Air Date: 05-15-2026

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine what it would actually take to claw back democracy from billionaire capture — and why some people think it's more possible than it looks. We'll hear about California's proposed billionaire wealth tax, AOC's vision for change that doesn't depend on positional power, and why Peter Thiel's new "AI Tribunal of Truth" may have accidentally revealed exactly what the ruling class fears most.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 45 minutes today include

C-SPAN

More Perfect Union with Inequality Media Civic Action, & Robert Reich

Taylor Lorenz

Brittany Page

Pitchfork Economics

and Washington Monthly

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 6 sections;

Section A, Tech Power, Surveillance, and the End of Truth

Section B, Bezos, Amazon, and the Human Cost

Section C, How the Tax Code Built the Aristocracy

Section D, Ideology of Capital

Section E, Markets in the Mind

And Section F, Bubble, Backlash, and the Way Forward

And now, on to the show.

it's funny because, in this op-ed that, Jeff Bezos paid for in The Washington Post, there was this line that you had mentioned earlier about, as a potential 2028 contender, XYZ.

And in the context of that, it's, it was very clear this was a veiled threat, right? So it's, the elite saying, "If you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is. And it's in the, it's in the modern-day barons who own The Post and own the algorithms, and we're gonna...

We'll make an example out of you." 

And what's funny about that 

is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat, and my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. And

presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers' rights are forever. Women's rights, all of that. And so anyways, I... the way... But to, A finer point to your question is that when you aren't attached, right?

When you haven't been, like, fantasizing about being this or that since the time you were seven years old- it is tremendously liberating because I get to wake up every day and say, "How am I gonna meet the moment?" And conditions change radically all the time. So I make my response less to an attachment to some positional, title or position and working backwards from there.

But I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and observing the conditions of this country and saying, "What move or what decision can I make today that is gonna get us closer to that future stronger, faster, better than yesterday?" And those conditions, I think a lot of times, I, I remember the first time I walked onto the Senate floor.

I remember the first time I walked onto the Senate floor. I was a freshman, I was a freshman in the House, and a fun fact is that House members are allowed to go onto the Senate, but Senate members are not allowed to go into the House unless they're allowed in and invited. And, and so I had walked onto the Senate floor and, I looked around and I was like, "Wow, it's, everyone here thinks they're gonna be president."

And they are making decisions from that place. And I don't want to make decisions from a place of, "What's in it for me?" I wanna make decisions from a place of, "How are we gonna change the country?" And that's in response to people en masse. It's in response to the numbers that we have in the House and in the Senate.

I count votes. I build caucuses. I help elect responsible and principled people that, that, a- and I try to decouple our political system from money and politics. And so my decisions come from a very substantive place. And, that's what goes into weighing it. And the great thing about that is that no billionaire can stop that.

No concentrated, level of power, no elite, no gatekeeper can prevent me from doing everything I can, waking up every day in service of the working class. And I can do that in the House. I can do it in the Senate. I can do it from, uh, the White House. I can do it from a shack in Upstate New York, chopping wood- and being a burnout.

I can do it from anywhere. Wow, that's one I didn't even, that was one I didn't even think of. If it makes you feel any better, and if you find this more liberating, I don't think you were gonna get Jeff Bezos's endorsement anyway, 

billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, they get paid differently. He famously takes a $1 annual salary from Facebook, but he mostly gets paid in the form of shares of his company's stock, and if he never sells those shares, he never has to pay taxes on them.

Same with most other billionaires in California. Despite holding nearly $2 trillion in wealth, the state's billionaires only contribute about 2.5% of the state's income tax base. The vast majority of their wealth is sitting in their investment portfolios untaxed. California could raise the top income tax rate to 95% and never touch that money.

That is the point of a wealth tax. In California, it would be a one-time 5% tax on an individual's net worth if it's over a billion dollars. And it can be helpful to deal in physical objects here, since these fortunes are so huge. This is a superyacht. One of these costs about $500 million. If Mark Zuckerberg were to convert his entire fortune into superyachts, he would have 444.6 of them.

If the wealth tax passes, Zuckerberg would be left with a measly 422 superyachts. In the four odd months it took for me to research, report, travel, and produce this video, Mark Zuckerberg's wealth just sitting in its investment portfolio has already grown by the amount he would be asked to pay. 5%, if they're billionaires, when their wealth is growing 7% a year, is almost a rounding error.

But many of these billionaires are still spending millions to try to defeat this tax, and already taking steps to try to get out of it Businesses are fleeing California And it's gonna cause a mass exodus. This wealth tax is having a huge impact on people fleeing to Florida. It's a badly drafted effort.

It's already had an outsize impact on this state. Okay, to be clear, we're talking about six people, six billionaires who have told reporters that they either purchased real estate or incorporated LLCs outside of California. Plus, the proposal covers any billionaire who was a resident of California as of January 1st this year.

So if they haven't taken steps already, it's too late. Recent polling shows that a majority of Californians favor the tax, but also that they're concerned that they will have to foot the bill if the billionaires flee. And the measure's opponents are spending millions to try to push this scare tactic to the public.

It's an argument that sounds pretty similar to that of the governor, Gavin Newsom, and there might be a reason for that. Former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, these billionaires have all contributed the maximum amount to Gavin Newsom's campaigns in previous cycles, as have other California billionaires like Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, who also incidentally cut a quarter million dollar check to stop Zohran Mamdani from becoming mayor of New York.

Taxing the ultra rich was a huge part of Mamdani's campaign, and California billionaires took notice and started spending to try to stop him. Now, those same billionaires are counting on their years-long investment in Gavin Newsom, and it looks like it's paying off. What would a compromise look like to you?

I don't know what, I don't know what there is to compromise. Altogether, Newsom has received financial support from 50 of the state's billionaires and their spouses. And in a state with roughly 200 billionaires, that's not a drop in the bucket. As Newsom positions himself as a 2028 presidential contender, those same billionaires are now funding that effort through a couple of newly formed federal PACs.

A sizable portion of Newsom's billionaire backers come from the tech sector, which is an important part of California's economy. Your home is beautiful. Thank you. Do you think that you guys would also, too, leave California if the billionaire tax passed? I think that is our, big fear. It's the nightmare.

We're going through the phases of denial, acceptance, grief, however you call it. 

These guys are betting that doom and gloom projections about billionaire founders being forced to sell their super voting shares and potentially losing control of their companies will be enough to scare voters into rejecting the proposal.

It shouldn't be too, too difficult if on paper you're worth several billion dollars to come up with your tax payment without, selling shares or doing some dramatic move. 

There's even a special provision for startups that would allow their founders to delay paying the tax until after their company goes public.

We're trying to make it as easy and reasonable as possible. We're not trying to cause a liquidity problem for these billionaires. We're not trying to cause them to sell shares when they don't want to. We're just trying to use reasonable modern tools in order to close a gap. Property 

rights are?

Human rights. 

And sure, billionaire-backed PACs are already spending big to try to defeat this proposal, but the billionaire class solidarity might not be as strong as you'd think. This is an interview with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, and one of the California billionaires who would be subject to the wealth tax.

Is it something that's of concern to you? 

I gotta tell you, I haven't thought about it even once. We work in Silicon Valley because, that's where the talent pool is, and, whatever taxes I guess they would like to, apply, so be it. I'm perfectly fine with it.

It di- it never crossed my mind once. 

For Huang, a one-time 5% tax is a small price to pay to live in a region where his business can recruit the most highly skilled workers. It's a perspective that mirrors that of the working Californians who I spoke with. 

Billionaires are making their money off the backs of our public infrastructure, and so we need to make sure that they are paying their fair share for the resources that they are using.

They are making a lot of revenue on workers and working families in the state, and if they cannot help with the 5% to help the workers that are making their businesses thrive, then see you later. 

Why are we doing this? We are doing this because on July 4th of last year, President Trump signed a piece of legislation that's going to take $1 trillion out of the US healthcare system, and that money is being moved to the richest people in the country.

Affordable healthcare, universal childcare, free school meals for every kid. These are not radical concepts. They're a part of everyday life in many parts of the world. But it took decades of work and five failed attempts before the millionaires tax became a reality in Massachusetts. Billionaire PACs are already pouring money into California to defeat this proposal.

These things do not just become a part of everyday life, not without a fight.

Hans Moravec, a roboticist working at Carnegie Mellon, became enormously influential within Silicon Valley's intellectual subculture back in the '80s. In 1988, he published the book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. In the book, Moravec argues that humans were in their last century, which was prescient and that we would soon all create machines that were smarter than ourselves.

These mind children would ultimately replace us, and he insisted that we view these successors as our offspring, and that computers would essentially be the next step in human evolution. Moravec wrote cheerfully about our human extinction. His vision validated Silicon Valley's utopian streak and its relentless push for innovation.

If humans were temporary and building machines to replace us was this higher good, then it allowed these tech workers to believe that what they were building was noble, and they were contributing to this future better world. In a 1995 article for Wired magazine titled Superhumanism, the writer Chris Platt interviews Moravec.

Moravec began the interview by enthusiastically asking Platt, quote, "Wouldn't it be great if you could enhance your abilities via artificial intelligence and extend your lifespan and improve on the human condition?" Again, this is all back in 1995. He predicted that by 2030, quote, "We should have a third-generation universal robot that emulates higher level thought processes such as planning and foresight," and that it will quote, "Maintain an internal model of not only its own past actions, but of the outside world itself.

That means that it could run different simulations of how it plans to tackle a task, see how well each one works out, and compare them with what it's done before. An onlooker will have the eerie sense that it's imagining different solutions to a problem, developing its own ideas." Around the same time in 1993, mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge echoed these ideas in a paper on the technological singularity.

He declared that the creation of superhuman intelligence would definitively end the human era. "The moment that machines surpass us in terms of intelligence, history would belong to them," he said. Humans would no longer be in control, and we probably wouldn't even be relevant. He outlined several different paths to our extinction, and these included superhuman AI, human-computer integration, biotech genetic upgrades, but all of these basically led to the same place, which is the end of humanity, or as he put it, quote, "The end of the human era."

Young engineers and investors in the Valley began to believe his future was undeniably our collective destiny. The internet progressed throughout the '90s, eventually birthing the dot-com bubble and subsequent crash. By the beginning of the next millennium, 26% of households in America had internet access, and the average person was becoming more and more comfortable with technology.

In 2005, Ray Kurzweil published the book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The book repackaged Moravec and Vinge's pro-extinctionist ideas for a mass audience with an optimistic gloss. Kurzweil's book hit the bestseller list, and people were excited about this magical future where humans would merge with machines and be able to upload our minds to live forever in the digital ether.

This idea of biological humans becoming obsolete was going from fringe to mainstream culture and became more openly embraced by Silicon Valley CEOs, founders, and especially venture capitalists These ideas were also being adopted by the men who built some of Silicon Valley's most notorious empires. In Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, he talks about a party where Elon clashed with Google co-founder Larry Page.

Page literally accused Musk of being a speciesist for arguing that humanity deserved to continue at all. Larry Page argued that digital life was undeniably the next stage of evolution, and that it was parochial and even prejudiced of Elon to cling to the supremacy of the human race. Musk replied that, yes, he was pro-human, but of course, that has since changed.

As technology progressed, especially throughout the boom time of the 2010s, startups began to explicitly seek to construct a post-human world. The iPhone had redefined everyday life, apps were taking off, and the valley's rhetoric about transcendence was becoming more and more pervasive. In 2011, The Atlantic ran an essay gushing over Google's data-driven decision-making, framing it as superior to the, quote, "Irrational, error-prone tendencies of human managers."

The piece suggested that machines would ultimately make better leaders than people, and this tone of machines as our savior and humans as obstacles became increasingly common in the tech press. A 2012 Wired feature titled, quote, "Better Than Human: Why Robots Will and Must Take Our Jobs" proclaimed that robots were destined to replace us in the workforce entirely.

Humans simply could no longer compete with the flawless, tireless machine Wired writer Kevin Kelly wrote, quote, "This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You'll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. 90% of your coworkers will be unseen machines.

Most of what you will do will not be possible without them, and there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do." Kevin Kelly continued, quote, "We need to let robots take over. They will do jobs we have been doing, and they will do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can't do at all.

They will do jobs we never imagined needed to be done, and they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were. Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up a new work that matters." A year later, Wired ran a piece on self-driving cars with the line, quote, "Humans are the most dangerous part of the system: drunk, distracted, careless, and fallible."

This is true, by the way. Humans are super flawed creatures, especially at driving. I'm actually very pro self-driving cars. But I think it's really important to examine the role that mainstream media plays in framing these issues and the tech industry as a whole and setting these narratives. Throughout the 2010s, journalists and the tech press kept pushing forward these ideas that humans were bad, error-prone, messy, and dumb.

Machines, on the other hand, were positioned in the media as clean, sleek, smart, and evolved. They were like humans equal danger, machines equal safety. And throughout all of this, there's just this- Underpinning implication that if humans were so flawed, which again, they kept reiterating that we were, maybe it's better to just let machines take over.

Maybe they actually deserve to take over altogether. In a 2013 Vanity Fair article titled quote, "Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence," the writer Kurt Andersen wonders if the singularity will usher in global techno nirvana or civilizational ruin. The piece casts Vinge and Kurzweil as forward-thinking techno evangelists who believe human evolution is up for redesign, and they talk about editing our genes to remove these messy biological errors, AKA eugenics The very next year in 2014, The New York Times ran a piece about predictive algorithms in healthcare with the headline, When Machines Know You Better Than You Know Yourself.

That same year, a video titled, quote, Humans Need Not Apply went viral on YouTube. The video is 15 minutes long, and it compares human workers to horses replaced by engines. It projected that nearly half of all jobs, especially white-collar jobs and creative jobs, would disappear under automation. The video has amassed over 18 million views, and it ended up becoming enormously prescient.

I remember actually watching this at work and being like, . As all of this stuff is happening online and in the mainstream media and culture, you also see this post-human ideology shaping the physical world. Architectural design throughout the 2010s became sterile, and retail spaces like the Apple Store removed any trace of humanity.

Coffee shops adopted minimalist chairs and tables and antiseptic lighting and white walls. Customers stopped paying human beings and started to use iPads at the till. And this sterile aesthetic of minimalism really just was so focused on removing the visibility of human workers. It reinforced this idea subconsciously that humans are messy, chaotic, and unreliable.

Picture this. You're at work. Your colleague collapses. They hit their head. Blood is pooling around them and you're absolutely panicked. You believe that they are dying. You desperately, naturally want to help them, but your boss tells you to turn around, stop looking, and get back to work. According to reporting from Western Edge, this is what happened April 6th at an Amazon warehouse where an employee died, and the workers who desperately wanted to help him were instead told to get back to fulfilling shipments to protect Jeff Bezos's profits.

