The stock market is in turmoil . . . and Reddit is to blame. A group of alternative investors, in effect, sold the short-sellers short and took down a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. Day-trading bros are high-fiving . . . the Wall Street billionairs are crying . . . and the normies are scrambling to get in on the next 10X rally of a failing company or new crypto currency.But what does it all mean? Does the current volatility and casino-like nature of the stock market foretell dark days ahead? More broadly, is the whole American empire and its planetary financial domination, another Gamstop, a pump-and-dump scheme writ large? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021, and welcome back to The Spencer Report.
We've bet it all on Doge.
Joining me today is Keith Woods.
Main topic, GameStop and the end of the American empire.
The stock market is in turmoil, and Reddit is to blame.
A group of alternative investors in effect sold the short sellers short and took down a multi-billion dollar hedge fund.
Day trading bros are high-fiving.
The Wall Street billionaires are crying.
I care.
And the normies are scrambling to get in on the next 10x rally of a failing company or new cryptocurrency.
But what does it all mean?
Does the current volatility and casino-like nature of the stock market foretell dark days ahead?
More broadly, is the whole American empire and its planetary financial dominion another GameStop?
All right, Keith, welcome back.
How have you been?
Yeah, good to be here.
I'm very optimistic.
I think I'm going to be a Dogecoin millionaire by the end of the week.
A million?
I put everything I have into Dogecoin.
Oh, good.
That's responsible.
Millionaire.
I mean, aren't you already a Dogecoin millionaire?
I was expecting you to be a Dogecoin billionaire master of the universe by now.
Yeah, so let's get the obvious out of the way.
This has been a hilarious 72 hours or so, and it's certainly stranger than fiction.
You know, I think everyone has a lot of schadenfreude going on.
And I think maybe it kind of reveals who you are, how you just feel about it, just on an immediate gut level.
Whether you are the people crying on CNBC, or whether you are laughing at the people crying on CNBC, or whether you think this is a terrible thing to our...
Well-functioning market system, or you think this is hilarious.
Now, I think it's hilarious.
I do not shed tears over the loss of Melvin Capital.
And, you know, when a billionaire is, I believe his name's Cooperman, was crying on CNBC, you know, we had our Camelot, and now it's a ruin.
And, you know, I mean, yeah, I feel some schadenfreude.
But I also can take a step back and not get...
Lost in this thing, because this is a lot of fun.
But at the end of the day, it's a crazy pump and dump scheme in a highly volatile market.
And that is what it is.
And it might be funny, but I've seen people get on this bandwagon and say, oh, well, Trump lost, and so we're now going to destroy the system.
Through these kinds of things and hold them hostage.
And this is the new populist way or whatever.
And I can only just kind of roll my eyes at that stuff.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, I like the spirit of it, obviously.
And I think everyone...
I mean, the only one I saw defending the hedge fund managers all week was Ben Shapiro.
You wrote an impassioned thread about how, you know, on free market principles that the hedge fund managers actually benefit everyone.
Yeah, less and less people want to hear that stuff.
But yeah, I mean, I like the spirit of it.
I mean, you know, in this particular case, I think it was kind of effective sort of guerrilla warfare against the oligarchs.
I mean, I think what the short position on GameStop was like 140%.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, What changed yesterday?
I mean, when you start seeing people talking about we're going to inflate Dogecoin to the moon, it's like there's a lot of people that I think have come on board and they think it's some kind of like infinite money scheme.
Right.
And I definitely think it's limited.
I mean, it's kind of like, you know, like these people went to the poker table with the professional poker players and they won a couple of hands.
And now they're sitting at the table and it's like, on the long run, you know, you're going to get burned.
It's not a strategy to just sort of go from one altcoin or one stock to another creating artificial bubbles.
And eventually, surely, the big investors will just start playing both sides of this as well.
I mean, I think there was already some of that.
Some of these people that were sort of cheering this on, like, what's that guy's name?
He's like that Indian guy that was invested in Facebook, and he's like this ethical...
Oh, yes.
I'm forgetting his name.
He's running for governor.
He's running for governor, I believe, but he's claiming that this is socialism or something.
Yeah, but at the same time, he bought GameStop stock and tweeted about it, but he sold it a few hours later.
So he was kind of benefiting from this pump and dump scheme by getting everyone involved.
So yeah, I mean, it's kind of uniting everyone against the oligarchs, which is a good thing.
And I think it's done more than anything the last few years to expose some of the corrupt practices that go on and some of the ridiculous ways that parasitic finance capitalism makes money off people.
But in terms of like – They're playing in the casino.
Yeah.
It's not like they're – In terms of this idea that like, oh, this is what Occupy should have done and this is how we bring down capitalism.
It's like – I mean, it's like gambling on all kinds isn't really going to destroy the financial system.
No.
They're just taking part in the casino themselves and kind of screwing over The big players who live in the casino.
And maybe there is some benefit to that.
