Derek Barris, Matthew Rimsky, and Julian Walker dissect the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, exposing Christian nationalist influences where over 200 military complaints allege commanders framed the conflict as biblical Armageddon. They critique Pete Hegseth's "death and destruction" rhetoric and Mark Carney's Davos speech, while analyzing how $529 million wagered on Polymarket intersects with geopolitical violence. The discussion expands to prediction markets' explosive growth from $9 billion to $44 billion, noting Trump Jr.'s investments and the CFTC's deregulation under industry CEOs. Ultimately, the episode reveals how unregulated speculation and capital-driven mystification blur moral lines, prioritizing profit over human rights or environmental protections in an increasingly privatized global order. [Automatically generated summary]
Minority Complaints and Religious Politics00:14:45
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Spirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Rimsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 299, American Jihad.
As black rain from bombed oil facilities falls from the smoke-choked skies of Tehran, the U.S. and Israel continue their war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
From the start, Trump officials have seemed only to disagree on both the murky rationale and the objectives of their mission.
Meanwhile, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been flooded with reports of commanding officers rallying their troops with apocalyptic pep talks in which Trump has been anointed by Jesus to kick off Armageddon.
This should perhaps come as no surprise given that Secretary of Defense Pete Hekseth has been holding Christian nationalist prayer and worship services in the Pentagon since last May.
That's Secretary of War, Julian.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah, I gotta give him his correct pronouns.
Beyond the obviousness of this religious politics, Matthew looks at how Canadian PM Mark Carney supports Trump and this war while pretending not to, using deceptive language tricks that borrow from religion to blur the line between strength and values, power, and principle.
But hey, if you want to distract yourself from all this, Polymarket is a wonderful place to bet on who's going to be bombed next.
Derek breaks down how prediction markets have become a massively lucrative Rorschach portrait of our times.
As the joint strikes against Iran by Israel and the U.S. continued last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth seemed determined.
You're welcome, seemed determined to portray himself as a heartless yet thin-skinned movie villain.
He promised Iranians death and destruction from the sky all day in a press briefing where he also said, we're playing for keeps and they're toast and they know it.
And then complained about biased media coverage when asked about fallen Americans.
No somber words of appropriate empathy or grief for the families of the dead, just frustrated whining.
When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it's front page news, he said.
I get it.
The press wants to make the president look bad.
Okay, I gotta stop here because death and destruction from the sky all day.
We're playing for keeps.
They're toast and they know it.
If you've heard commentators mention that Hegseth sounds like he's playing or quoting from Call of Duty or Helldivers, I can confirm that the shit talking sounds exactly like gameplay dialogue in any one of a number of first-person shooter, multiplayer military games.
And to my ear, that connects to the brush off of the casualties and his failure to speak to that.
I mean, he's just doesn't really have a soul.
So that's not surprising.
But I think it's coming also out of that environment.
It's like he's calling fellow players whiners for losing and having to respawn in.
So if you're playing hard, your kill count for a match would be in the hundreds.
And so if you're going to worry about taking smaller losses, you're just going to be mocked as some kind of snowflake.
Well, I think your instinct here is right because the White House posted something, I think it was from Call of Duty after the first day of strikes.
Yeah.
Non-gaming folks should note that a huge part of the Call of Duty game experience, this is true of other games as well, is accumulating or scavenging weapons and accessories or buying them with in-game currency.
So people spend hours in the shop and then prepping their loadouts for like maximum coolness.
So the crucial first step in going to war in Call of Duty isn't skill.
It's not training or strategy.
It's looks maxing.
So part of what's going on, I think, with Hegseth is just that, plus alcoholism.
Yeah, plus alcoholism.
Meanwhile, public statements from the administration show a complete lack of clarity about the mission in Iran and why the U.S. is involved.
Like, was it preemptive?
Did Israel drag America in?
Or did the U.S. lead the way?
Is it about regime change or preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power?
Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Coleman Levitt, Steve Witkoff, and Donald Trump have all given different, often contradictory answers to those questions.
But could it be that the lack of real world clarity about the motivations and mission are murky because of an underlying belief that this war has cosmic significance?
When Pete Hegseth was first nominated to be Secretary of Defense, many of us were alarmed by photos that revealed large tattoos on his torso and arm associated with Christian nationalism and the Crusades.
But for the Project 2025 agenda, those were actually a feature, not a bug.
Now, cuts of the last two weeks and The Guardian, along with other news outlets picking up on the independent journalism of Jonathan Larson, has reported that there have been 110 complaints from military personnel over the course of the first three days of the war regarding commanding officers framing it to their troops as the biblical Armageddon.
And in the days since, this has grown to over 200 complaints.
They were made to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation from 40 different units across at least 50 different military installations.
And these complaints included things like a combat unit commander saying during briefings that Donald Trump had been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.
Another complaint involved a non-commanding officer saying that they had been urged to tell our troops that the operation was all part of God's plan, with multiple scriptural quotes about Armageddon from the Book of Revelation being thrown in.
I just want to cite, you know, everyone should listen to segment three today because you can bet on if Jesus is going to come back to do that.
It's actually millions of dollars right now.
So, you know, get in on this.
Oh, boy.
Wow.
I would buy the short trade on that.
I think it's important to remember that these accounts are likely coming from a minority of military personnel concerned enough with religious freedom and separation of church and state to even know about the MRFF and take the time to lodge a complaint with them.
So I would guess this film, and it was probably more widespread than these numbers show.
And it does say a ton about just how outrageous all these statements are.
I mean, how often does anything from the military rise to the level of mainstream coverage coming from the soldier's perspective?
I mean, soldiers of all ranks have their personal feelings, but there's always been this sentiment that you keep those feelings locked down to yourself or just your squad.
And obviously, formal complaints exist, but you really have to be saying some crazy shit to get this sort of coverage.
And I would say claiming you're helping to usher in biblical Armageddon definitely warrants that.
I've been really moved by the number of vets who are now peace activists in my social media feeds who are talking about just how dangerous this is in ways that makes me understand that they have like a really clear understanding of what it means to have group cohesion and what it has to be based on.
And I was just thinking about like, you know, to the extent that some people in a particular battle group might be all on board with this mission or this messaging, they're going to regard those who aren't as doubters or as weak links or as, I mean, it's just terrible, terrible for morale, like because your trust isn't going to be in each other.
It's going to be in, you know, the divine prophecy.