While this is not being widely covered and we're only learning about this a full week after it happened, we're starting to see other headlines about burning warehouses and Molotov cocktails and bullets flying toward an AI CEO's house. All you had to do was pay us enough to live. There goes your inventory.

A burst of light at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and a fleeing man the FBI identifies as 20-year-old Woodlands resident Daniel Moreno Gama. Around 2:00 AM Sunday, San Francisco police say someone fired gunshots from a car, hitting the OpenAI CEO's home. Amid unprecedented income and wealth inequality, we're seeing people reach a breaking point and turn to violence in the absence of political and policy solutions that empower them in the workplace, protect their rights, and ensure that they can meet their basic needs.

Or, on a more basic level, not be left to bleed out on a warehouse floor while managers tell your colleagues to get back to the Amazon packages passing by on the conveyor belts that just won't stop. And while that would seem like the most important story, The New York Times is over here running profiles of Jeff Bezos's new wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos.

Look at this. "Someone has to be happy. Why not Lauren Sanchez Bezos? As half of an unfathomably powerful couple, Mrs. Sanchez Bezos seems to have influenced the uber rich to stop apologizing and start enjoying themselves." Hey, New York Times, read the room. In one world, we have Amazon employees who heard and saw their colleague collapse and believed he was dying and/or dead who were encouraged not to look at him and to keep working inside an Amazon warehouse.

While Lauren Bezos details her work-free days with Jeff, working out, drinking coffee, and making gratitude lists to ensure that she centers joy. This is truly sick, and once I put these two stories together in my mind, I couldn't shake it, and I had to come and talk to you about it because this is corporate abuse.

This is stripping people of their humanity, and this cannot stand. And make no mistake, our society looks at things like warehouse fires and Molotov cocktails and bullets, and correctly codes that as violence. But when we see the violence of corporations prioritizing profits over people, paying starvation wages, telling people to get back to work while their colleagues die in front of them, our society somehow looks at that and doesn't code that as violence.

But it too is violence, and it too is unacceptable, and it too should have consequences. Where are the handcuffs for these abusers? It's time to wake up. Let's read this critical reporting from Western Edge, Everyone is replaceable, death rattles Oregon Amazon facility. Sam was helping unload trucks when a heavy thud against concrete echoed across the Amazon warehouse.

An employee's lifeless body lay on the floor. Work halted in the loading docks on the south side of Amazon's distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon. Sam and other employees stared at the person who'd collapsed just twenty feet away. Conveyor belts of packages continued to roll. Quote, "I didn't have a direct line of sight of the person's face, but I saw a body form laying lifeless," Sam told the Western Edge.

Employees who spoke for this story requested anonymity to protect their jobs, and their names have been changed. Now, think about this. These employees are afraid to speak out and tell us that they watched their colleague die as their managers told them to keep working, because they will lose their jobs for exposing this violence and inhumanity.

And this man did in fact die. He was forty-six years old, and employees called nine one one. They tried to provide life-saving measures, describing to the dispatchers that this man was bleeding extensively from his head. He was starting to turn blue, and the manager stepped in to tell them to get back to the true priority, Amazon's bottom line.

For more than an hour, several employees said workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves, and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt.

Within moments of the man hitting the floor, Sam said a woman ran over and began performing chest compressions. The woman began to cry and screamed out for someone to help her. Sam, who has CPR training, asked her supervisor if she could assist. The supervisor watched the woman heaving her weight into the man's chest and gave no response.

"I start sobbing, and I said, 'I want to help, please. I know she's going to get tired and need to be subbed out,'" Sam told The Western Edge. The supervisor, who Sam perceived to be in shock, had a simple reply. "It has to be management or safety team. Please get back to work." "I need to help," Sam said. "Just turn around and not look.

Let's get back to work," Sam recalled the manager saying. This too, like Molotov cocktails and burning warehouses, is violence. It is traumatizing. How are you supposed to feel like your employer gives a shit about your wellbeing and safety when you watch your management team rally to protect the corporation while your colleague bleeds out in front of you?

This is violence, and I encourage you all to read this in full and give this publication, Western Edge, your full support because it is a remarkable thing for them to break this story. And with all the tools and resources available to an outlet like The New York Times, you'd think they would be breaking a story like this instead of giving us a profile on Lauren while Amazon didn't even pay these employees for a full shift after they were sent home early after witnessing this death and being forced to work for hours while he bled out, and they're only offering unpaid leave and optional counseling to those who are interested.

The New York Times is instead diving into the misunderstood Lauren Bezos and her time spent at her $230 million compound, as they describe it, calling it the billionaire bunker. This is grotesque. As wealth and income inequality explodes and people feel trapped in an ever-tightening grip of the capitalist system that allows the corporate overlords to steal from the working class by paying them peanuts and padding their pockets, we need to start recognizing that this is theft.

This is theft. 

I think anybody listening to this would agree with the two observations. A- and observation number one is that we're living in this time in which you cannot walk down the street in certain zip codes of this country without bumping into a plutocrat trying to change the world.

They are doing philanthropy maybe. Their kid is in Africa right now starting a social enterprise that turns poop into recycled coffee. They come back from those Africa trips with these, plutocrat bracelets that they all wear when they go to Africa. They are involved in making finance more humane by doing impact investing or whatever else.

And so all these initiatives are really ubiquitous, and we all know they're going on. Y- you, y- when you go to college campuses, every young person is e- is engaged in some kinda, change the world effort. And so on the one hand, we're living in this time in which the very, very rich and powerful seem to be all in on the idea of making the world a better place, and aware of inequality and interested in fighting it.

On the other hand, we're living in this time in which the same class of people, the same plutocratic class that is doing so much to give and help essentially has secured for itself and continues to benefit from a near monopoly on the fruits of the future, and has essentially rigged the society to function as a casino in which the house, i.e.

them, always wins. And so the inquiry behind Winners Take All started with the question, what is the relationship between these two facts, which themselves are not particularly in dispute? I think where the dispute comes in is what you think the relationship is, and the conventional wisdom out there is, or was, that the relationship was one of a drop in the bucket, that, yes, we do live in this time in which there is this savage inequality.

However, rich people are on the case, stepping up, a- and there's just not enough of them, or they're not giving enough away, or they're not stretching their dollars far enough by not being effective enough, and that if only there were more of them and they gave it away better and they did this and that, then we could solve these problems.

And I started to become intrigued by an opposite possibility, that all this elite Magnanimity and do-gooding activity was actually part of how we sustain the elite monopoly on the fruits of the future. That in other words, the extraordinary helping of our time was how we maintain the extraordinary hoarding.

And I did what I do as a reporter, which is I began to report it out. Tease out more how all this do-gooding sustains the inequality and propels it. To start with, I'll say I get that's counterintuitive to people. Yeah ... I think if you're like a Koch brother, first of all, my condolences on being a Koch brother or being a deceased Koch brother.

But- ... if you are... Sorry, was that not spoken with enough- No, 

you're ki- You're with me, baby ... you're kinder 

than me. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. My- I forgot to drink my Koch compassion coffee this morning. 

Yeah, exactly. 

So I think there's some people who would say "Forget this guy.

Who cares about inequality," right? So let's... i'm not gonna have much luck with those people. But if you're persuaded that, yeah, this inequality thing is a big problem, I think many people, probably most people, the people in a way I was writing to force to question, I think many people would say, "Okay, but at least these people are doing some small thing to help.

Isn't it better than doing nothing," right? That's the basic question that my book is up against because my book is a portrait of a series of people and of gestures which I think at the margin, each of them is an improvement in the condition of the world if you look at it in isolation. And so the question then becomes, what is this guy saying about the fact that not just the system that produces this wealth in which these people are trying to do a little bit, it's not just that it's not enough, it actively may be upholding the harm.

So here's how I make that case. First of all, the simple way to think about it is if an individual act of do-gooding is abetting a harmful system on a larger scale, then it may actually be a counterproductive deed. Now, that is obvious in cases like the Sacklers behind the opioid crisis, where a relatively small amount of money is enabling a system or a reputation cleansing that literally is allowing harm to be done on a much greater scale than the gift.

But the point I was making was broader and h- and here are some of the ways in which individual acts of do-gooding that are marginally helpful to people that really do make some difference in some people's lives may in fact be contributing to a bad system. A, reputation washing, right? So you got a whole class of people who have cause to be resented in this time, who are, as we know in many cases, manipulating their company books so they don't- pay taxes, who are underpaying workers, who are claiming, as Jeff Bezos did, that they're gonna give benefits and then pulling the benefits from Whole Foods workers, et cetera, et cetera.

And so you got a bunch of people who are doing a bunch of things to make money that would really cause them a lot of problems and would create bad stories of the kind that would drive people into the streets and would force reform. But for changing their reputation, but for softening their image, but for acquiring a kind of moral glow as philanthropists, they would be in real trouble.

Sometimes criminal trouble personally, but certainly just reform trouble. 

And if I may interject, and it definitely takes one to know one, they are converting circumstances in which they would have low status into circumstances in which they would have high status, which is all wealth and power really is.

Correct. 

The people who work the hardest to be richest are the most status conscious people in our society. That's why they work so hard. And the thing that is most important to most people is their status, and certainly to status conscious people. And I think that this point you make is really important and profound, is that if your goal in life is to have as much status as possible, these bad stories are...

They're more than just inconvenient. 

They're a real problem. I'm, I, I'm a parent. I have kids. You may have even heard in the background screaming. I- ... really care about what... I, I care less what book critics think of me than I do about my kids. These people all have kids.

Sure. Yeah. Yes. 

N- these people, can't afford to have themselves known as predatory loan sharks. 

Social pariahs. 

And I think here the point is that it's a relatively cheap bargain basement way of changing your name. 

100%. 

The rule of thumb that I would use is you can do bad things in the billions and wipe it out with gifts in the millions.

The 

millions. 

let's turn to politics, 'cause I think that is one area where the billionaires' impact is a little bit more obvious.

You dig deeper on that, and you argue that billionaires are uniquely destructive to democracy, and you list a few ways. They lobby, they finance campaigns, they run for office themselves. How do you think about the destructive impact that billionaires have had on our body politic in just the past decade?

We're familiar with this idea of capture or re-regulatory capture, but we're kinda living through billionaire capture, where kinda every aspect, of the-- our democratic system is over-influenced to the point where essentially most of us have no real voice or vote in the system, which is not to say our vote doesn't matter in certain jurisdictions and certainly at the local level.

But in terms of really influencing what's on the policy agenda or more often what's blocked from happening, is really a function of billionaire capture of the political system. So there are policies like taxing the wealthy, which are, whatever, 79% of the population thinks billionaires and the ultra-wealthy should pay more taxes.

We're not gonna see that in a political system that's almost entirely engineered and captured by the ultra-wealthy. We started talking about fixes, so why don't we keep going on that? You have a lot of ideas about this, and one thing you argue first for is, a perceptual shift in billionaires, right?

The public, we tend to revere billionaires mainly as self-made. Certainly Donald Trump, President Donald Trump, has cultivated that myth, and, people do tend to think of billionaires still as having earned their status in some way. They're supposed to be smarter than us.

They're supposed to work harder than us. But you argue that billionaires are also subsidized by us in a lot of ways, including through, and you've mentioned this, tax policy. And you've mentioned more taxation of billionaires, but what else would you do in public policy and in tax policy so that the billionaires responsible for exploiting the US economy and the rest of us begin to pay their fair share?

You're right, Anne. I think part of it is to understand the story of wealth, how wealth is created. I used to work with Bill Gates's father, Bill Gates Senior. He and I wrote a book about how to defend the estate tax, the US inheritance tax. And he used to always say about his son, "Oh yeah, he worked hard, but a lot of people work hard, and, he benefited from the public investments in knowledge and infrastructure and the internet that kinda created the foundation for the internet economy and wealth creation in that space."

And therefore, no one does it alone. And taxation of substantial wealth is essentially fair payback to the society that You've disproportionately benefited from. So changing the story and addressing, the mythology of individual wealth creation is really important. But, in terms of public policies, I do think, the estate tax, which is essentially a, a wealth, inheritance tax at the end of life is irrelevant now.

It's, it's been, Y- the ultra-wealthy can pretty much opt out of it, plan around it, not have to pay it. So both restoring the progressivity of the income tax, but also having a genuinely robust luxury or real estate, I'm sorry, estate inheritance tax is important, and probably an annual wealth tax, and you start to see more proposals looking at that.

Including the state of California is proposing an emergency wealth tax on billionaires to help with healthcare costs. That will be on the ballot in 2026 in California, so voters will decide on that. So wealth tax and lifetime real estate or lifetime luxury, wealth tax and inheritance tax and a, progressive income tax, those three pieces of the puzzle, along with investing in enforcement, because part of what's happened is the ultra-wealthy have, when you reach a certain level, you have a whole team of people working with you to help move your money to the shadows and, dodge taxes.

I call it the wealth defense industry, the tax attorneys and planners. And so at this point, the IRS is completely outgunned by these professional, wealth hiders to the point again, where the wealthy are pretty much opting out of paying most of the taxes that They should rightly pay 

What about solutions for the two other major problems we've talked about that you've isolated?

The first being capture of particular industries. Like how would you-- how do you think about regulating the economy to eliminate or limit that kind of capture by the billionaires? And then on politics, what w- are your top recommendations for limiting billionaire influence in a political sphere? 

I think we have to look at what is- is essential in our economy that should not be, an arena for wealth plunder.

So just take health- hospitals. Most hospitals were founded by religious organizations and civic groups for the public welfare. Now they're seen as, you know, cash cows. There still is a large nonprofit housing sect- uh, you know, hospital sector. Um, but we should basically say, you know, maybe we create a, a new ownership entity that is, uh, recognizes that healthcare is a commons, that it belongs in a protected commons.

It's not a arena for plunder, and, uh, wall off and protect some of those types of institutions. Along with, you know, maybe we need to say We should tax luxury speculative real estate, invest in permanently affordable housing or what most of the world calls social housing, permanently affordable housing- Mm-hmm

rental housing, cooperatives. Uh, same on politics. You know, I think it's, you know, peop- I, I, I've, uh... you and I have both been around. We've probably watched different kinds of campaign finance reform proposals come and go, and, um, e- e- even get implemented, and it hasn't really changed the balance. I'm afraid what money and influence, it's like water running down a hill.

It just, you put up a barrier, it's gonna find a way around it. Uh, I think the only answer to saving democracy is reducing the concentration of wealth and power. Uh, it's just having billionaires, people having more than a billion dollars is just too much power. You know, it's not about the money. It's not about the consumption.