Maybe there's some little kernel of truth to this is what Occupy Wall Street should have done.
But no, I wouldn't get...
Again, I support these guys in spirit in some way, but it's not the real thing.
What they did originally in flight and the GameStop stock to screw over the people to shorten it.
They were basically filling the role of what the regulators should be doing there.
Right.
You could argue that.
I think there are a couple other levels to it.
There was some speculation that the same people who were shorting GameStop were also shorting Tesla.
Tesla has gone up 10x on basically speculation, and that this was almost a bigger scheme.
That's an interesting...
I think there's another level to it in the sense that they were also buying up AMC, which was getting shorted because movie theaters are obviously basically out of business during the pandemic and all these big movies keep getting delayed and they have no cash flow.
Game stock, I think there is a kind of populist element to it in the sense that You know, GameStop is like an old, I don't know, it's not quite a 90s business, but it's definitely a 2000s business.
I mean, I've never been to one.
There actually is one not too far away.
But, you know, you go in and you buy a gaming system or you buy games and it's kind of like one of those businesses where you kind of feel a part of it.
It's like, oh, I love to go to my GameStop.
And same with AMC movie theaters.
There's a communal element to a movie theater.
You go there and have popcorn and have a date and whatever.
And it's like big Wall Street is trying to destroy these kind of homey chains and engage in just the wild, extreme speculation of companies that have no cash flow but all investment in Silicon Valley or investing in other hedge funds or whatever.
And it was almost like the little chain kind of punching back against Wall Street.
I thought there was a little interesting element to that.
But I don't know what to say.
It is illegal to conspire with a bunch of people and say, we are going to go buy this stock all at once and through that market mechanism push up the price and then we are going to sell it.
That is illegal.
That's pumping and dumping.
And they were doing that with a company they liked, which evoked Gamergate as well.
The fact that they were defending this gaming platform.
Yeah, I mean, it is what it is.
It's just now done on Reddit and it's not done in a boiler room with a bunch of sharks on Wall Street who want to make their first million and they're going to do it by pumping it up.
And remember, whenever you pump it up, it goes down.
I mean, there's like an equal and opposite reaction.
You know, there are people, as Jordan Belfort himself said when he was interviewed recently, I just tweeted it out.
I mean, there are people who are going to hear about this now.
Like, there's your normie on Twitter or Facebook that hears about this and goes and buys into this, and they are probably going to get sued.
Because no one is really buying GameStop.
Because they think that it is a great investment that they need to hold on to and that its business model is sound.
I mean, they are playing a game and that game will end and it will be bad.
It will likely be bad for all the people who get in now and get in after it's made a splash in the media, etc.
Yeah, well, I think it was at $4 last year at one point.
And I decided to shorten it when this kind of celebrity investor came in and was put on the board.
But yeah, I heard someone talk about it.
He said the amount of shortening that was done on it would suggest that...
Investors were kind of gambling on it, going out of business this year, that it was probably going to be facing bankruptcy.
I think GameStop lost something like half a billion dollars last year.
What's the true price of the GameStop stock?
If it was like $6 for most of last year, and then it was kind of inflated to over $20 when this celebrity investor came in, that's when it was heavily shorted.
The true price of that stock probably is like under...
So you'd imagine eventually it's going to kind of reach an equilibrium and fall back to that.
So all of the people that have inflated it up to whatever it's at now, you know, 180 or 300, who knows what it's at now, but eventually they will get burned.
Like that's kind of a certainty at this point.
Yeah.
So, you know, so much for that.
I am interested in what's going to happen because I think there's a tremendous amount of...
I think there's a lot of euphoria and I am curious.
I would imagine in the next 72 hours or maybe...
Maybe a week later or a month later, there's going to be a tremendous amount of depression.
And I think people should watch out for that.
I mean, we do not, obviously, give stock advice on this program.
But just keep this in mind.
If you've heard of it, it's already over.
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, a lot of people, they did say they were just buying it too.
Basically screw over these hedge funds like Melvin.
They weren't doing it to make money.
They were just trying to keep the stock high so they could screw over these companies.
But yeah, I mean, that's one thing.
But yeah, there does seem to be people...
I mean, I heard people saying, like, buy GME and hold it forever as if that was, like, a key to, like, infinite money.
So it does seem to be, like, catching people now that don't really get the shot and think this is, like, a way to kind of next to Wall Street.
Right.
The other thing about this that I think is interesting is that we had major stock market downturns at the beginning of the pandemic, which was not terribly surprising.
By about February and early March, You know, people in the know, at least, were taking it seriously now.
And I think one of the impulses for Trump to engage in this kind of coronavirus denial for as long as he did was that he did grasp kind of intuitively that this was going to send the stock market down, and that sends his own chances down.
Because those presidential elections in the stock market are correlated in interesting ways.
But the stock market kind of got it together.