Yeah.
So in a diverse group of military personnel, you're not actually going to create cohesion by insisting everyone buy into fundamentalist Christianity.
Probably the reverse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Mikey Weinstein, who's the head of that Religious Freedom Foundation, and he is himself an Air Force veteran, commented that what the complaints had in common was reporting an unrestricted euphoria of commanders as to how the biblically sanctioned war is clearly a sign of the end times, and that many commanders are especially delighted with how bloody the conflict will have to be to fulfill fundamentalist Christian eschatology.
But this Holy War zeal, I'm sorry to tell you, goes all the way to the top.
A far-right evangelical named Ralph Drollinger has been providing Bible study evangelism and discipleship, as his mission statement describes it, through his capital ministries organization since 1996.
They have branches in 40 different state capitals, including in Washington, D.C., where Drollinger himself is headquartered.
He even personally leads a small weekly Bible study group within the White House and then provides printouts from those sessions to Donald Trump, which I just thought is a fantastic factor.
His politics, Drollinger, of course, are anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, climate denialists, and he frames Catholicism as one of the primary false religions in the world.
Like many evangelicals, Drollinger teaches that Israel is a key component for end times prophecy to be fulfilled.
He's said in an interview that Israel retaking all of Gaza is necessary to start the eschatological clock toward the return of the Messiah.
I want to point out that Drollinger is not just about the geopolitics.
Like he really brings it home because one of his other fixations is that he really wants to communicate to all Christians out there that corporal punishment for their children is the best way to raise them.
And actually, if you don't hit your children, you're not actually doing God's work of discipline.
Yeah, nice guy.
Drollinger touts Hegseth as among the White House cabinet members designated as sponsors of his Bible study group.
And that's Pete Hegseth alongside others, like Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and of course, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and OMB Director and Project 2025 author Russ Waut.
In addition, since May of last year, Hegseth has himself led a weekly prayer and worship service in the Pentagon Auditorium.
And this has raised concerns about separation of church and state, violations of the First Amendment's establishment clause, and the complexities along the lines of what you were bringing up, Matthew, of the Secretary of Defense inviting subordinates who may feel that they're actually compelled to attend a religious service during working hours.
Totally woke restrictions there, Julian.
I mean, come on.
I know, it's insufferable.
But this isn't Pete's first American jihad rodeo.
The former Guantanamo Bay platoon leader, great thing to have on your resume, and decorated Army National Guard major who taught counterinsurgency tactics in Kabul, Afghanistan, has long been involved with Doug Wilson's deeply controversial Christchurch.
Now, more about Wilson in a moment, but on a 2023 podcast associated with that church, Hegset talks about the role of fundamentalist Christian schools, which he refers to as boot camp, to do spiritual battle with the secular world.
He's also published several batshit crazy books with titles like American Crusade, which calls for an internal holy war against those who oppose his traditional values.
He has another book called The War on Warriors that decries wokeness in the military, like the kind I was just espousing.
And it says that female soldiers undermine civilization and argues for the removal of legal restraints and rules of engagement for American soldiers.
So in other words, no prosecuting of war crimes.
Then there's his book, The Battle for the American Mind, which waxes conspiratorial about the need to utterly destroy the leftist agenda of secular education.
And he commented about this on that podcast, saying, in the last part of the book, I lay out what an educational insurgency would look like because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao wrote about.
We're in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate, and reorganize.
And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.
And obviously, all of this is metaphorical and all that good stuff.
Wow.
And kind of the phases.
What a writer.
When he was nominated, I actually reviewed the books on the podcast.
I forget what episode it was for, but I read parts of The War on Warriors and Battle for the American Mind.
And I mean, he is just a literary genius for sure.
As I mentioned, this podcast that he was talking on comes out of the controversial Christ Church headed up by Doug Wilson in Idaho, who Hegseth controversially hosted at his weekly prayer and worship service at the Pentagon just last month.
Hegseth has also belonged for some time to a congregation in Tennessee that's affiliated with Wilson's church and has had the pastor from that church lead worship at the Pentagon too.
The Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality00:12:03
In a set of political religious policies that would, with maybe a few theological tweaks, have made the Ayatollah proud, Christchurch advocates for theocracy, restricting women's voting rights, barring non-Christians from holding office, and criminalizing gay and trans people.
During COVID, Doug Wilson described resistance to quarantine measures as the cold civil war that will lead to the hot civil war.
It sure sounds like Pete Hegseth is excited about that kind of bringing the war home.
In his writing, Hegseth calls for the, quote, categorical defeat and utter annihilation of the left, without which, quote, America cannot and will not survive.
Our American crusade, he says, is not with swords and it's not about guns yet.
Wilson's saying that resistance to quarantine measures is the cold civil war that leads to the hot civil war.
I don't think he's wrong about that.
Like, that's pretty perceptive, actually.
I think one good thing about Hegseth and the whole Trump administration is that they always tell you exactly who they are and what they're doing.
And the religion of it, as specious or incoherent as it is, is obvious.
Like Doug Wilson arrives at the Pentagon to bless the coming Armageddon, and he's trailing behind him decades of apocalyptic propaganda.
Like it's just part of a thing.
He's just sort of reaching a peak.
He's been saying the same thing and how he's got the best stage ever.
There was another new apostolic reformation prayer circle around the orange man today the other day.
There are some pragmatic material things going on as well.
I think they raise their hands in blessing and they're partially blocking the smell of him in his pants.
But then we have this fundamental belief structure that's just obvious.
And anyone who falls for it, I think, either has to be deeply indoctrinated into it from birth or willing to accept a complete bait and switch on their reality as a convert.
You know, so before baptism, geopolitics exist, but after baptism, it's all red heifers and Jesus descending.
So after the break, I'm going to talk about another form of religious mystification that I think is pretty important for keeping this kind of disaster chugging along.
So as I said, I'm going to talk about another kind of religious language that I see at play in this war so far.
It's subtler.
It's more in the background.
My prime minister, Mark Carney, became an instant global political celebrity on January 20th with a speech at Davos that I'll get into later.
But at the exact center point of this 2,100 word text, he dropped this line: quote, We are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.
So, guys, without any other context, what does that sound like to you?
How does that strike you?
I mean, just right off the bat, it sounds like a kind of double speak, like it's easy on the ear, but is it manipulative?
It calls to mind the critique of power described by the phrase that might makes right.