It's sort of about the, the power element of it. Uh, and especially in a society where there's so much unmet need. I, I like the, uh, the singer Billie Eilish, uh, addressing a group of, uh, you know, billionaires and wealthy singers saying, "You know, if you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?" And I think that is a fair question.

Why? How much, how much is enough? Uh, both from an individual point of view, but from a societal point of view, I can say having a billion is too much to have a healthy, well-balanced democratic republic. 

So we're in a situation now where the billionaires do control everything, and so I want to ask you about how ordinary citizens can bring about the kind of change that you're talking about.

And you are part of an organization, um, Patriotic Millionaires, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and about how you suggest ordinary citizens, grassroots, people who aren't billionaires begin to organize around some of the priorities that you've highlighted and bring some sense back to our economy and preserve our democracy.

Um, well, I wasn't a f- I wasn't, I, I guess I was more of a co-founder or... But Erica Payne and, and Morris Pearl and others really co-founded this network, really interesting network of, you know, high net worth individuals who basically would agree with a lot of what I'm saying in terms of, you know, we need to, uh, wealthy people need to pay more taxes and, uh, pay higher wages in their companies and not have so much power in our democracy.

And they actually kind of put their necks out there and publicly speak out and lobby on behalf of those issues. And I, I describe that as one of the cracks in the system. You know, I don't think this is, you know, uh, actually I'm very optimistic even after the last month of being out talking to people about this book because I feel like there's kind of an awakening.

People understand implicitly the harms that are caused by these great fortunes and extreme concentrations of wealth, uh, and they're trying to find places to push that agenda forward. It, it, you know, it's... Nothing as much is gonna happen in Washington DC at the national level, but in lots of states, people are pushing for luxury real estate taxes to fund affordable housing, taxing private jet fuel to fund green infrastructure.

Uh, as I mentioned in California, you know, taxing billionaire wealth and addressing healthcare. Uh, the incoming mayor of New York is saying, "I'm gonna address the affordability crisis for New Yorkers, and I'm gonna levy a 2% income tax on incomes over a million dollars in New York to pay for it." So people are starting to put those campaigns, and those are popular, and more and more people, I think, are gonna stand up and run for office on the basic platform of, "I'm gonna work for everybody, not just the billionaires.

We've just heard clips starting with

C-SPAN featuring AOC rejecting a veiled threat from Jeff Bezos's Washington Post, saying her ambition isn't a title but changing the country through lasting wins like single-payer healthcare.

More Perfect Union with Inequality Media Civic Action, & Robert Reich detailed how California's billionaires, holding nearly $2 trillion in untaxed wealth, are spending millions to defeat a 5% wealth tax while bankrolling Gavin Newsom's political career.

Taylor Lorenz mapped the decades-long arc from cheerful writing in1988 about human extinction to a 2012 Wired piece declaring robots "must" take all our jobs.

Brittany Page juxtaposed Amazon workers told to step over a dying colleague on April 6th with Lauren Bezos making gratitude lists at her $230 million compound

Pitchfork Economics explored how the same plutocratic class hoarding the fruits of the future uses philanthropy to avoid the reform and social consequences their behavior would otherwise trigger.

And Washington Monthly traced billionaire political power from lobbying and campaign finance to regulatory capture, calling the only real fix a reduction in concentrated wealth itself.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, speaking of the consequences of hoarded wealth now trickling down, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! We’ve suffered a dramatic cut in ad revenue largely driven by widespread economic instability and we’re being forced us to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus. We stretched ourselves quite thin trying to build a new show and so when Trump threw the world into chaos and marketing dollars dried up in response, we were extremely vulnerable to those shockwaves. Right now, I am getting back to basics and focusing on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. 

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As for today's topic, an old story but a good one.

It was just over 200 years ago in 1812 when the rebellion of the Luddites was underway. We’ve done full episodes on the movement but, in short, the Luddites weren't the confused machine-haters of popular imagination. That was just how the capitalist class framed them. 

In reality, they were skilled workers who finished woolen cloth by hand at a level of quality the new shearing machines couldn't match, and they had a specific question: when the machines come in and the mill owners get rich, what happens to us? The answer they got back was, basically, nothing. So they started breaking the machines. 

Whether that was the right tactic is up for debate but the Luddites asked the right question, and we're heading into the same fight right now with AI. Their question was: who gets the upside? Two hundred years later, the answer to that question turned out to be, mostly, their great-great-grandkids. 

The Industrial Revolution did eventually raise wages, sometime after the middle of the 19th century. Before that, for sixty years, output per worker shot up while real wages basically flatlined. The wealth went somewhere, just not to the people running the machines.

The same thing is about to happen again and the backlash is already starting. Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders agree on basically nothing, but they're both saying that the AI oligarchs are coming for working people. Sanders wrote in a Fox News op-ed last month that, in his words, the AI oligarchs don't want to replace specific jobs, they want to replace workers. Bannon ran a War Room episode this month titled "Stopping the AI Oligarchs from Stealing Humanity." 

Now, those two are absolutely not saying the same thing. Bannon's version routes back to nationalism and the standard right-wing scapegoat menu, while Sanders's routes to redistribution. They're using similar words for very different politics, and which version wins the populist energy matters a lot for the future.

But the energy itself is real, and it's already showing up in the streets. Maine's legislature passed the first statewide moratorium on big data centers in the country last month before Governor Janet Mills vetoed it. 

A record number of proposed data center projects got canceled in the first quarter of this year because of local pushback, according to reporting from Heatmap News. 

In Indianapolis last month, somebody fired thirteen rounds into the front door of a city councilman’s house and left a note under the doormat that just said "No Data Centers." The councilman and his eight-year-old son were home at the time. 

A week earlier, a Texas guy named Daniel Moreno-Gama drove to San Francisco and threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house, then went over to OpenAI's headquarters and threatened to burn it down. He's been charged with attempted murder. 

The Atlantic ran a piece this week pulling all of this together written by Lila Shroff titled “The AI Backlash Could Get Very is generating the structural conditions that historically produce political violence. We're a long way from any long-run wealth-creation phase, and very much in the part where people start breaking things and lighting them on fire.

A lot of what people experience as AI right now is genuinely garbage. The AI-generated slop, the fake actors, replacing artists and musicians and writers with statistical averages of their own scraped work, that's terrible and worth opposing. I'm not asking anyone to make peace with that. 

But a friend of mine put it this way: the problem with AI is that it’s like having a laptop but only using it like a cutting board. It's super powerful and has real uses but people haven’t learned yet that the boring, useful side of AI looks like a better spreadsheet, the kind of thing that makes the actual work of running stuff faster and less stupid. Those productivity gains are real and there’s a legitimate left-analysis that says we should happily embrace those kinds of productivity gains as long as the benefits are distributed properly.

The trillion-dollar valuations getting attached to OpenAI and Anthropic right now are a bet on future labor replacement. That money got captured up front, by a handful of investors and executives, based on a future in which a lot of work humans do now gets done cheaper by software. Meanwhile, the costs are getting socialized, with communities eating the power draw and the rate hikes. According to the Revolving Door Project, the public-health costs from data centers are projected to hit something like twenty billion dollars a year by the end of the decade, and they're falling hardest on low-income, majority-Black counties. So we've got a system where if the gains turn out to be real, they belong to about fifteen people, and if the gains turn out to be fake, the people who took the hit get nothing back.

We don’t have to invent solutions from scratch, because other places have already done it. In 1976, Alaska decided that oil money pulled out of Alaskan ground belonged to Alaskans. They put it in a constitutional amendment. Every year since 1982, every man, woman, and child in Alaska gets a check from the Alaska Permanent Fund. It's been as high as around two thousand dollars per person. Norway built a sovereign wealth fund on the same idea and theirs is now worth almost two trillion dollars. Even Bill Gates, back in 2017, floated the idea of a robot tax, saying if a fifty-thousand-dollar worker gets replaced by a machine doing the same work, the machine should pay something like the income tax that worker used to. The EU briefly considered it, and then the lobbyists got there and that was the end of that. So, we’re not starting from scratch, people have built versions of answers to these problems when the political will showed up.

There's a polling firm called Blue Rose Research, and they've found that the messaging that actually moves voters on AI is bold and populist. If you tell people that without rules, the corporations will fire everyone, keep all the profits, and leave them with nothing, that lands. Meanwhile, Quinnipiac polled this last year, and the only income group in America that's net optimistic about AI is households making over two hundred thousand a year. The people who think this is going to work out for them are basically the people for whom every technological transition of the last forty years worked out, and everyone else is reading the room. There's a political opening here, and right now the right is moving on it faster than the left. If Democrats don't show up to the midterms with an actual answer about who's going to own the upside, the populist energy goes to people who'll tell you it's all China's fault.

And the answer to that isn't complicated. Bernie Sanders has already introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on new AI data centers until there are protections for workers. State-level data center fights are happening right now in Maine, in Indiana, and in a bunch of other states. Organizations like the Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies are doing the policy work on what taxing AI productivity could actually look like. Don't ask anyone running for office next year whether they support AI regulation, because that's vague enough that everyone says yes. Ask them whether they support taxing the productivity gains from AI and redistributing them, because that's the question that separates a real distributive politics from corporate-friendly window dressing.

The Luddites asked the right question. They lost on power, and most of the people they were fighting for lost too. The question is open again and we get one shot at the answer before it closes the way it did last time so we need to make sure that people are being put first. After all, the whole idea of economies and technology is to serve the needs of people, not the other way around.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 6 topics today. First up;

Section A, Tech Power, Surveillance, and the End of Truth

Followed by Section B, Bezos, Amazon, and the Human Cost

Section C, How the Tax Code Built the Aristocracy

Section D, Ideology of Capital

Section E, Markets in the Mind

And Section F, Bubble, Backlash, and the Way Forward

maybe the easiest way to combat the commoditization of all of our data, everyone put everything out, and let's create a data commons that then there's no value to it because we all have each other's data.

No, no. No. No. No. That's not the way it's gonna go for you because the thing is, maybe that would work if that data wasn't valuable. This data is incredibly valuable. Look at what Google did, just announced, like a week ago, that they're gonna be te- testing, targeted deals, AKA surveillance pricing, right?

Like, where suddenly, Or what Instacart, what happened with Instacart, right? People, certain people are being charged 23% more for certain, for their grocery orders based on their data. So as surveillance pricing and AI and all this stuff integrates, we already see, this type of discrimination happening with people getting different rates for, car loans, for rental, applications, all this stuff.

Your data will be used against you. For, or healthcare denials. It, now they know that you personally were chatting with a friend on Discord, about, health issues. Like, all of this data gets fed into these AI systems that ultimately will be used to exploit you. So we shouldn't want that. 

I know.

They're not supposed to be. It's supposed to be private. They're not supposed to see that. 

But we don't have pri- we're eroding pri- My issue is, we're eroding privacy in the name of- I 

know ... 

kids' safety. I'm all for ki- keeping kids safe. Let's start by not allowing these tech companies to target them and harvest even more data.

So the kids' safety is, another version of, Trump administration saying we need, to get whatever they were called, DOGE, into all the- Yes ... companies and take all the employee data in order to make sure there's no employees making too much money. It's like where's that data going? It's like back into Trump's Qatar bank account?

No, it's into Musk has it all. And then what Musk doesn't have, Larry Ellison has. So Larry Ellison's doing this one I've been reading about called Stargate, which I thought was to get to another dimension, but it's not at all. Remember that? It was a round thing and you could- Yeah ... jump through it and you get to this other dimension.

No, Stargate for Larry Ellison is to all of our biometric data and DNA data into one- No ... big thing. Now, the promise is that, we're never... no one's gonna get cancer or die or anything because they have all our data. 

I... The cancer thing really bothers me because every time someone's "Oh, so you're anti-AI," which I'm not anti the concept of AI-

or machine learning, whatever. And they're like, " what if it cures cancer?" And I'm like, " is that what it... Is that the application that we're discussing?" No, we're discussing a completely different application where they're harvesting biometric data to do healthcare surveillance pricing. Like- right now, AI is being used to deny people healthcare. If AI was being used to grant people healthcare, I would support that application of it. 

And the interesting thing then, going back to the press, and it's... 'Cause it is a kind of a tesseract or a fractal of influences then is...

So the, when you write about the manufactured outrage cycles in mainstream media, the manufactured outrage cycles perpetrated by the billionaires of mainstream media outlets- ... which include Twitter and Paramount and CBS, then fuel the parental outrage and desire for the very child protections that are reifications of the surveillance apparatus.

Yes. It just all feeds in. This moral panic is so convenient. It's so convenient for big tech. The focus is 100% on the users and regulating speech, which allows them to harvest more and more data. None of it targets their actual, business model. And that through Meta funding these front groups like the Digital Childhood Alliance or, just these fake groups that, basically exist to push, again, legislation that doesn't really target the companies.

But to target the companies, it's, it's a more nuanced thing, and people, a lot of these politicians can't even turn their computer on, and they don't... they're getting advice from Peter Thiel. 

I have well-meaning friends, right? Friends in the sort of nonprofit NGO sector that lose their jobs in corporate whatever or lost their job here, and then the opportunity is to start, a kinda, and I know three or four of them now, grifty, child-protecting NGO, Save the Children.

They'll find a couple of, really smart young high school students to come out and do panels in DC at Brookings or somewhere and basically pedal- And They all profit 

It makes me so mad because I, the people fighting this are trans rights organizations with no money. Groups like Fight for the Future that got their funding dropped because they fought the Kids Online Safety Act, again, something that Elon Musk continues to boost.

The people that fi- or, or sex workers, it's like it's no one. They have no funding, they have no money, and then they're going up against, like you said, this non-profit industrial complex that is f- that is, by the way, enacting, Heritage Foundation's tech policy 

too, 

I 

know. I know.

There was like... It's I wake up to this every decade in a different way. Like, when I look at, as a college kid, I look at Bill Clinton and go, "Oh, wait a minute, this is very Reaganite. This isn't..." And it just keeps happening. But these folks, it is, it's like it is out of almost Project 2025 in terms of, uh, the way they understand tech.

It's like then the only one I could find who's speaking our language is, the Pope. 

Yeah, I know. Which is so hilarious. I know. That's that's such a funny, side arc that we have this, amazing, American Pope that, somehow has more clarity, like moral clarity, than, anyone in the US, media even.

Like- 

Yeah ... 

it's hilarious, especially as an Irish Catholic. But, I just, I don't know. Right. It makes me depressed, and it makes me depressed to see, the media's complicity in it, as you mentioned. Like- Yeah ... these media companies are also owned by billionaire owners, and you can see the way that they have exerted influence over the coverage.