I think people realized by June or so that we're all not going to die, that this is going to be a very detrimental thing, of course.
But we need to start looking out for the future when things come back.
And a stock market is a forward-looking mechanism.
You are not buying what the company did a year ago.
You're buying what it's going to do in a year or in 10 years even.
um So there was a lot of volatility, but then we basically reached highs again.
And while we're doing this, the Dow Jones and S&P and NASDAQ and so on, and I would imagine you could...
Find this around the world are down, you know, 2%, 5% there, 3% here.
There does seem to be some major volatility and worry going on.
There was a lot of volatility with a stock like Apple, which is, you know, obviously they have a business model of highly profitable business model of iPhones and other things.
So the fact that that's happening is a little bit strange.
So I don't know.
This is just my gut instinct.
Things can get decoupled, and the economy can be decoupled from the stock market and vice versa.
And they're related, of course, but they can really be disconnected in ways, particularly now where...
99% of these equities are owned by financial firms.
They aren't really democratically allocated.
And so you have a bunch of big money banks and hedge funds who have some connection to the Fed.
They're getting all that money creation early, and they're pumping it into speculation.
You can really have a serious disconnect between the stock market, equity prices, and...
The real economy, how people are actually living.
But that can't really go on forever.
There are going to be ways that that is a massive bubble that is going to pop.
You cannot have a situation where you have major unemployment, unrest, negative social mood, lack of consumption, etc., and a stock market just rising infinitely.
And I don't know.
I'm getting the impression that...
Because there's so much...
There's obviously a huge amount of negative energy.
And you now have...
The stock market is, again, on people's radar.
They're thinking financially.
I remember when I was actually living in New York City.
During the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and there were all these signs everywhere, advertisements for the Financial Times, and it said, we're living in Financial Times.
And I thought that was actually quite true.
Average people were thinking about it.
People were very angry.
There was, you know, kind of a little bit of socialism in the air and, you know, let's slaughter the fat cats, you know, kind of thing.
I feel like we might be headed there now.
I think we might be headed towards really serious volatility and a stock market crash in the coming months.
2008 started like this.
You had some big box stores going out of business.
You had weird things happening in the market.
And then by September, which is when these things usually happen, you had a major bankruptcy of a financial institution, i.e.
Lehman Brothers, and then just the bottom fell out of everything.
And I just get a very...
I've lived through a few of these and I get a very strong feeling that we might be headed back into one of these things.
And in some ways it's overdue.
I mean, there was eight years between the dot-com bubble and the 2008 crash.
We're now in 2021.
Yeah, I just...
There's that famous quote by Joseph Kennedy, if the shoeshine boys are giving you stock advice, it's time to get out of the market.
It does seem like that kind of scenario again.
It is at the point.
The normies are talking about stock prices and crypto and all these kinds of things.
That's never good.
I called the Bitcoin top when I went on Twitter and everyone was talking about Bitcoin.
This was back in 2018, I believe.
Everyone was talking about Bitcoin on Twitter.
It was when I did that Dinesh D'Souza movie, and I was in, I think, San Diego, or I can't remember, someplace in California.
And I was out just eating lunch, and normies were talking euphorically about Bitcoin.
There was this guy on his cell phone saying, everyone needs Bitcoin.
Just buy more Bitcoin.
Every single person.
This is the future.
And I was like, all right, this reminds me completely of tech bubble, housing bubble.
That is the end of it.
And I get that feeling again.
I mean, this is that feeling on steroids where, you know, everyone are just declaring that it's free money.
Like, we need to buy, you know, hold, stay strong, buy it now.
This is free money.
The government's not going to give you two grand, but you get it this way.
That's the way they're talking.
And that is the proverbial shoeshine boy.
Yeah, I mean, Trump will have played a role in it.
Like, Trump undid a lot of regulation from the previous administration on Wall Street that was a response to Wade.
But, I mean, like, Elizabeth Warren, I saw she was getting bashed on Twitter today.
I mean, I know you like to take up sometimes and offer kind of esoteric defenses of the neoliberal types.
But in Warren's defense, like...
She was making a fairly sensible point that this is like a deeper problem of market regulation and the SEC is doing its job.
And she was actually the only person that was really talking about this problem in her election campaign in terms of financialization and the growth of Wall Street destroying business on the high street.
You know, she proposed like a second Glass-Steagall Act.
I mean, one of the big problems in the U.S. last few years has been there's huge job losses in the retail sector because of private equity firms, which are, you know, they come in.
I mean, there was a report in 2019 that said that they've cost one and a half million jobs in the last 10 years because they come in basically and they load these struggling businesses with debt.
The actual firm invests.
Very little money.
It mostly borrows it against the company.
And there's a huge rate of failure for these companies to take over because it rewards risky business practices and also laying off staff and cutting costs.
And then there's all sorts of loopholes for these people.
There's something that the private equity managers, they only get taxed at 20%.