Like he's messing with the relationship between military strength and moral values by kind of conflating or at least blurring the line between the two as if they're mutually dependent on each other.
Yeah.
I agree.
It's Orwellian off the bat.
I will take a charitable view here and actually read it decontextualized.
And what it would appear to be saying is that if you actually live your values, you have a certain sort of strength.
And then your strength, your strength should also reflect your values.
You're doing it better than him, Derek.
I think he should give you a call for some speech writing.
He does this a lot.
Like there's a 2021 book that he's got out.
It's called Values, Building a Better World for All.
And what's interesting about this book is that it's kind of the kickoff campaign book for a political campaign that didn't really happen because he wasn't elected.
He was appointed.
I'll get to that in a moment.
But in that book, he's got other lines like this.
He's got this, this line is incredible.
Values beget value, which reinforces values.
He's really into this.
He's amazing.
He loves it.
Yeah.
Values drive value.
So on one hand, I think it's just typical baffle gab from politicians, but I want to argue that rhetoric like this, especially at a point like this in his administration, performs a kind of like supportive metaphysical role as it tries to smokescreen away the contradictions of participating in and then benefiting from imperialism, to be frank, when you're a client state, but you're pretending you're a middle power with a moral center.
If we go back to your segment, Julian, Hegseth and Wilson and Rubio and the gang aren't pretending anything.
They see themselves as the tip of the spear.
And they're as open about their insane rationales as like anybody out of the 19th century.
Like Rudyard Kipling was, you know, very clear in the white man's burden, what, you know, we're supposed to be doing in the Philippines.
They're as clear as the Nazis were about skull measurements deciding who would live and die.
But like as much as fascists want to believe that they can do it alone, every spear tip has to have a handle.
It has to have a counterweight.
It has to have a guy holding on to it.
There is no capacity to bomb Iran at the drop of a hat without the generations-old normalization of 20 military bases in the region belonging to the U.S. There's no equipment to deploy without generations of like business as usual arms trading.
There's no financial backing without the massive global oil economy demanding more predictable or favorable investment cycles.
I think we can see the distance between the tip of the spear and the guy holding it in the scene of Hegsith bragging about infinite superiority on, you know, in one moment, and then Trump on Truth Social claiming that the U.S. has unlimited supplies of interceptors and smart bombs, but he's lying.
And so he has to haul the CEOs of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and others into the Oval Office to just beg them to increase production, which they're not, it's unclear whether they're going to be able to do that.
Because they probably need the rare earths and metals that he slapped tariffs on.
The other guys holding the spear handle are the legislators who can fund or defund the process.
And the GOP is online.
Will there be strong enough opposition from the Democrats when the inevitable demand for more missile money comes in?
Their record on military aid to Israel under Biden in the midst of a genocide is one indicator.
And then I found on February 20th that Dropsight reported on communications within the Democratic Senate leadership before the 12-day war in June, in which the communications showed support for military action against Iran, but the hope that Trump would be the tip of the spear and take the fall.
So sometimes the tip of the spear and the handle guy share the same core objectives, which shouldn't be surprising.
Now, surrounding any insane executive, this is the way I see it.
There's three professional complexes.
There's military, industrial, financial.
These are all institutions built for longevity to weather crises.
And they are managed by liberal democracies.
And these liberal democracies tend to select for leaders with more managerial skills than morals.
I have a bit of a trouble understanding this part about a democracy because based on political science research, the top qualities that voters look for are warmth, competence, character, value alignment, personality traits.
Now, of course, the person might not actually live up to the values or morals that they claim, but I would say that voters tend to vote more on affect than bureaucratic skills.
It's literally how Trump won, given how bad he is at business.
And we also know that things like height has historically played a role in voting patterns.
And then there's the famous moment of JFK debating Nixon on television, which absolutely tanked Nixon.
Yes, I totally agree.
On the voter level, all of the personality stuff is true.
It comes into play once the candidates have been institutionally selected.
This is my point for ideological consistency and managerial skills.
Like they've got to fit into a particular mode of, you know, the support of the capital project.
It's interesting.
I mean, I wonder if that's a somewhat outdated observation in this era of anti-institutional populism, because what you're saying seems to suggest like this well-oiled corporate style machine selecting predictable candidates, which does sound like a Mitt Romney or a Hillary Clinton, but regarding ideology and managerial skills, Trump has always seemed to have neither.
And I think a lot of people in the establishment did not want him to get where he got to, and then they fell in line once he did, right?
Right, right.
Well, I would say that let's just say Gavin Newsom is the frontrunner.
I'd say it's still pretty oily, that machine.
But if my model sounds outdated, it might be about like what part of the timeline we're looking at it from.
Because from my point of view, or from an American point of view, let's say, the management class has failed, which makes Trump the fascist who comes after that failure of liberal administrators to fully manage the contradictions of wealth inequality and so on.
That's what gives him the doorway.
And also, like Trump would be nowhere without his managerial support in the GOP and, you know, arguably the unwillingness of many Democratic lawmakers to fully stand against things like ICE and military budgets.
I want to just drill down on this a little more because I'm trying to understand what level you're talking about.
So, for example, in Portland, we went from one district to five in the last election cycle and introduced ranked choice voting for the first time.
Yeah.
So you're talking about candidates who had no institutional backing whatsoever, who have to then become part of the process.
I mean, I don't think that Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Boebert had institutional backing when they went from their CrossFit box to suddenly being in Congress.
And then there's all sorts of like weird sort of collaborations that happened recently.
James Tallarico, the number one donor to his campaign, was Maryam Adelson, who is a big MAGA person.
And so there you have like conflicts of interest coming in at a higher level.
So I think I agree.
I mean, I am fully on board with they pushed Bernie Sanders out to get Hillary in 2016, for example.
Like at that level, I agree.
But the way it's being framed right now is at every level, someone has to be part of the managerial class when on regional levels, I've never seen that in local politics.
Yeah, I'm really, I am speaking of the sort of the superstructure more than these amazing moments in local politics in which somehow people change the, you know, first pass the post rules or they, you know, divide up districts or they open up democracy the way that it should be.
Yeah, then interesting things can happen, like parliamentary things can happen.
Things that happen in Europe can happen when that sort of stuff begins.
But I mean, there's a really good reason that Carney ascends to this particular position at this point.
And it has everything to do with his ideological training.