Not just at the Washington Post, but a lot of these outlets. And I think that's incredibly disappointing because we're not getting this nuanced coverage of technology that we deserve. And I was thinking of this response that Elena Kagan, the justice, made after, Gonzalez v. Google, which was this, big challenge to Section 230 that the Supreme Court chose not to hear back in 2023.

But she's she makes a joke. She's " we're not exactly the nine greatest experts about the internet. Ha," and, everyone in the press galley's, laughing. And she's "So maybe basically Congress can figure it out." And I'm like, okay, that's actually really disturbing because the internet is, the most disruptive, technology of our time.

It's, ef- greatly affecting our, political and economic ecosystem. And, the fact that you guys are the Supreme Court and you're, like, laughing like, "We don't really know about all that stuff," you need to take it seriously. And, I- they do. Obviously, they hear, these big cases.

But, I think they fundamentally, don't take it seriously in a way and, don't have an understanding of it. 

No, and government and policymakers don't either. Back when I was coming up, it was I had friends who went to work for Microsoft to write legislation for Congress. Yeah.

our friend, Dana Boyd, brilliant person, right? Yeah. She graduated Berkeley and started, got a job at Microsoft. I'm like, "What are you doing for Microsoft?" She goes, " I'm actually writing the, the Internet kids legislation." Oh, and you mail it to them, and then they sh- ... they pretty much print it up right in the law.

And that's- Yeah ... from industry to i- it's coming down that way. 

I'm very focused now on the societal implications of AI. I spent the last several years, I was back at Google, and, a lot of the last 15 years have been involved in AI and the technology and how quickly it is gathering steam, how much more advanced it's getting, how much more advanced it will be in the next decade.

That is something which is going to be wildly more devastating than any of the consequences of the mismanaged technologies of the last 15 years. And the consequences will crash land on societies all over the world. We are not prepared for these things at all, economically, societally, geopolitically, environmentally.

And that's the agenda that I'm really focused on. The tech industry has massively distorted the agenda for how to manage these things. We talk about AI governance. 

Yeah. 

And there's a whole bunch of stuff which is about how you manage the AI systems themselves. That's 1% of the problem. 15 years from now, probably less than 15 years, when a lot of people have lost their jobs to AI and we have no economic solutions, we have no idea how to give people a good quality of life, that is a much, much bigger problem than some of the technical issues we're facing in those systems.

What happens when AI turbocharged industries consume wildly more resources and they destabilize already reeling ecosystems which we know are hanging by a thread and which will impact the lives of millions, if not billions of people? Between 2018 and 2023, the world consumed almost as much resources as one-third of the 20th century, and it's accelerating all the time.

And these are things where, in fact, you know, big tech companies, they go to governments who are desperate for economic growth now, right? A lot of the advanced economies- Yeah ... in the Global North- Yeah ... they've got plateauing growth. They've got declining living standards. They go to them and say, "Build this wondrous technology."

"Build this infrastructure. We will give you back the keys to a good future." And of course, that's not happening. This is something which on the present path promises to enrich a tiny sliver of societies, mostly in the United States and mostly in China. And I think the world we're gonna end up in, in the next, 10, 15 years is going to be much more unstable than today, with rapidly declining living standards for hundreds of millions of people.

I think a lot of graduates will not be able to get, good jobs at all. People who did a whole bunch of things in their lives and were told if they did these things right, they would get a good life and their kids would have better lives than them, that is not gonna happen at all on the path we're on.

And so is the tech industry gonna solve these things? No. And in fact, they have tried to minimize debate about these things. They've tried to point people back towards the technical solutions. Now it is a moment in which societies and our leaders need to have a mainstream conversation about what the heck we're gonna do to manage all of those effects, and that cannot be left up to the tech industry.

But now we're in a situation where, like you said earlier in the conversation, the world affected tech, and now tech is affecting the world. In the lead up to, some of the elections happening in the US, the tech giants have put together some of the most insane, amounts for- for, political campaigns. They're going after every single politician who is proposing any type of restraint or constraint- Yeah ... on, AI. And whether we like it or not, money shapes a lot of, ... an election. So you have the tech industry fighting to define how it should be managed or it should be governed.

And the people who are going to govern it being funded by them. It seems like a, an infinite loop that's, for the most part, already lost, unless something big breaks, as we've seen, in the past. It's only when something big breaks that, that something changes dramatically. 

I don't think we should be under any illusions.

The most likely path we're on, the one we are on right now, leads to disaster for our societies, and all societies globally. I actually don't think anyone gets out of this thing. I've spent the last, six months traveling the world talking to leaders and, a whole bunch of people behind closed doors where you have some really, spine-tingling conversations, and there's a s- there's a strain of opinion, mostly in the US and China, which thinks we can just win th- this race for AI.

And- Yeah ... a bunch of other people will get screwed, but we'll be okay, and that's not gonna happen when, of course, you have societies all over the world that are gonna be in chaos. No one gets out of this thing in one piece. But, we're in a moment now where I think actually a lot of people across societies, who are paying a bit of attention, they're seeing things are failing on any number of fronts.

Yeah. 

You look at all the polling. Why is it the overwhelming majority of societies in almost all the world say things are generally going in the wrong direction? People are angry. They realize that, there aren't nuances. There is no vision coming from the top anymore. And in that context, you then have big tech racing to install these systems where people are now really worried about their jobs.

There's a lot of polling showing that the number one thing that gets people, panicked about AI, which explains why it is in fact incredibly unpopular with societies, is because they're worried about their future jobs. So this is something where I think actually there's a lot of people who already are looking for a very different approach to how you manage these things.

The debate has not shifted there yet because I think a lot of people don't understand the scale of what might happen, the speed at which this will unfold, and how interconnected all these agendas are. When people really do understand that the technologies that might give you your amazing apps on your phone also might be things that destroy the prospect of your kids having future jobs and also will threaten, natural ecosystems- then it becomes a very different, 

as of today, my dystopian Rubicon has been crossed. My predefined one. Boom. Oligarch-owned AI truth machine. This is a concept that I have feared for a while, and, it exists now.

Journalists ruined your reputation, not with evidence, with a narrative. And when they come for you, there's no way to fight back, until now. Introducing Objection, the first AI tribunal. Former CIA and FBI agents will investigate. They gather evidence and make it public permanently. The AI tribunal checks the record and renders the verdict.

You can save your reputation in days, not years. From the team that bankrupted Gawker, mastermind Aaron D'Souza and investor Peter Thiel, comes Objection. Truth isn't what goes viral. It's verified. File an objection.

From the team that bankrupted Gawker. All right, so if you didn't catch exactly what that was, it is an assault on journalism. It's an assault on the media. It's an assault on truth. It is a privately owned company run by antichrist Peter Thiel, and a guy who's proud of the fact he bankrupted Gawker, to centralize the truth, to centralize narratives.

I'm not gonna get too loud 'cause my kids are sleeping in the room next to me, but holy shit, man, this is fucking terrifying. This is really scary. Let's have a look. 

Look at this dystopian bullshit. 

So here is their dystopian website, the AI Tribunal of Truth. "Today, anyone can publish allegations.

Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media." Sure, journalists get stuff wrong. Sure, the narrative changes. Journalists have got stuff wrong about me. It's annoying, I get it. But, this is not a solution.

I cannot stress that enough. Journalism must be decentralized. The truth must be decentralized. I hate this, man. To have this controlled in one centralized place owned by the most rich and evil people? Oh, wow. Here we go. "Without Objection, the court jester rules you. Challenge any public statement. We have the best investors in the world."

Warhawks, bailed out banks, the CIA. "Our investigators have previously worked at these organizations." So these are just logos that are on people's resumes. Let's have a look at your manifesto. "The truth is the foundation of civilization." Yes, truth is not optional. It is the essential condition that allows humans to reason together about reality.

Without shared truth, trust collapses and discourse gives way to force. This is how all of these evil fascist people work. They say something that is, broad enough to be true, and then they just skip ahead to, the worst premise ever. They'll be like, "Hey, killing people is wrong. That's why we've decided to own every bullet and put AI in every bullet, so if it kills you, we know."

Hey, the truth is wrong, so we're gonna own the truth. 

Before courts rule, before regulators act, before markets move, stories are published, narratives form, reputations are made or destroyed, reality is framed, often irreversibly. This is so corrupt. It is basically just saying, "Hey, what's the last system that we can't control?

Oh, yeah, people talking, the media." It's like all of these things. Before courts rule. It's like if you are a billionaire, you can buy the courts. You can control the courts. Before regulators act, you can lobby the regulators. Before markets move, you are the market. Before stories are published. Hell, half of them fricking own the media.

It's just other journalists. This is so cooked. Narratives form, reputations are made or destroyed, reality is framed, often irreversibly. Good. And yet journalism today is not truth adjudicated. It moves at the speed of the internet without a shared process for testing claims. This is a problem, but this is not the solution.

This is so not the solution. So we decided to own the truth. Go on, man. No way. No, no. This is my dystopia rubicon. I've ... It's written down, dog. Courts were built for truth, but cannot scale. Ugh, I hate this language. But cannot scale. Shut up. For centuries, courts served as society's truth adjudication engine.

That's, partially true. There's also, truth that gets adjudicated by communities, and the courts fail people a lot of the time. Laws aren't perfect. Courts aren't perfect. OJ definitely killed his wife. What are we doing here, guys? But it's also, the modern court of public opinion is a reaction to a broken court system or, an inaccessible court system that people who don't have enough money, which structurally was caused by you, you fricking VC-backed dorks.

So people have to bypass these exclusive and expensive things in order to actually just get some sort of fricking modicum of justice, and justice is so rare. These people have enough. They have so much. They have more money than God. They have more power. They have ... They own everything. Why do you want more, Peter Thiel?

What is wrong with you? Oh my God. I'm not saying someone should, but ... Why journalism is our first focus There is so much hope in that one sentence for everybody else. "Journalism is where truth breaks now, and where it can be repaired fastest." It feels like a threat. "Journalism is truth infrastructure and every downstream system improves."

Oh my God. This is so paternalistic of these evil people. They make this stuff, they lobby governments, they, try turn all... they try turn the commons, they try turn life, existence, into corporate assets. And then all people have left is what they can say. All right. All right. All right. What objection provides, total immunity?

Our long-term ambition to be a complete totalitarian government wherein there is just one truth, and we get to decide what it is. Da, da, da. Yeah, that's pretty much what it says. All right. "The direction is inevitable." Hmm. There is a, there's a propaganda technique called inevitable victory.

It's so funny. It's it's not even, that thinly masked. I've been reading a lot of Hannah Arendt lately, because I think everything that she writes is incredibly relevant to this moment, but there's this one line that's been sticking out to me. It's like a throwaway line in Origins of Totalitarianism, where she's describing Hitler.

For context, if you don't know, she fled the Nazis. Amazing political scientist, incredible historian. Anyway, the way that she describes the amount of time that Hitler was in power, she talks about it as the 12 years that Hitler's thousand-year Reich had managed to last. The 12 years of his thousand. So when I read, "The direction is inevitable," I'm like, all right, your predecessor got 1.2% of the way towards his backing goal.

What are you gonna do? You don't scare me, dog. "We begin with journalism because that's where truth now lives and where it is most at risk." How convenient. We begin with the Fourth Estate, something that we don't own. All right. Let's end on hope. Two bits of hope. The first is small and personal, and the second is structural and actually massive, and I think it's really cool.

All right. So the first small personal one, I have struggled with perfectionism for a long time, particularly on YouTube, and right now, hey man, turned on the camera. This has woken up something inside of me. I know that I like to make polished videos, but the urgency and the importance of this moment feels too big to ignore.

It's literally thing that I think can topple society. History is so much more malleable than I think most people realize. It is so vulnerable. This terrifies me enough to make me wanna change my behavior, and I'm doing it. But the second bit of structural hope is, damn, Peter Thiel, you just played your hand.

You told us what you fear. You fear journalism. You fear truth. You fear narrative. You fear reputation. Damn, man. It's, interesting. This is a common pattern with ruling class, with oligarchs, with elites. is fearing narrative. This is what Percy Shelley discovered after writing the poem Ozymandias, where he talked about the temporal nature of power, the fallibility of power, the fact that people who claim to have inevitable rule over the next, I don't know, thousand years or whatever, don't.

They eventually become dust in the desert and all we remember is not them, but the sculpture of them. The tyrant dies and the artist's work outlasts them, that's what Percy Shelley was saying. We see the sculpture, not the king. So it is quite cool to know just how powerful stories are, how powerful journalism is, how powerful the truth is, how powerful understanding is.

Cool to know what they're scared of. It's like they've just gone, hey, I know you suspected we had an Achilles heel. We definitely do. So if you have ever wanted to become a journalist, if you have ever wanted to amplify the truth, now is your moment. Now is your time.

Next, Section B, Bezos, Amazon, and the Human Cost

New York billionaire Steven Roth thinks that saying tax the rich is hate speech. Yeah, apparently he thinks it's just as hateful as racial slurs. Because as everybody knows, the most oppressed and marginalized groups include people like ethnic minorities and real estate moguls. Listen dude, if you think tax the rich is bad, you should hear some of the other suggestions that people have for you.

You might want to reconsider your position. Tax the rich, that's the friendly humanitarian version. That's the people still showing a willingness to extend the kind of compassion to the super wealthy that the super wealthy have proved that they are not willing to extend to the people. I swear modern right-wing politics really has just become a bunch of rich people convincing a bunch of poor people that poverty has nothing to do with economics.

Oh yeah, you're extremely poor and I'm fabulously wealthy. Those two things are not connected. They have nothing to do with each other. Yeah, the reason you're poor is all the DEI and all the brown people and trans people. It's all the government-funded lesbian mountain hiking initiatives and subsidized sub-Saharan transgender farming programs.

Yeah. 

Let's look at some New York statistics, shall we? Since that's where Mr. Roth here made himself fabulously wealthy. In New York in the 1980s, an average worker was making about $20,000 a year, and a CEO of a big company was making about 700,000 to a million dollars a year. Today, an average worker is making about 60 to $80,000, but a CEO of a big company is making somewhere around 15 to $25 million a year.

So the average worker pay has multiplied like three or four times, but the average CEO pay has multiplied like 15 to 30 times. And this is just a drop in the bucket, right? They're not being paid mostly in a cash salary. They're largely being paid in stocks and stock options in the companies they're working for.

Now, since the 1980s, the value of, the 10 most valuable companies, relatively speaking, has grown by about 7,600%, so it's doubled 76 times, whereas the compensation given to the workers that generate most of the value has doubled three or four times. So not only are the rich getting more rich quite objectively because the people are getting a much smaller slice of the overall pie than they used to, but also the rich get paid and pay themselves primarily in an asset that appreciates in value relative to the money over time.