They pay capital gains tax rather than the income tax they should be paying.
And they get these firms to pay all sorts of what they call monitoring fees, which is basically like they're just paying fees directly to the private equity firm to monitor the company, whatever that means.
But yeah, it's very sort of parasitic, these relationships.
And this just seems to be sort of expanding exponentially.
But I mean, I don't see how you really solve a problem like that without regulation.
But it just seems to be this perpetual cycle where...
There's a crash.
And Joseph Kennedy is the person that I think created the SEC and responded to the Great Depression with all sorts of regulatory moves on the Great Depression.
But I think it's bigger than Elizabeth Warren because Elizabeth Warren will often, you know, she'll lambast Wall Street people in Congress.
She'll bring them in and read them the right act and so on.
But her regulation seems to be about protecting retail investors.
So it's built on the assumption that you should be able to go in and put 100k of your life savings into Wall Street and they'll kind of prudently manage it and it will slowly climb up every year and you'll retire.
Maybe this is a bit overstated.
There's a certain kind of last man quality to the way Elizabeth Warren thinks.
It's from a middle-class retail perspective as opposed to looking at the bigger picture, which is that what is...
What is wrong with the economy that profits on making goods are falling and collapsing?
Real stuff is becoming very difficult to produce in this country and in the Western world.
We're creating this kind of financialized economy.
Something like Silicon Valley is just a kind of new version of this.
Really even engaging in technology production.
Something like Uber, which loses money, or at least it was a year or two ago.
I don't know if it's now profitable, but it just loses money constantly.
Uber, whatever you want to say about it.
Yeah, it's great when you're out in a city and you can catch an Uber at...
You know, midnight and it's easier, maybe cheaper than a taxi.
But they're not really creating any actual value.
They're creating value, but they're not really creating any actual good.
The technology was created by other people.
It was created by people who made the servers or made your phone or people who wrote the code.
They are basically converting, you know, average people into gypsy cab operators.
And it's not, like, there is no real technological investment, and there's no real creation of a new good.
Now, there's creation of a value, I guess, arguably, but it's also something that, you know, at least a year or two ago, was never making money.
It was just kind of reconfiguring things, almost like arbitrage, and, you know, generating a lot of interest.
And value.
But that value was inherently speculative.
And it's just a kind of issue.
Now, obviously, something like Uber isn't entirely new, but we're moving to a world where how you're creating value is just kind of in the ether somewhere.
It's all hype and immaterial things.
And this is also based on a massive inflation of the US dollar.
Now, we haven't seen massive price inflation or we've seen lower velocity, if anything, on everyday items in the sense that people are going out less, they're spending less cash over the barrel buying a sandwich or a movie ticket or what have you.
So we're not seeing inflation as that's usually understood in the sense of rapid price increases like Weimar era stuff.
But we have seen dramatic, incredible inflation of debt and credit with the US dollar and the Federal Reserve.
I mean, 90% of the dollars in world history were created in the past year.
I mean, that is insane.
It's not reaching a retail level, and so we don't see it in the way that it would really bother people, where the price of groceries is going up 10% every week.
That becomes just totally unsustainable and actually absolutely chaotic.
People lose their minds in such a situation.
We haven't seen that.
It goes up 2% a year, that kind of thing.
But in terms of just the absolute creation of money, It is incredible what is being done.
And I don't know the ultimate implications of that.
There's actually an interesting tweet that I saw from Claire Lehman, who is the editor of Quillette.
And she asked a good question.
It was like, well, the dollar used to be based on gold.
So there was some kind of...
Limit to the amount of paper you could create.
And it was ultimately backed up by something.
Now, you're not going to go out and redeem your dollars, usually.
But there's just a source of stability.
After FDR, but mostly after Nixon closing the gold window, not making the dollar redeemable, the dollar was kind of based on oil in a way.
So everyone needs oil.
We have this petrol economy.
The US is in the Middle East.
And so you buy oil in dollars.
That's just a built-in demand for dollars.
Then we kind of moved off post-Cold War, where America is the one big kahuna on Earth.
You pay your taxes and dollars.
And everyone wants to invest in the United States.
And so it's kind of based on economic growth.
And I would say subtly based on geopolitical empire.
But we are kind of getting to a point where you can reasonably ask, what is this based on?
I mean, there's no economic growth.
Whether oil is going to be just infinitely priced in dollars for the foreseeable future, I don't think so.
It's certainly not based on gold.
Bitcoin, crypto is a fascinating thing, but it's extremely volatile, and I don't think anyone really sees that as a hard currency in this way.
It's kind of like, where are we moving?
Where is the center?
To this planetary financial empire.
Can this keep going on?
It's all based on credit.
I mean, credit is the idea of it as credo, that belief.
We're all believing in this thing.
And we all benefit by continuing to believe in this thing.
But is America the next game stop or whatever?
It's being pumped up.
Yeah, I mean, you definitely hit something in terms of this phenomenon of platform capitalism.