Advocating for Canadian Sovereignty00:09:52
He's not chosen.
So he's a good test case for this.
It's like, if the system has to choose somebody without voter intervention, who does it come up with?
So let me just talk about Carney a bit.
Over the past six weeks, he has really distinguished himself globally as an icon of managerial calm.
This is what he was known for as the Bank of England governor during Brexit, and also while amassing a personal net worth of approximately $10 million as vice chair of Brookfield.
He's been at the head of other companies as well.
Brookfield manages hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure, energy systems, and real estate.
He's not a career politician.
Kearney is where he is because he won an internal Liberal Party leadership race after Justin Trudeau won last year's general election, and then he stepped down because his numbers were in the tank, but he also wanted to date Katy Perry.
What do you have against love?
Nothing, nothing.
He's free.
He's also a theater kid once and forever.
Kearney's banking streak is unbroken this way.
Like he's never really faced scrutiny.
But now he has a problem because the challenge for him and other leaders in his position is how do you protect your contracts and capital flows and the investors you've always worked for when your fascist neighbor who controls a lot of your economy goes ballistic.
Like that's the question he tried to answer at Davos in a speech that went viral.
There were two parts to the speech.
Part one, he really won people's hearts by offering a seemingly transparent account of the fecklessness of the international rules-based order, which he called a fiction.
And that fiction was now being exposed by the chaotic narcissism of Trump, although he didn't call him out by name.
And, you know, he really was saying that now middle powers have to distance themselves from that kind of chaos.
And he said, quote, we knew the story of the international rules-based order was partly false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically.
And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This is an incredible admission, by the way.
It feels like it's an admission to complicity in like real skullduggery, right?
But that kind of gets blown over because he's doing something honest, apparently.
So this fiction was useful, he says, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks of resolving disputes.
Okay, so setting aside the question of for whom is he talking about these benefits applying, like public goods, stability, security, Kearney is lauded for what seemed to be a frank breakup letter with Trump.
And finally, he's, you know, the adult in the room.
But the second half of the speech was this long list of investment-friendly, neoliberal militarization and oil economy policies that all rhyme with global North capital goals and seek to ensure, in his view, Canadian strength and coherence.
Like we will do capitalism in a more orderly fashion than and apart from the Americans.
But the problem is we are pretty much a client state.
The U.S. is our largest trading partner.
And the U.S. really treats the country like a strip mine or an ATM.
It buys three-quarters of our exports.
A lot of those are sort of just natural resources.
Supply chains in energy, autos, agriculture, and manufacturing cross the border constantly.
I think when a Ford F-150 is built either in Detroit or in Windsor, it crosses the border 17 times before it actually rolls off the line.
So it's like impossibly entangled.
And our militaries are merged in a similar way through NORAD, NATO, and Canadian companies hold contracts with DHIS, with ICE, and with the armed forces, supplying tools and software and armored vehicles and surveillance services.
So that is all background for being surprised or not being surprised when Kearney is the first world leader to come out in support of U.S. military policy and objectives as it starts bombing Iran.
And it's not surprising either that now he's not ruling out direct military support.
But the entire speech at Davos is based on we're becoming independent.
We're not, you know, sort of going to go along with anybody who has made this international rules-based order a fiction.
We're going to cut our own way.
Well, you can't really do that.
Well, Matthew, I'm confused by a few things here.
I'm not Canadian.
So, you know, maybe we can unpack them a little bit more just based on what we've been discussing in the speech.
I read and I watched it in preparation for the episode.
The client-state aspect is really important here, but isn't that what Carney is advocating for moving away from?
And I agree with the double speak because, you know, there's another example.
In the beginning, he says in French, and I'm not saying it French, but translated, the power of the less power starts with honesty, which would also qualify as pretty Orwellian.
But if there's a hinge point of the two sections here, you're identifying, and he says, you cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
I actually think that's a pretty good line that gets sort of the heart of what I read because it feels like he's advocating for Canada becoming more sovereign and not so dependent on America.
So I get a bit confused when you flag Carney's list as neoliberal.
Traditionally, that called for less state intervention in the marketing, but he's calling for more collective investments with government partnerships, it seems.
He mentions business tax cuts, but also income tax cuts.
And there is obviously deference to business.
That's where he comes from.
I would expect him to speak in that language, but he focuses heavily on trade partnerships at the government level, which again is not less state intervention.
So he seems to be putting forward a bulwark against tariffs.
I think these are all great questions.
I also think they speak to how good Carney is at this type of communication.
He is advocating for independence and his trade missions, fishing for new customers are a big part of his strategy.
But what would that test of independence be?
Like, how could he make good over his lament that we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim?
Like maybe at the moment when the dominant state launches an illegal war.
I mean, he's talking about independence, but in a very particular way, like an independence of capital flows.
Like that's what he wants to be independent.
It's not the independence of people.
It's not the independence of human rights.
With regard to domestic policy, he's signaling to the Davos crowd that the country is open for business.
And that depends on them understanding that he's loosened regulatory standards, which is what he's doing here on the ground.
And anybody in that crowd would know that.
And he speaks to some of those details in the second half of the speech.
But he's loosening environmental protections to expand more oil development.
He's shortchanging consultation processes with First Nations people over building projects on unceded land.
There is more state intervention to the extent that he's centralized more executive power in cabinet ministers so that all of the extraction projects can speed up.
So yes, Derek, there's more state intervention to the extent that ministers have more power to give CEOs kind of blank check or no competition contracts so that they can get things started faster, right?
So it's weird.
I mean, yes, like technically neoliberalism is less state intervention, but sometimes the lever is, well, we've got to get the state to do this thing so that there's absolutely freedom in how capital is moving.
Right.
But that kind of hints at, I mean, I think an issue we've discussed in varying ways for a long time.
Because from my perspective, what we're seeing is a group of men, and it's always predominantly men, who are working within a system, but they aren't sticking with the rules of that system.
So you've often argued that socialism has never been put into practice in the way that Marx prescribed.
I've argued that capitalism has never been put into practice the way that Adam Smith has prescribed, at least not in America, because it absolutely has not.
And so now we have another opportunity or another example of a political category, and they're always fudging with the rules.
So I just say that because everything you're describing, like loosening regulatory rules around drilling and shit, that just sucks.
It's not going to do people good in the long run.
But I think besides the veneer of any sort of political movement, you just have men who want to make a lot of money and will fuck over everyone along the way.