That relative to the money is important there. Inflation is money losing its value, losing its buying power gradually over time. The thing that it loses its value against, loses its power to buy, is not just goods and services, right? It's not just loaves of bread. It's also assets, which means a lot of the increased value that the asset gains comes out of the decreased value that the money loses.

It's the same thing, right? The thing that they pay themselves with gradually over time leaches value out of the thing they're paying you with. And then they just use their assets as leverage to borrow money at very low interest rates because borrowed money is not taxable, and also unrealized gains, unsold assets, are also not taxable.

They also reinvest most of the revenue that the company makes into building and growing the company, which makes the value of the company go up. Because reinvested profit is technically not profit, and therefore not taxable. But if you own shares in the company, it makes the value of the company go up, so for you it's extremely profitable, but until you sell the shares, not taxable.

Now, the way the system currently is didn't just fall out of the sky, right? It's not written in stone. It's gradually been crafted into what it is today over time through massive efforts of lobbying and propaganda. So I guess the question is: Why do we think the super wealthy are fighting so hard against efforts to try and return the landscape of wealth equality back to one that looks more like the one that they themselves succeeded in?

When he got rich, there was way less wealth inequality. There was way more opportunity and competition. Why does he not believe that you should have the kind of opportunity that he had? Were the rich people in the '80s terribly oppressed? Was there some sort of epidemic of woefully underpaid corporate CEOs in 1982?

Or is it more likely that the super wealthy are just trying to pull the ladder up after themselves and are using stupid people's predisposition towards racism and bigotry and xenophobia as a weapon to help pull that off?

Billionaires are up in arms about California's proposed wealth tax. Now, here's the truth and why you should support it. The proposed tax is a one-time 5% tax on people who had a net worth of at least $1 billion on January 1st, 2026. California's roughly 200 billionaires would be able to pay their share over a five-year period.

The revenue from the tax, which is expected to hit $100 billion, would go toward covering the devastating funding cuts for California's Medicaid system caused by Trump's big ugly bill. Now remember, that same tax bill doled out far more in tax cuts for the richest Americans, including the California billionaires now crying foul.

Now, a few California billionaires will make headlines by leaving the state in a huff or by threatening to move assets. But if they lived in the state on January 1st, they'll be on the hook for the tax anyway. In any case, research shows that when states increase taxes on their richest residents, the vast majority of them stay put simply because they can afford to.

Massachusetts increased taxes on millionaires and billionaires in 2023. What happened? The rich didn't move, and the state generated billions in revenue that's now going to public education and transportation. Let's be real. California's billionaires are wealthier than they've ever been. How are you? Take the CEO of AI chipmaker, NVIDIA.

His wealth grew by $124 billion over the past five years, and he'd have to pay just under $10 billion in the next five under the California proposal. That's an outcome that he says is... i'm perfectly fine with it Because he seems to understand the benefits of operating in a state that's also the world's fourth largest economy.

Perhaps his fellow billionaires should listen. Meanwhile, 15 million poor and working class Californians, including five million children who rely on California's Medicaid system, would be able to go to the doctor and afford life-saving medicine. Why are we focused on the complaints of a handful of billionaires instead of the needs of millions of their neighbors?

California's billionaire tax isn't the final answer to America's disgraceful inequalities of wealth and income, of course, but it's a start. It may open the way to further efforts to rein in the obscenely rich, which is what some billionaires probably fear. These efforts are essential not only to funding what most people need, but also to preserving our democracy.

The choice is clear. It's time to tax the rich. 

Now, Section C, How the Tax Code Built the Aristocracy

 

the 2024 version of the numbers is that the top 1% pay 40% of all income taxes, and 40% of Americans pay no income taxes at all. So the top 1% pay 40% of all income taxes, and 40% of Americans pay no income taxes at all.

So first of all, it is, this is highly misleading about the, about who the top, who the top payers are. What it is referring to is people with the most taxable income, and indeed, people with the most taxable income do pay the most taxes. But these are likely to be highly compensated individuals, right?

Whether they're working as lawyers, doctors, finance people. Highly compensated individuals who are reporting lots of income are paying most of the income taxes. They're also getting, It's also a sign of the inequality of our income taxes, of our, of our income. But what it doesn't say anything about is the richest 1% of Americans, because what I talk about in my book is how the richest 1% of Americans are able to avoid income taxes altogether because they avoid taxable income.

And because they can avoid taxable income- They are just as likely to be in the 40% of non-payers as they are in the top 1% of payers. So we are not... That, that statistic is not an example of us soaking the rich. It's an example of the fact that high income earners pay a lot of taxes, but high wealth owners can avoid taxes altogether.

By the way, the statistic is also misleading about the 40% of non-payers because although, that group, is largely made up of lower income Americans who don't pay income taxes, and of course our billionaires who don't pay income taxes, but because it's largely made up of the, of low income Americans, it, it fails to capture the fact that they are already paying significant payroll taxes.

Payroll taxes are imposed at rates as high as 15.3%, and they are imposed at a flat rate from dollar one earned, and they are quite regressive in nature. So even though Americans don't pay, there's a significant portion of Americans that don't pay income taxes, most of them pay payroll taxes, and those of course support the biggest expenses of the country, which is Social Security and Medicare.

So should all income be taxable? And what income is not taxable right now? 'Cause I was very surprised at how little income is not taxable and the income that was not taxable. 

So it's really interesting. Our income tax system, if you were to take a law school class on income taxes, you would start with Section 61, which says, income, gross income includes all income from whatever source derived, and it's very broad.

It includes things like, barter exchanges, and found money on the street, and lottery winnings. It's all these things. However you get money, it's pretty much subject to tax, except if you acquire money from inheritance, that is entirely excluded from income, and if you acquire money from your growing wealth because your stock goes up from, like Elon Musk's has from $180,000 in 2023 to $342,000 in 2025, all of that growth is never subject to tax in our income tax system unless that stock is sold.

And of course, our billionaires don't need to sell their stock because they can always support their lifestyle by borrowing against the stock, and that is a tax-free way of accessing these funds 

So how aware is the public that inheritance and, and investments are not taxed? I... We'll get to this point about the e- estate tax in a little bit, but to what extent do you think the average American realizes that inve- investments and inheritances are not taxed although every other income is?

I think that people are not aware of that. I think that people who experience the income tax experience it as something that is burdensome and difficult to avoid, and they also experience it as something that the more income you have, the more taxes you pay. So I think that they assume, naturally assume, that the richest Americans must also be paying high incomes, hi- high income taxes.

And that's why... And then it gets reinforced by these statistics that say, " the top 1%..." And there's a, there's this convergence where we pretend that the high income earners and the high wealth owners are the same people, but that's not the case. 

You point, you write that, "Imagine as a thought experiment that a millionaire tried to finance her life using only interest generated by her income, as many wealthy people endeavor to do.

At a 3% interest rate, $1 million would return only $30,000 in income a year, barely enough to support a subsistence level existence in mo- most United States cities. Meanwhile, $1 billion at 3% interest would produce an annual income of $30 million a year, enough to support even the most lavish lifestyle, all while preserving the principal which could then be passed on to children who can use the income to support their lifestyle, and in the given situation now, that would be tax-free."

There are many exceptions and e- exemptions that reduce the number of estates with tax liability. The current individual exemption in 2024 is 13.61 million or 27.22 million for a married couple. In addition, a maximum amount varying year by year can be given by an individual before and/or upon their death without incurring federal gift or estate taxes.

Because of these exemptions and others, it is estimated that only the largest 0.2% of estates in the United States will pay the tax. How much is generational wealth currently protected by the estate tax? 

Yeah. First of all, let me just say I'm really glad that you, talked about this difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, because I think that one of the problems with our current system, one of the cultural problems we have, is that it's very difficult to fathom the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion, right?

They all sound the same. And, and and so people think and, and and people think "Oh yeah, a millionaire is rich." But the important thing to realize is that a million dollars, while it's a, it's a lot of money, is not the type of wealth that really makes somebody, wealthy in that traditional sense that we imagine.

And yet the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is extraordinary. But we sort of-- And then of course, if Elon Musk becomes a trillionaire, that's even more mind-boggling about what these numbers are. We have this problem, I think, where well-off Americans, many Americans, who live in high, live in expensive cities, have real estate and retirement benefits that are worth a million dollars, even if they live a fairly modest lifestyle.

And, and so what happens is, though, people think, " I must be like the billionaires because, I have a million, and a million is supposed to be a lot of money." But a million really is not, does not support that type of lifestyle that we imagine a very rich person living, 

we're gonna start with the income tax system, right? No income taxes. We're gonna then see how our estate tax is failing us, by the way, in case you- Yeah. ... In case you're wondering where we're heading with that. 

Yeah. 

And then on top of that, money, as you pointed out, when you have property that grows in value, when you buy Apple stock or Facebook stock or any investment and it grows in value from, $10,000 to $10 million, as you pointed out, that's not subject to tax either, even though you can access those funds by borrowing against them- 

Yeah

because it's not realized, and our system doesn't ever require realization. You have to- No ... sell the property in order to realize the gain. And if you simply pass the property on to your kids, either when you're alive or at death, that doesn't trigger gain for you either. You have to sell it. And this is unlike the rule in Canada, where whenever somebody disposes of property, whether by sale or gift or inheritance, it's gonna be subject to tax.

All of that gain will be subject to tax to the donor. But we don't have that system. 

I- is the, I know the, there's the step-up, 'cause I'm, I live in a- Yeah ... different economy than Nick. There's the step-up- Yeah ... basis- ... on my house. The extent of my estate planning, I have o- I have an only child, is to die in my house, and that wa- which I've owned since, in Seattle since 1997.

That way there's no capital gains tax. Is that true on other assets, or is that p- particular to- Every asset. 

Every 

asset. 

So that's- So- Yeah, but the catch is you have to pass it through your estate at death In order to get the step-up in basis. Step-up in basis means that for your listeners, what it means is that your house, let's say you bought it for $50,000 and it's now worth $50 million because of where you're located, that gain- not quite that good, but Not quite.

Let's say it's worth 15 million so we don't get any estate taxes involved. Yeah. Okay? Then, if you pass that property on at death, your children are treated as if they had bought it for $15 million, and so when they sell it, they pay no taxes on it. Whereas if you sell it, you have to- ... pay a lot of capital gains taxes, or if you gift it to them during life, they would have your, what we call carryover basis.

So if you gift it, it would be, then you would pay, then they would pay tax on the gain if they sold it. The effect of this is that this thing that we call step-up in basis, also called the angel of death loophole, is a- The estate planners are very clever. Is a, it, it's a tremendous distortion in the market, which is interesting because, conservatives are always saying, "We don't wanna distort the market," but the biggest distortion in the market is step-up in basis.

Because that's why people don't sell their houses, because they don't wanna have to pay that extra gain. In addition, people don't sell their stock. Even if they have a stock that they think is no longer doing very well, the market, they are not gonna sell their stock because they're gonna have to pay tax on that gain.

So it's a big distortionary effect on the market, our current rules. 

Yeah. 

Nick, I feel like you're giving a look like I am definitely not convincing you. 

No, no, no. We're generally aligned, but y- I watched some of the videos that you made, and I think we're talking about the same thing.

So for sure the estate tax $15 million exemption is a significant loophole in the system. People pay zero estate tax on assets less than $15 million. 

It's the rule in the system, whether to say that... I don't think that's the source of the problem- 

Okay ... 

is the 

exemption amount. But if you, if you have a billion dollars- and you want that to flow to your heirs- are you asking for tax advice here, Nick? How to- 

No. You're saying why isn't the... You're saying why isn't the estate tax doing its 

job? You're most definitely gonna pay 40% at least- 

Okay ... 

of that- And so he- ... above the 15 million. You're, you're definitely gonna spend, pay 40%.

You would think. 

Yeah. So here is the thing. Dude, if that's not true- You need new- ... I need to hear about it now. 

Yeah, 'cause you need- Yeah ... some 

new advisors, Nick. Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Okay. I 

thought that was the whole point of your foundation. Unless you give it all to charity. So you take Gates, you take Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, right?

These guys are worth whatever it is, more than $100 million. 

Yeah, billion 

Th- they are going to play zero estate tax because their kids are already billionaires, and everything else is gonna go to their foundations 

So there's a lot of issues that we're raising here 

But there's no way around that 40%.

That, 

okay. Yeah. 

Let's, let's hear. Here's the, You can set up trusts for your kids and stuff like that, but, there's limits to all that 

Yeah, but there is a tremendous capacity for tax avoidance. Like what? And so I'm gonna- Like how are you gonna... If you, if you- I'm gonna 

tell you. Yeah.

Yeah, 

let's hear it. Tell me. I'm 

gonna write it all down. 

You taking notes here, Nick? 

Yeah, I am. 

I feel a little bit badly though 'cause I feel like I've gotten us to this subject without finishing that two-tier system that you had wanted me to talk about. Yeah, we can go back to that. Can I quickly finish that and 

then we'll come back here?

Yeah. No, yes. Then you'll tell Nick how to a- avoid paying taxes on his, when he's dead. 

When Americans think about the tax system, they typically think of the income tax system because that's the system that most people live with. The estate tax is a very large exemption. It's not relevant for them. And so the income tax system looms large in the visions of most Americans, as it should, because the combination of the income tax and payroll taxes means that anybody who has a lot of income pays a lot of taxes.

And somebody who even has modest income, let's say $60,000, which is the median income in this country, still will pay $13,000. If they're a self-employed person, they will pay $13,000 in income taxes and payroll taxes. Yeah. And this is a significant burden for working Americans. If you think about it, if you're trying to live on $60,000 and $13,000 of it has to go to taxes, that's really takes a bite out of what you have.

So 

you- And that's just federal taxes because they 

also have state and local And that's just federal. Then there's states on top of it, exactly. 

Which is gonna be, like, another 11, 12%- 

Depending on where 

you live ... depending on where you are, yeah. 

Yeah. And so the thing that I wanna mention also is that high income earners pay the vast majority of the taxes.

And the reason I wanna mention this, so in 2024, the top 1% of earners paid 40% of all income taxes. And the reason I wanna highlight that is because that's a statistic that is often distorted to tell the public that rich people are already paying all the taxes. We don't need to worry about rich people paying taxes because then they'll just say the top 1% are paying 40% of the taxes, and 40% of Americans pay no income taxes.

This is something that misleads the public into thinking our system is very progressive. And the problem is, first of all, for a lot of working Americans, they're paying significant payroll taxes on that- That 40%. But the other issue is that when we're talking about the top 1% paying 40% of the income taxes, these are people with high incomes, lawyers, doctors, bankers, finance people.