I don't think anyone has really figured out the implications of it or how to deal with it.
A lot of those companies like Uber and Airbnb, Deliveroo, all these kinds of examples, a lot of them have been able to make money by basically being ahead of regulations because It's such a new model that countries didn't really know how to deal with this stuff.
But yeah, I think some people have this idea of the free market idea that capitalism is going to lead to greater and greater production and efficiency.
But you see these companies, their main business model is kind of skimming money through fees and licenses of people's labor and also data collection.
There's this sort of...
Dual exploitation they have where you go on Airbnb and as you said, they're not actually offering anything except the coding of a platform and loads of people interact on there.
And then they skim fees off interactions between people and then steal their data and sell it to advertising companies.
Which was Robinhood, by the way.
Right, yeah.
Which is in the news because they were protected by Google who erased like 100,000 reviews or some crazy thing like that.
And they ceased trading on certain stocks that were being pumped up on Reddit, reportedly.
But Robinhood was offering no fees transactions on equity trading and probably other things.
And again, the name of the company is Robinhood.
It's like you're stealing from the rich.
It's like Bernie Sanders' stock company or whatever.
I mean, no.
What they were doing, their business model was to collect massive amounts of data by being the Google of stock trading, by giving you valuable information for free or a trade for free.
And they were selling that data to their client, real clients, who were these bigger players who could easily use that data.
I mean, all of these guys on Reddit using Robinhood, that data is going to go to the Melvin Capitals of the world, if not Melvin Capital itself.
And they're going to decipher trends and animal spirits in that and make money off it.
Yeah, and also one of their big investors was one of the funds that bailed out Melvin Capital.
So, I mean, there's an obvious conflict of interest.
I mean, what they did was incredible.
They took a lot of people's stock at $117 or something and just forced them to sell.
They sold it for them.
And it later went to $350 or something.
So, they cost people thousands and thousands of dollars.
It is an incredible level of corruption.
I mean, I think AOC and Ted Cruz were saying that they wanted to launch an investigation into that.
So again, that's one of the positive aspects of it.
It's bringing eyes onto that.
But yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
When you look at platform capitalism, and this is the thing where there's this weird kind of conflict with the internet and decentralization and the direction of technology, which is like...
You know, you have these people, like the very early adopters of crypto and so on, the libertarian types, what do they call them?
Like cypher punk people that saw this as leading sort of inevitably to like a libertarian ideal that was going to lead to decentralization.
And like theoretically, you could have, you know, you can move everything to the blockchain.
You could have like decentralized insurance.
You could move all of financial instruments onto the blockchain.
You know, you could have democracy on the blockchain.
You could run a voting system on there, all these kinds of things.
But at the same time, you know, we're getting this technology that should lead to decentralization, but it's creating all of these complex networks.
And the network effect is to lead to complete monopolization.
There's mathematicians that have studied this, like complex networks where you have interactive nodes that have freedom and that have...
And that, you know, growth is paired to system that inevitably tends to win or take all.
And it's like, you know, it's just it's this thing that everyone recognizes, which is like, you know, no one actually cares if Gab or some other Twitter alternative has a better interface than Twitter and is faster than Twitter and has less advertising.
You're just going to go on Twitter because it's, you know, it's the biggest.
And that's how that's pretty much how all of these things work.
Same with Airbnb, you know, you're not going to go on 10 different websites that each have like.
Five rooms to rent in the area.
You're going to go in the one that has like 500.
So, you know, it's this problem that, you know, as you have these sort of revolutionary technologies that should lead to decentralization and localism and so on, it's just, it's having the opposite effect and it's creating these new, like, feudal oligarchs.
You know, you've Jeff Bezos making like $13 billion in a day last year.
You've, what, Elon Musk has worked like $200 billion now.
Bezos is closed as well.
And yeah, it's just, I mean, as the market becomes globalized, this winner-take-all effect gets accelerated and gets accelerated even more by technology.
And you just have, everything is just being pulled into this gravitational center of like the few sort of early adopter oligarchs that control these platforms.
And I don't think like our state model really is capable of addressing this.
I mean, maybe the US is.
But it's like, what can any, you know, what can any state in Europe do against companies as powerful?
I mean, Australia recently, I can't remember what it was they did, but they were going to force Google to pay some tax they hadn't paid, or they were going to enforce some regulation.
And, you know, Google just threatened that they'd stop people using Google in Australia.
And it's like, you know, like, countries...
Yeah, so I mean, like, the nation stayed as, like, the ultimate sovereign.
It's being outrun by this stuff.
Vulture funds will just sue a country in South America for hundreds of billions of dollars and it'll get enforced by an international court.
You've this sort of personalization of sovereignty.
A lot of the models we have to try and deal with this kind of thing are just completely outdated now.
What do you do with oligarchs this powerful?
They've got their wealth offshored.