Yeah.
And I suppose the major question is like, in what direction is that moving, right?
In general, in what direction is that moving?
And, you know, one term that he left out of the Davos speech was austerity.
But I heard it loud and clear.
In fact, when we were preparing for this, I actually claimed that he had used the word austerity in the speech because that's what I heard in the policies.
And then you pointed out it wasn't there.
But the reason that I'm hearing it is that beyond the stage, he's directing cabinet ministers to find 15% across the board departmental spending cuts.
He's cutting the federal workforce by 40,000 people.
We're a small country.
That's a lot of people.
They're also stopping things like door-to-door mail delivery and closing post offices in rural areas.
Chiasmus as a Cult Leader Tool00:03:45
Like these are pillars of like democratic community and communication.
And he's doing all of this while doubling military spending, right?
So, I mean, a lot of this is going to sound familiar to our American audience.
And, you know, to be honest, I think it's kind of like gentleman Doge, right?
So this is all preamble to like, well, how is he making this work?
Right.
Because this is where the language comes in.
Carney has become a ninja in this world, but he didn't build it.
And because he's not going to challenge it, he really has to make it sound good.
And that's where I believe he deploys this kind of metaphysical rhetoric delivered through his slowburn charisma.
So the line again, along with many others in the book, is we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.
And it stuck out to me so much that I like looked up, like, what is, is there a technique here?
Is this called something?
And I learned that this formulation is called chiasmus.
So you get parallel phrases and then you flip them in order that the terms and meanings crisscross and enrich each other, but also kind of make as they crisscross, they also confuse and create noise, right?
That is very charged.
And it's a form of speech that's like aesthetically satisfying.
It creates cognitive closure, feelings of resolution, like, oh, he really knows what he's talking about.
It's sticky.
It's memorable.
I think it also tranquilizes the brain with like deepity feels.
And it's not new.
It goes back to speeches, to the Roman Senate.
But with Carney, there's another influence that's really important because Chiasmus is super, super central in Catholic liturgy and literature.
And Carney is a devout Catholic who in his book says that he's guided by the values of Pope Francis.
So maybe you've heard like Christian Chiasmus hits like the following.
He was made man that we might be made God.
The last shall be first, the first last.
Grant what you command and command what you will.
So what I've learned is that chiasmus works best if the terms are abstract and lofty.
So, you know, strength, value, power.
Not only are these terms hard to define, but when you double them up in this crisscross structure, it's like abstraction goes squared.
And, you know, I've said before that with American diction, with words like freedom, for example, you know, Derrida's term for these words are transcendental signifiers, words with high piety and emotional charge, but low meaning or definitional value, especially when they're repeated.
In fact, if you repeat them, they sound emptier and emptier.
Like when you close your eyes at first, however, you can almost see that they all have capital letters, like in some old Victorian book.
So these are perfect tools for obscuring issues like international law and selling arms to the IDF.
And we have referred to Robert Lifton's notion of the thought-terminating cliché probably 500 times on this podcast.
And he says that that is at the heart of a cult leader's influence.
Now, I don't think that Kearney is a cult leader at all.
It's more like he's a middle-aged choir boy with a lot of power.
But I think we can add this notion of chiasmus and its religious and scriptural background to that toolbox of discerning how leaders use speech to cast a spell and distract from what's happening in the real world.
Inside Information in Sports Betting00:04:37
While most people were sorting through the fog of Trump's sudden war with Iran, a lot of people probably missed the massive amounts of money being exchanged for the worst possible reason.
Roughly $529 million was bet across the prediction market, polymarket, linked to the timing of those strikes.
And some people who can remain anonymous given the currency is crypto, they made a financial killing, mostly from suspiciously timed wagers from newly opened accounts just hours before the attack.
The blockchain analytics firm Bubble Maps flagged six accounts as suspected insiders.
You a Bubble Maps fan?
No.
Is it an app?
Can I get a Bubble Maps app?
No, it's an analytics firm.
Okay.
To be clear.
So they flag those accounts as suspected insiders because they'd never placed a bet on any other topic.
And they earned approximately $1.2 million.
Jesus.
Now, there was a separate account called MAGA My Man, and that account made $575,000 betting on two incidences that Khomeini would be out of power and the date of the strike.
Now, after this came to light, Senator Chris Murphy said, Obviously, there are people close to Donald Trump who on Friday knew what was happening on Saturday.
It's very likely, probable even that the people that placed those bets were people with inside information.
You think?
Yeah.
I've been researching prediction markets for a few weeks now for my other career in tech.
So I want to go through what they are and how they're being used because I don't think a lot of people interested in wellness and yoga or listenership really knows about these markets.
And to start, I'll say I don't personally bet on anything.
I went to a casino in Atlantic City when I turned 18, like the next week, I spent the entire evening playing poker.
I went in with $118.
I walked out with $118.
And I told myself that night I wouldn't do it again because I value the money I earn too much to blow it on things out of my control, like gambling.
And that's just my personal feeling.
I don't personally care if people bet or not.
I do believe the proliferation of legalized sports betting is going to be as much of a crisis as opioids has been.
And this evolution into prediction markets could seriously fuck up society when insiders are pulling the strings for real world outcomes.
Derek, I haven't even done that one night test with gambling because I'm as terrified of gambling as I am of drugs, I think.
Funny story, actually, you went to Atlantic City.
One of my best friends was a school teacher and he would get on a bus in Toronto that took him to Atlantic City on Friday night.
He'd arrive on like four o'clock Saturday morning.
He would spend all of his money.
He'd come home dead broke in time to go to school on Monday at 8 o'clock.
The bus would pull in.
And, you know, he did that over and over and over again.
It was horrible to watch and, you know, live through with him.
I really loved him and he just could not, he couldn't get out of that.
And these days, it's like, I couldn't bear throwing money away and not having it for my kids.
Like it would just be so shameful.
And I think that's the legacy too of my mom because, you know, there's addictions in my family history.
She grew up with an alcoholic war vet and her father.
And that just all instilled in me this mortal fear of addiction.
So yeah, I didn't, I couldn't even do that.
I can't believe that this is a thing.
Like this is a complete nightmare if this takes over the culture.
Yeah, my college roommate lost so much money in the tens of thousands that he had to move out of state for a few years to pay off his bookie in the 90s after he graduated or else he would have been seriously harmed.