They have high incomes. They pay most of the taxes. Yeah. This is not people like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, all of our billionaires, and even frankly, our centimillionaires, who also don't have to pay taxes, because they avoid taxes by avoiding taxable income, and they do so because they avoid salaries, they avoid selling their property, and when they inherit property, none of it is subject to income taxes.

So they are not subject to the income tax world at all. And indeed, they are just as likely to be in the 40% of Americans that pay no taxes as they are in the top 1% of payers. And this is, if your audience takes away nothing from this call, I hope they take away this point about how it is that our system is unfair because they're constantly being told that, "Oh, no, the system is fair.

Top 1% are paying 40% of the taxes. What are you complaining about?" But it is the top 1% of earners, and wealthy people avoid taxes by avoiding taxable income. 

the very first billionaire in the United States was John D.

Rockefeller, worth about $1.4 billion or $30 billion in 2024 dollars when he died in 1937. The country did not see another billionaire for 50 years when Bill Gates achieved a net worth of $1.2 billion in '87. Since Gates, the billionaire class has grown exponentially, both in the number of billionaires and in the size of their wealth, which has far outpaced inflation.

In 2024, there were 750 billionaires, and more than a dozen people had wealth in excess of $100 billion, including Gates, who had personal wealth in excess of $138 billion, even after funding his foundation. So zero billionaires for 50 years, over the next not even 40 years. What changed, Ray? Was it technology that is a whole new economic sector opened up with information technologies like those that made Gates wealthy?

Are there more wealthy people because we just created more ways to get wealthy, including a whole new economic sector? 

I think the other thing that has very much contributed to the growth of the wealth is the failure to, for the tax system to keep up with these changes. And as a result, the richest Americans are able to continue to grow their wealth at exponential rates, right?

If you think about it, somebody who works for a living, they move two steps forward and one step back, right? You get paid money, but you have to pay significant taxes. So they go two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. But for the wealthy, they're moving ahead two steps forward, two steps forward, four steps forward, six steps forward, right?

Enormous amounts forward, not being set back by taxes. And this failure to pay taxes really plays a big role in this, enormous, growth of the wealth of the wealthiest Americans. 

So why has the tax code not kept up? We've talked to people in the past that, regulation does not keep up with technology when it comes to Silicon Valley and new, for, for instance, social media platforms, how regulation cannot keep up with technology. It's always lagging behind, and that regulation is always reactive and never preventative. Why has the tax code not kept up? Does it always lag behind what wealth is doing and where it is being kept? And does the tax code have to be reactive and not preventative?

The tax code definitely has to be reactive, because, the way that it works is that, you can never... Y- It's a really like a dance between Congress and, professional tax advisors, right? So Congress says, " we wanna tax this thing," and then the, tax id- for the right rules, the, taxpayers and their advisors find ways to work around the rules.

And then in a well-done system, Congress should be stepping back in and closing those loopholes that are created that they feel are inappropriate, right? But there's always gonna be people trying to reduce their tax liability, and Congress has to keep up by closing the loopholes. And what has happened with the estate tax is, is that for many years it was well-maintained right up until 1990, and after 1990 a drastic change occurred and, Congress stopped maintaining the estate tax.

But as an example of how well it was maintained, in 1986, in 1976 and then again in 1986, Congress enacted something called the generation-skipping transfer tax, which was an additional tax designed to limit people creating long-term trusts, right? So it would basically say, "If you give money to a grandchild, you have to pay two, two levels of estate tax because we don't think-- we think the tax should be imposed at each generation," right?

A very serious tax enacted in '76 and then reenacted in a different version in '86. In 1990, Congress again enacted a whole new set of rules that were designed to address a problem where people were hiding value, and so they enacted these four new rules, special valuation rules that were designed to address it, very, intense and, and, and what's interesting is both of these occurred under Republican presidents.

So this was a tax that was m- well-maintained under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Beginning in the 1990s, however, a group of 18 of the country's richest families got together to promote the repeal of the estate tax. And that's because they were able to avoid the income tax through ways that, we can talk about, but the estate tax, as I mentioned, was being well-maintained and it was hard to avoid, and they didn't like it.

And back then the tax rate was as high as 60%. Now it's been reduced to 40%, but that still could do a pretty serious job if it was actually doing its job They hired this guy by the name of Frank Luntz, who was a pollster and a wordsmith, and he said, "You know what? This is what we gotta do. We gotta lobby to get rid of this tax.

We have to change what the tax is called, and we have to change the people who are gonna be lobbying for it." So instead of rich people lobbying against an estate tax, they said, "We'll call it a death tax and get regular working Americans and farmers and business owners to fight against it." And that's what they did, and it was a tremendously effective campaign.

You might remember George W. Bush saying, "We're gonna eliminate the death tax." And, and it's been a pretty regular part of the Republican platform until quite recently. The effect of this was that we had one year where there was no estate tax at all in 2010, when a number of our billionaires died tax-free.

But the even greater effect was the fact that, politicians from i- both sides of the aisle became so, concerned about... The-- They turned the public so against the estate tax that politicians from both sides of the aisle said, "You know what? We're not gonna, we're not gonna take the heat of fixing the tax."

So the last time there has been any reforms to the estate tax to close loopholes was 1990, 35 years ago. And as a result, we have this entirely loophole-ridden system that basically provides cover for the rich, making it seem like they pay a lot of taxes rather than actually imposing any burden.

when an individual is filling out their tax form, there are fifty-eight different possible tax forms that an individual can fill out, and there are ninety-four different forms that corporations can fill out. Looking at what does that actually mean, where does that link up to the tax code, and then connecting that to other data sources so that we can get a complete picture of the US tax code, of the US tax system.

We're doing something similar looking at the spending. Usaspending.gov has the, for something like ninety-eight percent of federal spending, where did it go, what was it spent on, how much money went there? And so we can look at where those dollars are flowing. So instead of looking at everything at here's one big number- This, the economy or that's, this program, what is it actually doing to people?

What is it doing to our economy? Who's benefiting, and who's paying for it? Okay. And how are they paying for it? How much are they paying for it? So taking a very... Using the techniques that, computer science and, data science have revolutionized a lot of fields, and it's drifting into economics, too.

But, really bring that to bear on these fiscal models. And the old fiscal models, the CBO model and the Penn Wharton model, they're not using these modern techniques and tools. They're definitely starting to, and they're, they've been taking steps for a long time to, adopt these models. We're essentially doing it from the ground up, and we're trying to make as much of this open source as possible so that they can use our stuff, too.

In this case, a rising tide lifts all boats, where if everybody is starting to adopt these better methods, then everybody gets better analysis, and that's, I think- Yeah ... good for everybody. Yeah. So this is where the economists come in. T- they could use the same tools that you, the tool that you're developing right now and then just plug in their old assumptions and get very different outcomes from the model than we might.

Certainly our hope is for it to be transparent so that- ... by making this open source, if you wanna change one of the assumptions, then, and get different numbers, that's up to you. But, you have to specify, "Okay, I'm gonna change this assumption." Yeah. Yeah. It's been one of my complaints, by the way, the CBO model, whenever it models what a minimum wage increase would do, it always models job losses because built into their model is the assumption that raising the minimum wage has a disappointment effect.

It's just built in. It has to come to that conclusion. And- so CBO is starting to make a lot of their models open source also, and so they- Okay ... they have a GitHub repository where it's out there and people can look at them and see them and so everybody's advancing with the times. And, it is exciting time to be doing this research because a lot of those old assumptions, a lot of those old models are getting rebuilt and revetted.

So just tell us wh- where you are on building the model. What's the status? Yeah, so we've been releasing papers for a while now, and I guess probably last August was when we came out with our sort of three biggest pa- papers, one describing our tax tool, one describing our spending tool, and one looking at the debt and deficit.

And essentially the concept behind the debt and deficit piece was we reached this year, or I guess last year, a national debt of, roughly 100% of GDP, when you don't include things that we owe to ourselves, like So- Social Security and Medicare. That's about where we were in 1946 after the Second World War.

We paid down that national debt in, from the Second World War- In 28 years, we got it down to below 30% of GDP. That was mostly economic growth, but a lot of that was in spending restraint and actually collecting taxes. We've dug ourselves into this 100% of GDP hole over about 50 years. From the same time period that all these other, bad things happened that we discussed in, in, those other papers, we got in a lot of debt, and we looked at a way that you could reasonably get back to that, 1974 level in 30 years.

It took us 50 years to get into this problem. I think we can get out of it in 30 years. And what does it take to get out of it? Oh, I'm guessing taxing you, Nick, but I'll let Carter explain. We looked at different combinations of options. So taxing alone, spending cuts alone, economic growth alone are not likely to get us there, and so it will likely take some combination, of that.

So keeping the deficit below 3% of, GDP, and then letting economic growth and inflation take care of the rest- Yeah ... would be one way to do it. And then it's just, it's up to policymakers to figure out, okay, how do we get our national debt, our national deficit below, 3%? But, Carter, as I recall, one of the, from our earlier conversations, one of the really striking findings was that in an economy where inequality didn't rise in the way that it did over the last 50 years, and, the median worker did retain effectively their same share of GDP, we wouldn't have deficits.

Yes. That's, very likely true, and- Yeah ... it's directionally, not to the dollar, c- Yeah ... but it's directionally correct. Absolutely. The, the- Yeah ... tax receipts would have been higher. The- Yes ... sp- spending on safety net programs would have been lower. Would have been lower.

And- ... and we would not be in the same fiscal situation we are now. Yeah, so just to, just to expand on that thought, which I think is really, really important, in one way, our budget deficits are not a consequence of, by the way, Social Security is threatened, is not a consequence of profligate spending, although we have done that.

A- and it's mostly a consequence of tax cuts for rich people and wage suppression for everybody else. And that if, y- if people, i- I mean, in round terms, if the median worker had retained their same share of income from 1975, and they'd make effectively twice as much money Per year.

Yeah, in, in that ballpark, yeah. What that means, of course, is that if the median family in America made twice as much as they do presently, they'd probably be paying four times as much tax, right? But- Because not only... they wouldn't just pay twice as much in tax. They would probably bump up into a higher tax bracket.

Payroll tax generation would be higher, the, Yeah, everything. Yeah Everything. And Social Security c- contributions would be higher, everything. And of course, now people don't need food stamps, and they don't need EITC and the rest of it. And housing, heating oil. All, everything.

Yeah. I think what's important for Americans to understand is that, our fiscal crisis is largely a product of our inequality crisis, and that if we had managed our economy in a fundamentally different way, then we would really probably not have the kind of budget deficits that we have today.

Because everybody'd be paying a lot more taxes, except maybe people at the very tippy top. Also, the economy would have grown faster than- can you speak to that? So that's not something that we did as part of this. There was, many years ago, I did work on a study looking at that, and that there is substantial evidence that more equal economies grow faster than less equal- Right

economies, and that- Yeah ... that, that's a really interesting area of study, and there are... Economists have put up a lot of ideas about why that is. And it, that's- Okay, but it's pretty simple, isn't it? Yeah. It's pretty simple. If people have twice as much money, they will definitely buy twice as many things.

And when they buy twice as many things, people have to employ twice as many people, and so on and so forth. It's not, this is not a complicated concept. Nick has talked about this for a decade, that he may earn a thousand times more than me, he may have a thousand times more than me, but he doesn't eat a thousand times more food.

No. He doesn't... Despite all of his fancy houses- Yeah ... he doesn't spend a thousand times more on housing. He doesn't buy- Or haircuts or ... a thousand times more clothing. No. There's just no way for him to spend the money, No ... as if you took that and you distributed that out to a thousand people, and they would- Yeah

spend the money, more of that money than- Yeah, no ... he does. And the economy would look different, too, in the sense that- Yeah ... if you have fewer people with, at the very top, maybe you have fewer luxury car dealerships or- Yeah ... just things like that, and you have more, mid-market restaurants and better, mid-market cars than the, the- Yeah

high-end luxury stuff. Absolutely. And- I think you could- Very convincingly argue that not only would the economy be bigger, but it would be more innovative because the more robust and div-diverse demand is- ... there more incentive for innovation that exists, right? I do think it's, Carter, maybe you guys know the number, but I believe now something like, eighty percent of the consumption in the economy comes down to the top twenty percent of Americans or some- or maybe it's top ten percent of Americans today.

It's some crazy skewed number. And of course, that concentration diminishes the reason that businesses have to either create themselves or to be created or for people within businesses to create new products, for large and robust markets. And so you slow down that feedback loop between innovation and demand that is what the economy really is.

Moving on to Section D, Ideology of Capital

Donald Trump might have become the most honest American president ever. We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

They can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection. We have to guard the country. 

And honestly, this feels refreshing, 'cause at least he just said the thing. And as Trump and his administration remind us that we can't have healthcare or childcare because we need to fund a senseless and bloodthirsty war, there's an unsurprising lack of response from the opposition party.

Oh, wait, actually, I'm wrong. The Democrats- They posted about it, and then Chuck Schumer wrote a strongly worded statement. So I think we're good now. And it honestly is starting to feel like American liberals, and liberals more generally, have more in common with fascists than they do with leftists.

They were cool with Liz Cheney being part of their big tent coalition during Harris's doomed 2024 campaign, and now many of those same Democrats are out to get Hasan Piker, claiming that he's just as bad, if not worse, than figures on the far right. And this idea that when push comes to shove, liberals will side with fascism to protect capitalism is explored and explained in Dr.

Clara Mattei's recent book, Escape from Capitalism. This work was really about showing how austerity is not a natural order of things. It comes about in specific moments when the system shows its fragility, and that's what I based kind of the theorization of the cap- of escape from capitalism on, is to sh- say, the capital order is again really stressing the fact that this order's political and is enforced actively by s- governments and other state institutions or economic institutions at large.

Now this book, which has the subtitle An Intervention, argues that capitalism is in no way a natural or scientific system. It's a specific political project masked as an economic system that weaponizes concepts like austerity, unemployment, and development to enrich the capitalist class while further dehumanizing and exploiting working people like us.

Now, this obviously sucks and is true, but Mattei makes the point that precisely because this isn't a natural or necessary system, it can be escaped, deconstructed, and eventually destroyed. Now, to use my own language here, she's basically showing how the capitalist economic project has turned into a sort of political theology, where we treat the free market system like some holy and preordained way of life given to us by God.

And as I've shown in recent videos, a lot of evangelical figures are quite literally willing to argue that capitalism is Jesus's preferred economic paradigm. Take this credit card and build up debt- 'Cause when you do, you will consume of my flesh and blood," or something like that. But of course, this quasi-religious way of life does not serve people, it serves profit.

And the implications of all of this are quite bad, as Mattei points out in her book.