You know, a lot of their business model isn't like physical stores.
It's kind of, it's in the ether, it's in the cloud.
They're not beholden to any nation state.
If someone tries to, you know, like the kind of simple answer, like tax the rich.
You know, I remember what Occupy Wall Street finally came out with a list of demands.
And it's like leftist idealism always turns into this kind of, it runs up against this logic of capital where it's like, well, we can take back like the tax rates of the 1950s, but you're just going to have capital flight.
So everything is so disembedded.
It's like all of the old sort of leftist answers, like old, you know, you've old school leftists like Corbyn or Sanders resurfaced now and then.
But it's like all of their answers work fine when you have like an embedded market and, you know, you can't have like capital flight within 24 hours or just move to Vietnam or something.
But when everything is so global and the state is just kind of one personalized piece of sovereignty that's weaker than these centers of capital.
It's like, what is the answer then?
And I don't think anyone has really figured that out yet.
No.
I think it will only be figured out when there is an actual reset and there has to be a new center to this.
That's the only way.
Because they're not going to just stop doing something because we tell them to or Bernie Sanders is popular or something.
There's going to have to be a new reset of the financial order on a new paradigm once this one ends.
And they all do end.
I mean, at the same time,
even when you look at something like the British Empire, there was a level to which Merchants were always somewhat subservient to a greater order, but now it's like when you have...
I mean, anything from 10% to 50% of the world's wealth is offshore.
They don't even know.
So it would take a massive global coordinated response, but again, how are you going to get the world to cooperate on something like that?
Right.
It's going to have to crash.
Yeah.
It's going to have to crash and be replaced.
I think that's the only way.
And I can support a lot of the Sanders-Corbin platform just because I have a heart, but I never think that it's going to be something new.
I mean, I'll sometimes see these left-wing...
People on YouTube or whatever, and they'll bash neoliberals or whatever, as if there's just a couple of people out there benefiting from this.
And they blame everything on neoliberalism.
They'll blame bad movies on neoliberalism and all this kind of stuff.
And I think it is rather short-sighted.
They're not seeing the big picture and the, you know, just monumental changes that have occurred since the 1950s.
I mean, in order to go back towards something where we're taxing marginal income taxes at 99% at some level or whatever, you need a different world for that kind of thing to even make sense.
Yeah, I mean, you have to think, like, the US in the 1950s, I mean, like, the rest of the world was, like, bombed to oblivion.
Like, where else were people going to go?
You know, like, Africa in the 1950s, you know, Japan was a wasteland, Europe was a wasteland that was reliant on USA to rebuild itself.
So, yeah, I mean, to isolate a period like that and say, well, you know, look, the highest rate of income tax was whatever it was, 90% or something under Kennedy.
Yeah, like, unfortunately, Conditions have changed, and there really isn't a way to...
The right falls into the same thing, but there isn't really a way to freeze capitalism in one point.
When they say things like...
I mean, again, I ultimately support UBI or something like that, and I obviously support the 2K checks, but...
You know, you see a lot of these, the kind of liberal, like the crystal ball types or, you know, these people like, oh, we need to fight neoliberalism by giving people money or whatever.
I mean, keep in mind, Steve Mnuchin supported all this stuff.
Like Steve Mnuchin was like the most, he was like our guy behind the scenes.
He was like, we need more stimulus, like 4,000 over the barrel.
You know, he was, at least that was what was reported.
Neoliberals are not opposed to something like UBI, and they're not necessarily opposed to $2,000 checks.
I think there's some people who are who want everyone stuck on this hamster wheel, working, working, working.
They don't want you to be free from that.
But giving people $1,000 a month with UBI or $2,000 stimulus, that's not really questioning anything.
They could create that money.
And you are now spending it in this financial world order that we could call neoliberalism if you want to.
But you're not really questioning anything.
And you might actually be saving it from collapsing by doing something like this.
Especially when there's such a transfer of power just with the way the systems are going.
This is another thing.
Increasingly no one owns anything.
And everything is rented.
And in the case of Uber and Airbnb, your personal property is now a means of income.
You know, your spare room isn't a spare room.
It has to be turned into a way for you to generate $500 a month or whatever.
So yeah, I mean, maybe the more short-sighted oligarchs would oppose that.
But I mean, in the long run, you know, you have, I mean, there was news last week, like Bill Gates is the biggest private landowner in the US now, which is like, it's getting into weird, like sort of cyberpunk, like...
territory now with the oligarchs like, uh, but yeah, it really is.
But yeah.
So, I mean, at, I think it's actually inevitable.
I think something like UBI is inevitable and that at the end of the day, the oligarchs will support it and they're going to spend that money on Amazon.
And they're going to continue to rent.
I mean, a lot of these technological changes have...
For you in your 20s, you probably couldn't imagine having a record collection.
It just wouldn't make sense unless you're some hipster who owns vinyl or something like that.