So I've been up close and seen it happen on college basketball games, mostly in my apartment.
I did not partake.
And it's just, yeah, again, I just never, I've never come from money.
I've never had a ton of it.
So wasting it in that way for the possibility of getting a payday just never made sense to me.
But to your point about like, you know, we might not be able to understand it, but political betting itself is not new.
Right.
Betting, as I'll get to, is kind of in our DNA in some ways.
Political Betting and Stock Speculation00:10:31
The first political bet on record dates back to 1503.
People placed bets on the Papal succession.
And even then, it was considered an old practice in the literature.
Crowds wagered on gladiatorial contests and political outcomes in ancient Rome.
You had 17th century coffee houses in London, which served as informal exchanges where merchants and parliamentarians traded odds on wars, royal successions, and changes in government.
There was one shop called Jonathan's Coffee House that would eventually become the London Stock Exchange.
And they published political betting odds in newspapers.
The first instance of political betting on Wall Street was in 1884.
And this went on until World War II when it was actually outlawed.
I did not know that about Jonathan's coffee house.
I knew about the coffee house.
So it sounds like political betting and stock speculation have been like tangled up for a very long time.
Yeah.
I mean, stocks come a little bit later, but yeah, absolutely.
You know, today's prediction market was revived actually in 1988.
There were three economists who were frustrated by polling failures that they kept seeing in newspapers.
You had Jesse Jackson, who trounced Michael Dukakis in the Michigan primary, despite polls predicting the opposite.
And these economists wondered if market mechanisms could outperform surveys.
So they created the Iowa Electronic Markets, and they launched it the same year to let participants trade real money contracts on the race between George H.W. Bush and Dukakis.
Their creation outperformed traditional polls, and it provided an early proof of concept of the wisdom of the crowds, which is a principle that was first identified by Francis Galtland and was later formalized by Hayek.
And the basic idea is this, aggregating dispersed beliefs through financial incentives can produce more accurate forecasts than any single expert.
And just to add to that, if you get called for a poll, You don't have any incentive to tell the person the truth.
So there's always that you have to weigh.
But if your money's on the line, you're much more likely to be honest about what you believe.
And then the internet came along and gave steroids to all this.
So prediction markets have been in circulation since 2001, but regulations kept getting in the way until crypto and until Trump's administration.
Decentralized platforms started using smart contracts to settle bets automatically without a central clearinghouse.
And the prediction industry remained relatively under the radar until the 2024 presidential election.
Polymarket, which is the same platform that Iran money was wagered on, processed over $3 billion in trading volume on this one race.
You had an anonymous trader named French Whale who made over $80 million on Trump's victory, which significantly shifted market odds in that person's favor.
Okay, so you mean that the bets changed Trump's actual numbers?
Like, do we have good data on whether polymarket odds are contaminating polling?
There's no clear indication of that yet.
It didn't necessarily shift Trump's numbers in the American polls, but his wagers shifted the prediction market in Trump's favor.
So theoretically, insider training could affect elections, but so far we have no definitive knowledge of this happening.
But I think as we're seeing in Iran, if people inside the White House are betting on this and then doing the action, knowing they can make some money, I would say, yeah, we are in for some rough times with this.
And so prediction markets have arrived.
Total trading grew from 9 billion in 2024 to more than 44 billion last year.
You have another market called Kalshi, which is Polymarket's main competitor.
They now process over $1 billion in weekly training.
Their platform is mostly used for sports, and they process more than $1 billion on Super Bowl Sunday alone.
Polymarket is where political betting thrives.
And if all this sounds dicey, yeah, major institutions are getting in on it.
However, you have Robinhood, DraftKings, and Coinbase.
They're all in on the action now.
You have the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange.
It is not a government entity.
It is a private business.
They now distribute polymarkets data globally.
The company has become the official prediction partner of X and Stock Twits.
And along with Kalshi, they are now the official market for the NHL, meaning you can bet on games through them and the NHL is putting up the odds during games.
Polymarket raised $2 billion from Intercontinental Exchange alone, and they are now valued at $8 billion.
And a big part of the reason is Trump.
He's made a killing in crypto, and the entire industry is trying to get as much regulatory momentum as possible while he's in office.
Polymark is actually thinking of IPOing before the midterms, just so they can become legitimate.
Wow.
Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm invested in Polymarket and he serves as a paid strategic advisor to Kalshi.
Trump's media company partnered with crypto.com, whose parent company donated $30 million to Trump's super PAC to launch its own prediction platform called Truth Predict.
Boy.
Then in December, Trump's newly confirmed Commodities Future Trading Commission CFTC chairman said his agency would withdraw a proposed rule that would have banned political and sports-related events contracts.
Then he created an innovation advisory committee to draft new regulations.
This is a 35-member panel.
It includes the CEOs of Polymarket, Calci, Coinbase, Robinhood, FanDuel, and DraftKings.
You guys might be surprised to learn there's zero representation from consumer advocates or public interest groups.
It's all CEOs.
No addiction specialists on the board.
Doesn't appear to be so.
No mental health professionals.
No, but there is an AI psychologist, I think, is on the board.
Oh, that's awesome.
Democrats have threatened legal action against these markets, but yeah, they're going to accomplish anything right now.
And so you can event right now, you can log on to Polymarket.
You can bet on how many tweets will Elon Musk post on March 13th.
You can bet on top Spotify artist of 2026.
And you can bet on when will Mr. Beast's million-dollar puzzle be solved by my favorite, I flagged this earlier.
Will Jesus Christ return before 2027?
And there's currently $39 million being wagered on that.
Now, to their very limited credit, Polymarket pulled a bet off the site last week speculating on a nuclear bomb going off in 2026.
Why?
Why was that being on the paper?
They have morals.
Come on.
They actually did come out and they said that's even a little too far for us, which is stunning.
It's pretty apparent as to the consequences, but the Jesus bet leads to one of my main problems with these markets, which is actually defining the terms.
There's a lot of wiggle room for the market itself to say, we said, will Iran be carpet bombed on Saturday, not cluster bombed?
And so we're not going to give you your money.
And since these markets are virtually unregulated, there's no way to actually hold them accountable.
But Polymarket's founder, Shane Coplin, is a billionaire at 27.
Kalshi co-founder Luana Lope-Laura became the world's youngest self-made female billionaire ever at 29.
They are doing fine.
Woke.
They're absolutely woke.