Now, something she emphasizes that I think is really important is the idea that capitalism is a fundamentally inhumane system, like it's quite literally anti-human. Now, if we wanna use the pro-life, anti-life paradigm favored by many of capitalism's biggest fans, it is an anti-life- system. And that's both in terms of human life, plant and animal life, and even the very conditions that sustain biological life in general on this planet.

If we're going to protect natural systems, one of the solutions is to bring nature onto the balance sheet. 

So on this month's Burns After Reading, let's talk about why I think this book not only speaks to one of the very apparent contradictions of our time, but also might help us articulate some of these things in a way that makes anti-capitalism more palatable to our liberal friends who are starting to understand that things are really bad, but might still struggle to understand precisely why.

Okay, let's start here. Economics Is political 

In one year, our agenda has produced a transformation like America's not seen in over 100 years. 

It's not a science or some objective metric of understanding financial and social reality. But for generations, we've been taught the lie that somehow economics can be disconnected from the political, and more specifically, the human, and this decoupling has led to a large-scale depoliticization, where politics happens via voting and posting and donating money, a- and all the economic stuff that actually runs our lives th- that's largely apolitical.

The system is just running itself, jacking off with invisible hands. Now, in the book, Mattei writes that, like the economist of a century ago, modern economists use language that hides an existential concern for a system that is actually neither eternal nor natural. We might think here of the 2024 election where the Democrats repeatedly told us that actually the economy was good, even though for most of us, our lived experience didn't agree with that.

And now in 2026, we're seeing the same thing as markets fall and prices go up, and Trump tells us that it's all good, and eggs are cheap, and gas prices are going down. 

$1.99 a gallon. How would you like to have $1.99? That's- 

You're a worthless pile of . 

Now, as Mattei writes in this book, there are no economic problems that are not inevitably also political problems.

This makes sense of why those in political power will do stuff that makes no sense to us and seemingly makes our lives actively bad. Mattei also writes that what is irrational according to the logic of needs is entirely rational according to the logic of profits. In other words, the market doesn't really give a shit if we can afford gas, eggs, or rent.

It's solely oriented towards the purpose of shoring up profit for those in control of capital. Your ability to enjoy your life is completely incidental to those ends. And as Mattei gets at in this book, it's not just incidental that this system makes most of our lives way worse than they could be. She writes that to satisfy our needs, we depend on a system whose logic is not only indifferent to them, but also requires our exploitation.

And we can put that in simple terms. We are dependent for our means of existence on a system that is fueled by the active exploitation of our human existence as such. There's no such thing as capitalism for everyone or wealth creation for the whole middle class, as that's counter to the operations and the underlying logic of this system- Itself.

Insert your preferred metaphor for this in the comments. And that's why Mattei writes that capitalist wealth is grounded in inequality and human alienation. So again, this shit is not accidental. It's very much a part of the system itself. But this is why Clara points out how the use of austerity and unemployment by the ruling classes are, to put it in academic terms, fucking bullshit.

Because as we saw earlier in the example of Trump, there is always money in the proverbial banana stand, it's just that we don't get it because that money needs to pay for things like war and corporate tax cuts. 

Capitalism and war go hand-in-hand. 

So when governments preach austerity, we need to ask who is being told to spend less, and who is still free to use seemingly infinite money on bombs, tanks, private jets, and making sure the billionaires don't have to pay taxes.

It's the same with unemployment. Mattei gets into this in the book, but think about it in this way, who benefits from full employment and who benefits from continuous unemployment? Because as you probably know, if we all had jobs, there would be less scarcity in terms of work and wages, and then employers would need to compete to attract and retain employees, us.

And those employees would then have bargaining power to use against potential forms of exploitation. On the other hand, when there aren't enough jobs for everyone, employers have the power to take advantage of that scarcity to pay less and treat workers worse because they don't have other options. This of course also hurts attempts at unionization and workers organizations because it's way more risky to organize when you can be easily fired, and then if you get fired, you know that there's not other jobs to go get.

In 1694, the English government re-engineered money by allowing the Bank of England, which was private back then, by the way, to issue notes for government borrowing. The important bit here is that this completely aligned the interests of the state with private owners of capital, who received interest payments in exchange for funding the state's military needs.

State-sponsored. Actually, because early modern states needed a lot of resources for wars, and because of the old Black Death that wiped out a third of Europe's labor force, amongst other reasons- States gave exclusive and sovereign rights to private companies like the Dutch and English East India companies to raise capital and armies.

Lots of armies. State-sponsored and regulated, and the list goes on. Trust me, I've read too many examples at this point. The point is, states have always played a crucial role in the expansion of trade and markets, and as rulers everywhere became more dependent on the fortunes and whims of merchants, or, as they eventually called themselves, capitalists, states made the expansion of those very merchants possible.

And it was, and still is, a great relationship for both parties. Eventually, capital owners ran on the literal roads and rails created by political rulers, and received sweet interest payments from the loans given to those states. And states everywhere have always been cool with this, because they can tax the profits of private venture, and then use that tax money to build more public infrastructure, like roads or rails, but of course also to do war.

A lot of war. Beckert writes, "Not surprisingly, between 1670 and 1815, the British government managed to increase tax extraction by a factor of 17, even though the national income only tripled during those same years." Whoever associates capitalism with low taxation has not studied history. Over the same period, Ottoman tax revenue remained almost unchanged.

So what was it you were saying, Ron? 

Just let business be business and government be government. 

Not so smug now, are we? And it continues to this day. Nowadays, our economy is based less on the production of literal goods and more on financial speculation, of course, but that doesn't mean that states aren't married to capital.

Remember that, 2008 great economic recession thing, when the speculative loans and investments of private banks blew up in their faces? Right after that happened, we saw the loving relationship between capital owners and the government in action, alive and well. When all the private banks failed, the government had their backs and bailed them out.

Thanks, government. And the same thing happened when Russia invaded Ukraine. With rising oil prices, instead of demanding that big oil corporations lower their profit margins, God forbid, states gave them subsidies instead. Yeah, it kept oil prices somewhat low for us consumers in the short term, but also meant that corporations made unprecedented profits during a crisis in their very own industry, and that, of course, just means more inequality between the big guns and the rest of us folk.

And very likely, the same will happen with the war in Iran. This is just classic capitalism. This is really not a free market, it's a very regulated market, but unfortunately, often in the favor of owners of capital. Now, the thing about capitalist propaganda is that you have to dig really deep to debunk it, as I think is evidenced by my 10-minute ramble about the very, very brief history of markets.

I even remember doing an economics course during my undergraduate degree where I was taught about the effectiveness of the invisible hand of the free market and all of that. Even in universities, we're still being fed this crap. And so I guess it's not that surprising that we hear the same talking points from Ron.

As far as Park and Rec goes, I think what's probably happening here in the show is that the writers don't really understand what capitalism is, a- and they think because Ron is a libertarian, he should be into capitalism, which kind of makes sense. We'll get there. But I think the message actually hits pretty hard, because throughout the show, Ron is always portrayed, as the level-headed, logical guy.

He's the guy who builds his own chairs and knows how much a steak should cost or whatever. Sure, he's definitely a goofy caricature, but I'd say the other characters are even more absurd. And exactly because he's the level-headed guy compared to, for example, Leslie's weird and chaotic energy, his libertarian rants often come off as objective common sense truths rather than just one side of a historical debate, and I think that's especially true for this episode.

So the propaganda here isn't really that the video dome fails and that he was right after all, it's that the show frames Ron's market as a jungle speech as the logical conclusion to the episode's events. My point is that by making the most rational character in the office the one who also preaches that the market is beautiful and brutal and should be left alone or whatever, the writer subconsciously reinforced the myth that capitalism is somehow free from Evil government meddling.

But as Beckert's history shows, this logic is complete fantasy. Capitalism does not operate outside of the state. No, it was very much made by the state, and to this day is upheld by the state. And what I think really hammers down the nail here for me is that Ron is actually a good guy, like annoyingly so.

And he doesn't even act on the very rants he goes on about with capitalism and libertarianism. We see that in another episode from the following season when his cabin is up for sale. Instead of selling it to the highest bidder, which a good capitalist very much would do, he just gives it away for free to April and Andy.

That's a good guy move Definitely not a capitalist move, and not a libertarian move either. And look, the episode isn't entirely wrong that government intervention can go badly. It obviously can, but that's not actually the question we should be asking. The interesting question is which regulations and in whose favor?

Because as I hope I've made clear by now, there has always been regulation. The choice has never been between a regulated market and a free one. The choice has always been between regulations that serve capital owners and regulations that serve everyone else. Like historically, granting monopolies to private companies to outsource colonial resource extraction for the purpose of warfare, that is very much regulation.

And likewise, deregulating the investment strategies of private banks so that they can make catastrophically speculative loans until the whole world economy collapses and the government has to apply regulations to bail them out, that's also regulation, as weird as that sounds. Just the kind that benefits the people at the top and sends the bill to everyone else.

And no doubt that it's gonna happen with the oil industry again with the war in Iran. Can we just stop subsidizing big oil, please? Apart from the bad economics, maybe this might be a good opportunity to start thinking more seriously about subsidizing a clean, green energy transition. I know it's not as profitable, but, neither is the end of civilization.

But then on the other hand, things like wealth taxes, antitrust laws, welfare systems, labor protections, these are also regulations of the market, but they're the good kind, in my opinion anyway. I'd say that these are the regulations that have actually kept our societies from completely degenerating into a libertarian, or shall I say capitalist, wet, but dystopian dream.

Now, last thing I wanna say, which might be the elephant in the room here, you might be confused that I'm using capitalism and libertarianism interchangeably all the time here. Ron is more of a libertarian than a capitalist, right? That's his whole thing. As it turns out, these days, the two ideologies are just remarkably similar.

So think about it like this. Let's imagine there were no rules, like libertarians want, right? Let's say that there are no rules for where you should be driving on the road, left or right. It does not matter. So in this scenario, anyone can drive where they want. At a glance, it looks like freedom, but what actually ends up happening is that the person with the biggest truck pretty quickly finds out that they don't need to share the road with anyone else.

They can just drive straight through, and sure, technically everyone has the same freedom to drive wherever they want, but that freedom means something completely different if you're driving a Toyota Aygo versus an 18-wheeler. Eventually, the big trucks will consolidate the best routes, and the Aygo is left with the ditch.

Sorry, Toyota. 

If you think about libertarianism like that, we don't really get freedom. we're actually just handing freedom over to whoever already owns the biggest truck. That's libertarianism for you. For us regular folk, the only free choice we're left with is either to sell our time as labor or the freedom to starve.

And that's exactly what's happened over the last 40-odd years of neoliberal deregulation, also synonymous with libertarianism. Inequality is at historic highs, the environment is fucked, and the regulations we've gotten rid of were mostly the ones protecting us people, while the ones protecting owners of capital have stayed firmly in place.

So when Ron says, 

Just let business be business and government be government. 

It sounds good. It sounds clean and logical, and coming from him like something a sensible guy would say. But it describes a world that literally has never existed, and if it did, it just would not last very long. 

This is Pomona, a small cafe around the corner from where I live. The cafe is owned and run by Elsa, and one of her specialties are delicious Danish open-faced sandwiches that she makes with whatever produce is in season. Elsa and her cafe, Pomona, participates in our capitalist system. She, of course, needs to pay rent and set prices, but, and this is important, Elsa and her cafe are not capitalist as such.

Why? Because Elsa's cafe is organized around use value. Elsa is fine with a steady state where her cafe earns more or less the same profit each year, and with that profit, she can do things that are useful to her, like going on a summer holiday with her family. And this is actually how most small businesses operate.

Shops that engage in commerce to satisfy various human needs have existed thousands of years, even before capitalism emerged. But use value steady-state companies like Pomona are also fundamentally different from the exchange-value driven companies that emerged with capitalism. For example, this company, Espresso House.

In the early '90s, the Swedish couple, Charles and Elizabeth, traveled around the world and were struck by the fact that everywhere they went, they could find Starbucks coffee shops, cafes that served mediocre coffee at inflated prices. They figured that Starbucks must be a money-making machine, and they were amazed that Starbucks hadn't yet opened in Sweden.

So in, 1996, Charles and Elizabeth opened Espresso House, a coffee shop inspired by Starbucks in their hometown, Lund. Whatever money they made from their business, they invested in expansion, and soon they opened in Malmö then in Helsingborg and Ystad, and then along the Swedish west coast. Ten years later, Espresso House had become Sweden's biggest cafe chain.

That's when the couple sold the chain to the British private equity fund, Palamon Capital, who merged Espresso House with Sweden's second-largest cafe chain, Coffee Cup, and then sold the chain to Norwegian private equity fund, Hercules Capital, who expanded the chain to Norway and Finland, and then sold Espresso House to German conglomerate, JAB Holding Company, which has continued to aggressively expand Espresso House, which now has over 500 coffee shops around Northern Europe.

So while Pomona is organized around use value and steady state profits, Espresso House is organized around the capitalist concept of exponential accumulation of exchange value. Here's another way to explain the difference. When I buy a coffee at Pomona, the profit of that coffee is designed to satisfy particular concrete needs for the owner.

But when I buy a coffee at Espresso House, the profit goes into endless accumulation of exchange value, into buying up competitors, into fees for financial intermediaries, into advertising and marketing, and in practice into putting local cafes out of business. The Swedish journalist, Fredrik Strage, once said this about Espresso House.

"Their cafes are the maggots that hatch when culture dies." 

That is how most of us feel. The problem, though, 

is that the virus of exchange value logic takes over everywhere in our economy, and we really hate it. 

We hate it when software we love turns into shitty subscription services that force us to pay for things we already bought.

We hate that the internet, which used to be a place for curiosity and connection, is now designed to trap our attention in endless scrolls. We hate it that our schools and healthcare are taken over by exchange value logic through privatizations. We hate it that our cities are becoming unlivable because homes are treated as financial assets rather than places to live.

And we also hate it when video creators like me start caring more about accumulating exchange value from our videos than about the use value of the videos themselves.

Five years ago, I published my first video essay on this channel. It was a nerdy video about big tech and antitrust law, and let's just say that it was far from a masterpiece. Since then, I've made a number of videos for this channel, and for most of this time, I've had very few viewers. But then last year, my channel started growing steeply, and in just a few months, the channel went from 13,000 subscribers to 130,000.

And after that, the growth rate flattened out. This growth was, of course, very encouraging. But when my channel grew, something fascinating also happened. All of a sudden, both people around me and the voice inside my own head started telling me that you now need to use the growth that you've already had to grow the channel even more.

Now that I have an audience base, I must increase production by hiring outside script writers, editors, and animators... So I can publish more frequently, I need to maximize revenues by promoting things like VPN services, credit cards, meal kits, and whatever crap YouTubers sells these days. 

