the job of men like him, like me, as the thinker here, my job is to be like the Rand Corporation in Vietnam to plot out a path to victory, right?
It's the job of you guys, the people with money.
All you need to do is put money in my pocket and the pocket of other people like us.
Right.
And we will finance, like if you finance think tanks and like pay for intellectuals, for lawyers like us, we will put out public policy and we'll get judges in place.
And one of Powell's big insights is like, because again, he's about to become a Supreme Court justice.
His attitude is like, conservatives need to take over the courts, right?
That's the best way to shift policy because these are lifetime appointments.
The more conservatives we get in the courts, we can actually take the reins of culture and steer, right?
He's not wrong.
He is not at all wrong.
He's very smart.
Yeah, it's almost as if we designed it badly.
Yes.
Yes, it is.
It's weird that we were like, okay, we'll have this branch of government, this branch.
And they get, you know, it's like every few years.
And then we'll have these like lifetime kings.
We should have some God kings, probably some God kings.
Yeah, definitely want a couple of God kings in there.
Why would we do that?
That's so seems like a bad idea.
I don't think we need God kings.
Powell's attitude is that every American business should donate 10% of their advertising budget towards propaganda, towards think tanks, towards funding this stuff, right?
Like every corporation, Exxon and whatnot, they should all be putting money into think tanks and consider that advertising, right?
To lobby the government and publish papers that push their agenda, right?
Right.
Which is, you know, what happened.
A big central part of his obsession is textbooks.
One thing he wanted is he wanted oligarchs to pay right-wing pundits to critique and attack textbooks for being insufficiently pro-capitalist.
He wanted to pay for there to be organizations to monitor TV networks.
He believed that like television should, quote, be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.
The goal of all this was to make sure that corporate America got equal time with like, you know, the interests of human beings.
He's basically saying the next time a guy like Ralph Nader publishes a book about how cars are killing people, we need to make sure every news agency gives equal time to the car companies saying, but we don't want to put seatbelts in cars.
It'll make them too expensive.
Yeah.
Both sides.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's really good stuff here.
And it's like, there's a lot of very modern stuff here, right?
Like Powell writes that like business owners should use political influence and money to stem, quote, the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to consumerism or to the environment.
And he puts the environment in quotation marks.
Political power is necessary.
It must be assiduously cultivated and when necessary, must be used aggressively and with determination.
It is essential to be far more aggressive than in the past, with no hesitation to attack, not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas, and no reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose corporate efforts.
So, you know, not great.
Not great.
But it all happens.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, they get it.
You're right.
Yeah.
We're now in a situation where it's not even like abnormal.
We don't think of it as weird.
Like it, it, it's, it's, it's weird that like these things have to be debated or explained.
They have devolved the conversation successfully.
Yeah.
You know, where like because they follow Powell's marching orders.
Yeah.
Right.
Where we're getting people who are saying like, you know, who are just publicly like, this is going to hurt corporations and that's going to hurt you, the worker.
And people are just believing it.
It's kind of wild.
Like, it's wild that Trickle Down is a thing that's like, oh, yeah, it'll get to you.
And it's like, why would anybody vote for that?
Why would anybody, an average person, go like, oh, yeah, we should, we should totally just let it go to the rich people and then it'll get around to us.
It'll trickle down to us like piss.
Like it's just like, that's so weird that we, that people were able to sell this idea that the upper class at the corporate owners are people that need to be protected or need to be represented politically.
Trickle Down Economics Myth00:03:12
Dave, I love so much that you brought up Trickle Down Economics because that's where we're heading in part two.
It's got Dave.
For right now, let's trickle down your pluggables to our audience.
I can, I mean, you mentioned gamefully unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-U-L-L-Y unemployed.
That's a podcast network I do with Tom Ryman, where we talk about movies mostly.
We do reviews and we talk about movie news, so on and so forth.
We have a Patreon you can check out.
And then I am the head writer for Some More News, which is a political show that I'm sure a lot of people are aware of if they're listening to this.
But if you're not, you should Google it.
I don't know when this is coming out, but we just did a two-parter on Ladyballers.
You know, the important stuff.
Hell yeah.
Well, everybody, this has been a podcast.
I have been Robert Evans.
Ladyballers has been a bad movie, but listen to what Dave thinks about it.
And go to hell.
I love you.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses.
We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
We're pretty close, though.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to community thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.