I just want to understand you're suggesting with this problem with defining the terms that somebody who believes in their heart that Jesus came back could have a claim against Polymarket.
Well, they could have a claim, but I bring that up because there was a bet that happened.
Will Khomeini be out of power by a certain date?
Right.
Now he was killed.
And so the market said, well, that's different.
We're not going to honor that he's out of power because he was killed.
And so people are, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So people are trying to sue, but you can't because these markets are still unregulated for the most part.
The fact that ICE, the Intercontinental Exchange, is now a main backer, these could eventually be on publicly regulated platforms.
So that could change and that that's going to make the terms.
They're going to have to define them much more clear, more clearly than they do now.
But as of now, they're just like, nope, Khomeini, that bet is off.
You're not going to get your money.
And because of that semantic difference between he was killed versus he lost power or he's out of power, they're willing to do that and stand by that and then keep all of the money because they're not afraid of pissing off their clientele because everybody's going to keep betting anyway.
Yes.
Okay.
At this point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And there's no consumer protection.
Yeah.
And none of them are on the board.
So at least in America.
So, you know, it's entirely possible, and this may have already happened that as has happened in sports for a long time, and we've flagged this a moment ago, politicians start throwing the game to manipulate these markets.
I mean, they've been manipulating markets forever.
We, you know, there's been a lot of talk, we're recording on Tuesday that, you know, oil went up to 120 a barrel, the markets were about to crash, and then it dropped to 90 a barrel all of a sudden.
And so market manipulation is a real thing.
But now they have an even more untraceable way to do so through these decentralized platforms.
And I'm going to guess whatever regulations this administration devises for these companies, it's not going to be to favor the people placing the bets, provided that said politicians are getting a cut of the spoils.
Industrial Capitalism Hiding Power Relations00:15:03
You know, I hate to broken record my citations, but you know, Marx describes all forms of speculation as like mystification.
Like there's all of this running money that's gamed around as if it's extra and the game hides the underlying economy.
It hides the like exploitation that generates the money.
And like you're saying, like it, it can just be flipped.
It can just be turned around to do the opposite thing.
Well, with that theory, you know, mystification is just an admission of ignorance.
No, no, it's not.
It's not an admission of ignorance.
It's a process.
I believe it is.
What?
Well, I believe it's an admission of ignorance.
Then I'm not explaining Marx properly.
It's not an admission of ignorance.
How are you using the term, Matthew?
How was Marx using it?
Mystification, it's based on the idea of the commodity fetish, that the farther the object gets away from its material production and its labor inputs and all of that stuff, the less you're able to see all of the human sort of factors that flow into it.
It becomes an abstract object that then is worth money instead of labor.
And so you can't really connect to the actual blood, sweat, and tears or the place or, you know, how much time it took or what the lives of the workers were.
So you go to the mall and it's filled with commodities that are fetishized because you have no idea where they came from.
So it's not, you're not admitting ignorance.
You can't know.
It's you've been you've been alienated from the process of production, right?
So that's that's what it means.
So you're talking about from the consumer perspective purely because there are steps of production and supply chains that led to that appearing in the actual mall that you're shopping in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you, but you as the person and more specifically, as the worker who has produced this object will find that object later in the store divorced of all kind of all kinds of social relations that actually made it.
His first concern is that the product that you make is alienated from you in the sense that you don't use it.
It's not something that you have because you love or you honor.
It's something that you have made for somebody else so that they can make money.
Right.
And so the mystification is the product goes out into the world and like it's just sort of somehow exists.
And you're right.
Like the people, the workflow managers, everybody who brought it into production and retail, they know where it came from and how it tracked.
But we don't.
We don't.
Right.
Okay.
So is he arguing for isolationism then?
Because what you're saying is if I, if I'm buying something from my wife's homeland, Thailand, like I'm not going to see the processes that come there.
So is he saying, well, therefore, we need to then stop all sorts of global trade, because if you can't see the processes that went into this, then at the consumer level, you shouldn't be able to purchase this.
So you're not really going to understand.
There's no prescription against mystification.
He's describing something that happens in industrial capitalism that hides from us what the power relations are.
So it's a much simpler observation than I think you're making out, right?
Which is on the level of you bought the product from Thailand.
Yeah, you're going to have no clue as to whose hands made it, whether they got paid fairly, whether they were abused by their employers.
You're just happy to have it.
And your sort of calculation around how much it's actually worth is going to be based on comparing it with other abstracted commodities on the shelf beside it, not in comparison to all of those social factors that created it, right?
So it's not, he's not arguing, it doesn't go farther into, okay, well, we should never buy anything from Thailand.
We should understand what happens in mass production industrial capitalism so we can understand why people are so easily separated from their labor and its value because and they don't know that that's happening.
It's super interesting, Matthew, because it sounds like you're describing Marx talking about a psychosocial or philosophical sort of process.
Like mystification is a process whereby our perceptions collectively get distorted in this sort of way where we're alienated from the reality of what's really going on in terms of that product and where it comes from and what it's worth.
And who suffers to produce it.
And who suffers to produce it.
And what it's worth, right?
And how the worth can be speculated upon.
But what's tricky about that is because I hear Derek listening to it and saying, well, how does that fit into a kind of economics theory that has nuts and bolts, right?
As opposed to like an idea of how something becomes abstracted in a way that alienates us from the reality of it.
Well, it does have nuts and bolts in the sense that he spent like 10 years sitting in the British Museum looking at shipping manifests and doing the math on how the economy is actually working at that time to figure out that, you know, there are basic processes that bring commodities to market.
And this is what they do to the power differential between workers and owners.
So.
So there are nuts and bolts there.
But if we jump directly to does that mean we should never buy anything from Thailand, it's much more like, no, let's recognize that if the things that we make are only for profit value and not for use value, this will be the outcome.
And therefore, maybe there's an isolationist outcome to that in the sense that, yeah, it would be very good if we could become more localized and self-sufficient in our economies, not only so that we could avoid the excesses of globalization, but also because we would have more human contact with the objects that we use and we wouldn't be sold shit that we didn't need by people who just want to make money and don't care what we need.
So it's an isolationist argument.
So it's saying local community don't.
Yeah.
Well, when you say it's much simpler, it's not.
I mean, I don't understand why speculation becomes a form of mystification in this.
But besides that, I mean, you're painting something you said a moment ago that the number of people who suffer in the production, we know that's true sometimes, but that's not always the case.