Every song is available on YouTube or Apple Music or Spotify or whatever.
You might not need a car.
Because of the financialization of the economy, you can't afford a house because...
House prices have just ballooned because no one actually buys a house.
In a weird way, no one even owns a house.
I mean, you're paying a mortgage.
You don't really own it at some level.
You could also make a case that in a way, UBI is a kind of concession.
To lead in that it would move people away from said demand and, you know, universal health care, you know, universal sort of basic services, you know, this like paradigm of social democracy that we've had since the Second World War, where, you know, just in virtue of you being a citizen that you're entitled to all these benefits, because that does bring with it a kind of...
You see the libertarian ideas tend to grow in more multicultural societies.
In countries in Western Europe, blood donations were never a problem.
People would donate blood for free.
In the US, it was a big problem for them to get enough blood and plasma to offer financial incentives.
So you see how having that kind of...
You know, basic sort of Norvig model of social welfare in a state can lead to a kind of social cohesion that doesn't benefit neoliberalism.
And so you can see how it is a kind of concession that, you know, instead of giving you free health care, free education, cradle to grave benefits, this kind of thing, that you just, you take your check as kind of an atomized consumer that everyone in society gets, regardless of race, religion.
It makes demands on you, the state.
I mean, this is...
I mean, there's a massive difference between FDR work programs where...
And again, you could make a libertarian argument against these or whatever, but of employing people to build roads or build...
I've actually visited places in the United States that were FDR projects that were kind of public lands or little wilderness areas or hiking trails and things like that.
And you are...
Employing them for the betterment of society.
Our national park system, which is actually a really great thing, was created not just to conserve wilderness, but also as a nationalist agenda by people like Theodore Roosevelt and Madison Grant and other people like that.
I mean, fascism was a way of almost forcing people to participate.
It's like, we're going to make you get out there in the center of Rome and hold a dagger above your head and declare your allegiance to the state.
That is fascism on a basic level.
That word is obviously overused.
But at this point in civilizational decline, it's just kind of like, yeah, give me my money, bro.
And buying weed and ordering shit on Amazon and hanging out.
And working less, but you don't have to work as much because, you know, McDonald's is automated.
And it is a, like, I think the paradigm of the last man, where there are no demands, he is absolutely content, and there are no demands made on him by the state or the family or the church or whatever, and he does not make any demands on himself.
That is...
Where we're headed.
And I do support UBI because I realize the level at which people are getting screwed over.
But I'm not going to ever claim that this is a new paradigm or we're saving the white race or whatever, or this is going to be so great.
No, UBI is the next neoliberal trick.
If you want to use language like that.
It's the next stage of this financialization of the economy, the end of production, the end of the state as a center order that you have a responsibility towards, and so on.
It is generating a last man.
It's generating a kind of sleeplessness.
There's the famous scene in Inception.
Maybe not so famous, but I thought it was one of the most amazing scenes.
Where, you know, Cobb or the protagonist walks in and there are these just people who are just asleep all the time.
They're on this cocktail where they are just living an amazing dream.
That is the kind of world that we're headed towards.
Much more than...
You know, the way it's presented by left wing YouTube, you know, these people where it's like, oh, let's just go back to the 50s where everyone's, you know, proud to be an American and everyone's middle class.
And, you know, you can have a family of four or whatever.
That's not where we're headed.
And all of these systems that are now possible.
You know, UBI has like 40 or 50% support or something.
It's remarkable.
All these things are now possible because they're sustainable within the current paradigm.
And I would say that they're kind of like the last gasp of this paradigm.
They're not even pretending to be bourgeois anymore.
It's like we're not even pretending to say, work hard, you'll get a gold watch after you've been in the corporation for 30 years.
You might have a summer home, but you'll definitely have a car and your wife can stay home and take care of the kids and use her dishwasher.
They're not even doing that.
They're now basically saying, hang out with your beds, play video games, masturbate, and we'll send you $1,000 instantly into your checking account and you can buy more stuff you don't need on Amazon.
Yeah, I mean, you still see sort of remnants of this in Europe anyway, which is like, you know, you'll find like the, you know, there's like a certain type of sort of old school person that like they might be out of work and they'd be entitled to unemployment benefits, but they just never even crossed their mind to apply for them or like a common complaint you'll get from people in, well, in Ireland anyways, like they'll complain about all the, you know, like the immigrants that just arrived and they've got a social house and they've got...
All its benefits and, you know, they're applying for five different social welfare checks and it's like, well, you know, you're probably entitled to half of that yourself.
Like, why haven't you applied for that?
But it's like, there's still that kind of, you know, there's still that way of looking at social welfare as like, you know, this is our collective pot and it's there for the least fortunate and it's like a terrible thing to draw on it if you're not entitled to it.
Which, I mean, in some ways is kind of admirable.
Yeah, it's admirable.
I mean, it's one of those things.