I mean, there has to be a reckoning with the fact that every company is going to want to make some profit so they can hire more workers and actually produce more goods if it's warranted and people actually want them.
And this seems to be working backwards from that concept to saying that even that very idea of producing anything for profit is therefore of is going to only be a net negative, which I just do not believe in at all.
Well, if things are only produced for profit, then we begin to lose contact with what we actually use and what we need.
That's your belief.
I don't think that's true.
No, no, it's it's no, think about how many people want AI as a product in the world.
How many people want the K the coming AI sort of panoply of products to roll out and destroy their labor?
Like who actually wants that?
Well, in the UK, there's just been a report released that there are actually businesses are hiring more people than they expected to and above because they're trying to work with AI systems.
So we're looking at you have, you have two things going on in AI right now.
You have a doom and gloom scenario, and I believe some of that could come to fruit, but you also have a number of companies that are trying to use it and actually creating more labor because of it.
And that's a recurrence throughout.
The same thing happened in the internet around 2001.
So to just look at the doom and gloom scenario, I don't think is taking a holistic view of what's happening in the industry.
I'm not even looking at it as doom and gloom.
I'm saying who wants it?
A lot of people.
Who wants a better truck?
Well, my neighbor just bought a Rivian and she absolutely loves it based on her own Ford.
This is what I'm saying is that the sort of completely free manufacture of products to perceived and then created needs is anarchistic, right?
There's no planning.
We've talked for six years about why there's no universal health care in the States.
That takes planning.
It takes planning.
It takes discipline.
It takes some kind of like, I'm going to restrict purchases or expenditures on these products in order to bring them home to serve social needs, right?
And we don't, the people who make really big money in capitalism are not thinking about what human beings need at all.
They are seeing a potential for marketing products that then they can upsell as essential.
And then they exploit human desires and they create a bunch of useless shit that drives the climate off the cliffs.
Yeah, I don't agree with that.
I mean, a moment ago, you said the people don't foresee, and that's absolutely not true.
The people don't what?
What did I say?
When you said that people who succeed at capitalism do not think about what people need.
And my former coworker was the number nine employee at Amazon.
He is the guy who created the Amazon bookshelf, which basically made the company what it is.
And so I got some insights into the early company.
And I am not fucking fuck Jeff Bezos and fuck everything the company has become.
But in the early stages of the company, they thought very much about what people need and delivered it to them.
And over time, As it scaled, as happens with most of these systems, as it scaled and becomes further away from people, then it became extremely dicey.
But what does that tell you?
The idea that at the origins of this thing that they don't think about that, about serving a need is just false.
That's fair.
But what does that movement from useful innovative product to Jeff Bezos wants to eat the world or Sam Altman doesn't know if it's worth, or Peter Thiel doesn't know if it's worth saving humanity.
What does that tell you about that arc?
It tells me the same exact thing I said a little while ago about political systems, that however good intentions are, as time, as people gain more power, it is human nature to then exploit that power, whether it's capitalist, socialist, neoliberal, whatever it is, at some point when it hits scale, it is going to then kick in a certain number of people's greed, and then they start looking for opportunities everywhere.
And what's the antidote?
What's the antidote to that?
If you have a mathematics that is based upon the exploitation of the greed principle in the form of I'm going to appropriate all profit from a particular exchange into ownership and capital so that I can expand my operations, create more products, then you have a very particular sort of jet fuel behind that perhaps natural, perhaps organic, perhaps human nature process.
One of the most interesting stories that I heard David Graeber say was that he was talking to, or he was reading, he was researching communications between ExxonMobil executives in the 1980s who knew that climate change was doing what it was doing,
who knew what kind of crap they were responsible for, and who were writing to American legislators to say, please regulate us, please do something because we are beholden to our shareholders.
And so, you know, he gave it as this example of, you know, it's even if you intend to do well in a system like this, you will run up against the mandate to make money first for profit to be your God.
And I think that's what we've got.
Well, yeah, but I mean, I don't disagree with any of that, but you're also talking about one specific industry.
We started this conversation about a systems approach.
And I think within any sort of economy, you're going to get the exploitation.
It is human nature.
We've watched this happen for thousands of years from the beginning of the Harappan civilization forward.
So that seems to be a human feature, not a bug.
And to answer Julian's economy, I mean, Julian's question, my prescription would be what we have proof for, which is mixed economies.
And mixed economies seem to do best because they keep checks and balances in ways that America is not because we have just allowed unfettered capitalism to reign.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So strong regulations and strong separations between corporation and government, right?
And strong social safety nets.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I respect that aspiration and can say from somebody who lives in more of a social democracy than you do, that's the dream here, right?
That's what we would like to see.
And I would just say that, you know, in the perspective of the last, you know, let's say, 75 years or since the beginning of the Cold War period, that's been the sort of progressive ideal.
And I think to sort of suggest that, you know, the Nordic model or the Scandinavians or the Canadians or the Australians have found this balance between, you know, regulation and innovation.
And that is what we should model ourselves on.
That's why I wrote this segment in the middle about our very prime minister, because the pressures will always move towards privatization.
The pressure is coming from a certain group of people that usually have acquired capital.
Yeah, from capital, from capital.
Like it's, it's, it's, I almost have a, I almost have a metaphysics around it, right?
Like that's the way it moves.
It moves.
It exerts incredible downward pressure on people's best instincts.
And so I know that you guys both look to Scandinavia and you go, wow, it would be so nice to live there.
But I assure you, it's temporary.
No, I don't say that everything is to everything is temporary, but I don't say I don't want to live there.
I'm saying that that model has shown data that has the highest happiness indexes and also has economies that work best compared relative to all the other countries.
Now, you can't when you're looking at these, so when you're looking at these things, that doesn't mean we've reached a final form.
Why Scandinavia Isn't the Solution00:00:42
We absolutely have not.
And you can continually improve upon that model incrementally, which seems to work best.
Because every time we have phases where sudden changes of power happen, things don't go so well in the long run.
So we can look upon incremental improvements, but that never means that I want to move there or live under that economy.
I do want universal health care.
I mean, I'd like to move there.
So if anyone wants, if anyone wants to host me, absolutely too.
But my point is always that we have to compare when we start talking about models like what they have in Scandinavia, they should be compared to other countries in the world, not compared to some abstract perfection that has never existed.