It's like there's a lot of white people, I think, in the U.S. who are probably entitled to a lot of benefits and they're just not drawn on them.
It's not something to even consider.
So it's almost becoming like a hindrance for the white working class.
But yeah, I mean, that is something we're going to lose.
And it's another thing that makes people more atomized and harder to organize.
Because like you said, you know, when everyone has their $2,000 check and they're all watching Netflix and smoking pot, it's like...
You know, on what collective interests you even organize them around, you know, everything.
It's just a further reduction of everything being to economic units, everyone being an atomized consumer, you know, someone even conceiving of themselves as part of a race or an ethnic group when they're in a country that's, you know, a hodgepodge of different groups that are all getting the $2,000 check, all buying the same things.
Yeah, it's a further...
You know, it's a further step down that road of atomization.
But I mean, at the same time, I wouldn't...
At the same time, you know, like you said, this is kind of an inevitable process.
You know, I do see, like, people on the right constantly coming out against UBI, like, oh, they'll turn it off for white people.
And if you say something racist on Twitter, you'll stop getting your check, which is like, you know, for all of the private de-platforming we've seen, you know, I kind of, like, try and think of, like, major sort of...
You know, like, what major alt-right figures isn't getting their posts delivered or something?
Exactly.
Last time I checked, my PO box still works.
But, yeah, I mean, it's that thing, again, like, it's, you know, it's like, what's your...
However, I can't use PayPal or YouTube, you know?
Right, I mean, you know, Marc Collette and Laura Taylor recently had their bank account shut down in the UK, which is, like, you know, that's the problem.
Of a lack of government interference.
So, I mean, it should be an issue.
It's one of those things that's like, if we're moving to a post-industrial economy and these things are inevitable, like, you know, are you going to just sort of scream on the sidelines about whatever the latest conspiracy is that this is Bill Gates doing it to, like, you know, starve right-wingers or something?
Or are you going to try and be ahead of the curve and sort of make this an issue that you can frame around identity?
Yeah, it's one of those things like you have to acknowledge that this is kind of, you know, this is another step down the road of a long process that's really bad for us.
But at the same time, you know, what really are the options here?
Right.
And what's the alternative?
Well, it's going to collapse and something new.
I mean, that is the only alternative.
And I'm not trying to be depressive or something by saying what I said about things like UBI, because I think there's also kind of like an interesting development over the past four years or five years with Trump to a large degree, but on the alt-right, where you have a lot of people sounding like Bernie Sanders, but they do have a sense of identity and so on.
And I am throwing cold water on that.
I'm not impressed because I see a lot of these latest things as a late stage of this current paradigm.
And that means that we're going to have a new one, maybe in our lifetime.
And it's going to collapse and we'll have something new and it's going to be amazing.
And I hope we can have a say in what it looks like.
So I'm ultimately very optimistic, but I'm, you know, highly, you know, I don't know, I'm not pessimistic.
I'm just realistic about what all this stuff actually is in the short term.
Yeah.
But this is a great conversation.
Go ahead.
I probably wouldn't be as pessimistic about the sort of embrace of sort of old school economic populism among national leaders.
Because, I mean, what you've seen the last few days is like...
You know, you get an event like this, a black swan event, or maybe this is a grey swan event.
I'm not sure how you start the swans out again.
And suddenly you have millions of people turning to economic populism and getting this sort of anti-elitist sentiment.
And it's like, what's being offered on the left is so terrible because the amount of leftists and mainstream left that have been sort of subtly counter-signaling this because You know, because the anti-Semites got involved or it wasn't like the coalition isn't gender-queer enough or something.
You know, if you can forecast that kind of collapse that is coming, it seems like the best way to be ahead of the curve is for the right to kind of own that position.
There's clearly like a kind of market demand for, but the left isn't satisfying.
Yeah.
This is a great conversation.
I'm glad, because I think we went deep, but then also went shallow, you could say, and talked about what was happening immediately.
So, yeah, it was a great conversation.
Thanks, Keith.
Bye.
Bye.
*Fart*
Yeah, and we're both approving that everyone listening put all their money into Dogecoin.
Oh, yeah.
Or some...
Even more esoteric or bizarre cryptocurrency that has a funny name.
I would just put it all on red.
Yeah.
All on Doge.
What is Dogecoin?
It's like a dog?
Is that what it is?
Is it a Shiba they call it?
Like a Japanese Shiba is the name of the dog.
Oh, is it that famous dog?
Yeah, I think the coin is just like a copy of another coin, like Litecoin.
And it was, luckily, it just started as a joke, yeah.
But it's like, it has as much value as any other thing.
But it's that famous dog that was, like, at a train station?
Isn't there some, like, story about him?
They did a movie or something?
I think, I don't know, maybe I'm conflating famous dogs.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I mean, Doge is such a part of the internet now, it's just like...
Yeah.
Yeah, put it all in Doge.
Just don't sue me for saying that because I'm obviously joking.