So if you go to meta.com/jack- Go to google.com 

Try it out at slash verytastic to- Overdue for- 

I must enter new markets by doing short-form content and maybe even doing content in other languages.

And I get it, these are all strategies you probably need to deploy if you want to make a living off YouTube. Because after all, YouTube itself is a hyper-capitalistic platform built to reward exchange value above everything else. Whatever keeps people scrolling the longest will be promoted. The use value of a video is, at best, a happy by-product.

And sure, it would make sense for me to start doing all of these things, but I also believe that we can, and we must, resist at least the worst tendencies of this economic system that we find ourselves in. And we can do that by favoring use value over exchange value. As consumers, we can choose to buy our coffee from local cafes instead of financialized chains.

And as nations, we can resist letting exchange value logic take over our schools and healthcare. And as video creators, we can choose not to turn every video into an ad for a VPN or a vitamin 

Continuing with Section E, Markets in the Mind

Clavicular doesn't have a worldview. He isn't motivated by an ideological commitment to hierarchy.

He didn't reason his way to looks maxing through first principles. This isn't part of a wider political project for him. In this moment, I feel bad for Clavicular. Being needled by Andrew and other media figures about the philosophy behind his pursuit must be exhausting, because there is no why.

Because looks maxing isn't for anything. It's an end in itself, in the same way profit accumulation is the point of capitalism. Asking Clavicular why looks maxing is like having a stockbroker on CNBC and then spending the whole time asking them about the ethics of commodity production. It's just not the same thing.

People talk about Clavicular like he's a ruthless social Darwinist, but if you watch his behavior and frankly his demeanor, you'll quickly find that's not true. He's more like a dispassionate investor managing an asset portfolio, except in this case, the asset happens to be his face.

I have an embarrassing confession to make. I used to be on the looks maxing forums all the way back in early 2021, around the time that clavicular was getting a start actually. And it made me mentally ill. I was a sophomore in college, lockdown was still in full effect, and I was more socially isolated than I've ever been before or since.

In my vulnerable state, I really convinced myself that my problem was that I wasn't attractive enough. I told myself that if I could become mathematically perfect, or at least optimized, then I would be safe. I would deserve love. In the end, I never flew to Turkey for experimental limb lengthening surgery or developed my own peptide stack or smashed my cheekbones with a hammer or any of that crap.

In fact, the only part of it that I really took seriously was the gym, which ended up being good for me in the long run. But for me, the most debilitating aspect of looks maxing wasn't the method being advocated or any of the stuff that I actually did to myself. It was the mentality that it inspired in me, that it inculcated in me.

Because this mentality really functioned to justify my isolation. It protected me from the messy realities of social life, and it gave me a rationale for indefinitely postponing human connection. Somehow the prospect of reshaping my entire body with chemicals and weightlifting seemed easier and less scary than putting myself out there romantically and socially.

Because it gave me certainty and it protected me from the prospect of rejection. I could tell myself that I wasn't ready to engage with the world because I wasn't perfect. And that's just it, you'll never be complete. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that. But back then, I couldn't. And because of that, I didn't date anyone in college.

I worry that we're all becoming clavicular, that we've internalized market logic to such an extent that we've become blind to it. I worry that clavicular actually isn't wrong, that maybe he's just ahead of the curve. I worry that his behavior is a rational response to the increasingly atomized, globalized, digitized, marketized reality of 21st century capitalism.

In this world, human connection is replaced by numerical signifiers. In this world, we are nodes in a market network. In this world, ruthless self-optimization is rational. So let's not create that world. Let's build a better one.

So what is the rational response to clavicular, to looksmaxing, to the marketization of society? And I think it's pretty simple: be a good freaking person, be body positive. All this looksmaxing stuff is weird. Just be chill, bro. Yeah, you like my Brad tube impression? I'll be here all week. So yeah, before I lay out the solution, we need to talk about why the standard normie left-wing response to looksmaxing is totally ineffective.

That's right, it's time for everyone's favorite segment: criticizing the left from the left. I've noticed that a lot of people like to pretend that looksmaxing is some kind of weird, unprecedented trend that only terminally online autistic men participate in. But really, what's odd and antisocial about these guys is that they openly discuss how far they're willing to go, whereas most people subconsciously internalize this logic, participate in it, but then pretend that they're above it.

If you go to any major city, you'll find legions of yuppies with expensive gym memberships and health smoothies and elaborate skincare routines and high boost insoles.

Do you think I wear this watch because I need to know what time it is? We all do it. You're just not supposed to talk about it, which means that movements focus solely on challenging beauty standards or promoting body acceptance, while they are important, can't fully address the material conditions that make the logic of looksmaxing so hard to resist.

Sexual capital is an economic force. It's not just a transient cultural phenomenon. People are rational actors in an irrational system, and no amount of plus size models is going to change this underlying reality. You can't tell someone to just be themselves when they can clearly see that certain attributes are rewarded by the market society.

In short, we need to do more than just critique beauty standards and promote self-acceptance. However, this doesn't mean that we need to accept the system as inevitable either. So what would a robust solution look like? I've argued in this video that looksmaxing isn't about individual personal vanity.

Rather, it's a rational response to structural conditions, which means if we care about living in a society where people don't feel compelled to transform themselves into cyborgs, we must take on these structural forces that generate this pathology in the first place. That requires community. Community, community, community.

And I know what you're thinking. This is not some kumbaya, let's all get along, hippie plan. All right? There's a very specific reason that I say community is the antidote to looksmaxing, and it's because when you're in a community, you're interfacing with real people, which fundamentally changes the logic of the game.

Think about it. If you're living in a post-human digital wasteland, scrolling, swiping, liking, gooning, nothing really matters but your appearance and the numbers in your bank account and your clout metrics. You are a complete bug man whose entire life is defined by the market algorithm. This is the rational kernel of looksmaxing because, yeah, this is the world that we're building.

This is the world that we are headed towards increasingly. But, but it doesn't have to be that way. When you're embedded in a community, factors other than your looks become salient because communities are positive-sum hierarchies. In a community, you gain status by enriching the lives of others and by developing competence and by providing resources and by just being a good hang.

In a community, you can build the trust required for reciprocal altruism, and suddenly you do actually have the breathing room to be yourself. Your physical appearance becomes one part of your identity rather than the sole metric that determines your entire life. To me, that's much better than a zero-sum mog off.

Are you mogging me right now? 

So community is the antidote to looksmaxing. Great. Except this doesn't really solve the problem, does it? Oh, you're experiencing problems because you're socially isolated and your entire life is governed by markets? The solution to that is to not be socially isolated.

Free wisdom for you there, buddy. Just rebuild community. While it is correct, doesn't tell you how to overcome the forces that led to the erosion of community in the first place. These social pathologies are being generated by structural problems. Liberals cannot get this through their fricking heads. So let's return to the refrain of the video, the distinction between the market economy and the market society.

This idea comes from political philosopher Michael Sandel. In 2013, Sandel wrote, "How can we decide as a society when markets serve the public good and where they don't belong? I think the only way we can determine that is by having a public debate about how to value the goods and social practices that we care about.

We need to debate case by case." Aw. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Sandel isn't wrong, but there's one problem. What if we rationally decide that markets don't serve us in a particular instance? Building a society where markets are tools, where markets don't define every aspect of our lives, requires building power.

It requires actually doing politics. It requires building a countervailing force that can challenge capital. I think back to, workers unions used to have, daycares and adult education societies and sports leagues, and all sorts of stuff that would embed you in this cultural life.

We can kill two birds with one stone. Political organizing is a great place to prove your worth among other people. It's a great place to build community and actually, be useful to people. But the ultimate goal is to live in a healthier society where social life is not defined by markets because, political life and economic life is not defined by markets either.

In a healthy society, looks would just organically matter less. Because for one, people would have organic social bonds and other sources of value, which sort of make looks just one part of their identity. But for another, people would just naturally be healthier and more attractive because they'd be living more human lives.

If you're playing sports, living an active and creative lifestyle, you're in a walkable city with plenty of nature and green space. Your food systems aren't poison. You have enough time to cook for yourself and sleep well. You have adequate healthcare. You have free time to actually, develop yourself.

You would just naturally be a healthier person. In this society, attractiveness is not the result of autistic self-optimization, but rather just a natural outgrowth of living the way humans were meant to live. You can call that looksmaxing if you want, but for me, it's qualitatively different. That's the world I'm trying to build, and hopefully you are too.

The effect of Citizens United on climate legislation was not a gradual one.

It instead changed Congress almost overnight. After Citizens United, outside spending from the fossil fuel industry was pumped into politics like never before, rising from 2 million to over 150 million over the course of just four presidential election cycles. There are over 100 different groups involved in this, all beholden to the fossil fuel industry.

That includes think tanks, fake scientists, massive propaganda campaigns, and even attack operatives going after journalists and researchers. But no single politician better illustrates the direct pipeline between fossil fuel money and climate obstruction than Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin had holdings in 2021 valued at between $1 million and $5 million in Intersystems, Inc, the coal brokerage business he himself founded.

He also had a stake in another firm run by his own son that provided support activity for coal and metal mining and drilling oil and gas wells. And at the same time, he served as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the very body that writes US energy policy. Huh, that's interesting.

Manchin was also the top recipient of campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry in Congress, and at the time, he had the decisive vote in a 50/50 Senate. And boy, did the fossil fuel industry have Manchin in the palm of their hand. First, he killed Biden's Build Back Better bill entirely.

Manchin killed off a keystone provision of the bill that would've pushed utilities to speed up the shift to renewables, roughly doubling the amount of wind, solar, and other clean energy put on the grid each year. I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can't. I've tried everything humanly possible.

I can't get there. You're done. This is a no 

This is a no 

Without that provision, Biden had no credible path to a carbon neutral electricity sector by 2035. It also didn't help that Biden couldn't fight back against Manchin or the Republicans because he wasn't too sure what year it was, what planet he was on, or what astral plane his withering consciousness was hovering through.

I no more think of myself as being as old as I am than fly. 

But when the Inflation Reduction Act finally passed back in 2022, a dramatically scaled back version of Build Back Better, Manchin had inserted oil and gas provisions and demanded Democrats trim down the original $3.5 trillion plan, all while he was the leading recipient of donations from the oil and gas sector, owned a stake in his family coal business, and crafted provisions explicitly designed to give coal a chance to stay online.

We're doing 

clean coal, everybody. It's called clean coal. It's the cleanest coal you've ever seen. 

We love clean, beautiful coal, don't we, Doug, huh? 

And ladies and gentlemen, there is so much bad that has come from Citizens United, and we will get to more of that bad very soon. But when it comes to global climate denial, we are witnessing quite literally the greatest scam in history.

Here is the number that puts all the political spending into perspective. Fossil fuel subsidies worldwide reached a record $7 trillion. Nearly 60% of the $7 trillion figure is due to undercharging for the costs of global warming and local air pollution. In other words, fossil fuel companies are being allowed to privatize the profits while socializing the catastrophic costs onto the public, onto future generations, and onto the planet.

And since Citizens United was decided in January 2010, there has not been one single serious bipartisan climate bill in the Senate. But let's talk about bills that actually get passed in Congress, bills that have to do with- War. The United States spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military.

That is more than the next ten countries combined, and we account for 37% of all military spending on the planet, and it never goes down. After every war ends, the baseline resets higher. Eisenhower called this the ratchet effect when he warned about the military industrial complex in 1961. Along with having the sassiest pose I've ever seen from a US president- Eisenhower was also 100% right about the military and its relationship to capital and the government.

The five biggest defense contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, collectively spend over $2.5 billion on lobbying over a two-decade period, the equivalent of employing over 700 lobbyists each year over the past five years. That's more than one lobbyist for every single member of Congress.

Who do you think would win in a fight, 700 defense contractor lobbyists versus the entire federal government? Let's go. The lobbyists. The lobbyists won. It wasn't even a fight. But here's where it gets even more absurd. Every year, Congress adds billions of dollars in defense spending the Pentagon never even asked for.

In fiscal year 2026 alone, Congress added $34 billion above the president's defense request. The year before that it was $21 billion, and the year before that, $15 billion. 68% of those additions were for programs the Pentagon put zero funding toward in their own budget. Congress is literally inventing weapons programs and handing the bill to taxpayers, and the lawmakers doing it don't even have to disclose their names.

Unlike formal earmarks, these program increases require zero transparency. The defense industry donates to your campaign, and you quietly add a line item for their product, and nobody ever knows you did it. And on top of this, the Pentagon is the only major federal agency that has never passed an audit.

Congress first required annual audits in 1990. The Pentagon didn't even attempt one until 2018, and it has failed every single year since. In the most recent audit, the Pentagon could only account for half of its $3.8 trillion in assets. And all the while these defense contractors post record profits, the people actually serving in the military don't even get to eat a meal that looks like it was made on planet Earth.

This photo was allegedly taken by a service member stationed on a ship somewhere near Iran. This shit looks like it was discovered by interdimensional travelers lost in the same astral plane as Biden's consciousness. 

I no more think of myself as being as old as I am than fly. 

What the is that? Soda. Now, Citizens United didn't create the military industrial complex, but it handed it a weapon that Eisenhower could have never imagined, the legal right to spend unlimited, often secret money on the elections that determine its own budget.

And now, just like you might say striking up a conversation with a stranger, sitting around your extended family at Thanksgiving, or trying to think of a good icebreaker for a first date, let's talk about Israel. 

Being pro-Israel is good policy, and AIPAC members make sure it's good politics, too 

AIPAC is the most wild, most recent, most what the is going on example of Citizens United in action.

AIPAC, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has been a lobbying force in Washington for decades. If you wonder why your parents harbor a sort of inexplicable yet ardent affection for Israel, that's probably due to the work of AIPAC throughout the late 20th century. But AIPAC's super PAC, called the United Democracy Project, is beyond mere lobbying.

In 2024, AIPAC spent over $100 million on US congressional elections. No, that is not a typo. One lobbying group, one, spent more than $100 million in a single election cycle. That is the most ever spent by any outside organization in American congressional elections in history. Now, why would that be?

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those funds were dedicated to defeating progressive Democrats who had criticized Israel's military campaign in Gaza. AIPAC poured nearly $15 million into the New York primary race against Jamaal Bowman, making it the most expensive House primary in US history, to oust one of the few progressive critics of Israel in Congress.

Then they turned around and spent over $9 million to snipe Cori Bush in Missouri. Two leftist members of Congress gone, not beaten by Republicans in a general election, but washed away by a tidal wave of outside money in their own primaries. And here's something that should bother you regardless of politics.

AIPAC is not registered as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the 1938 law designed to expose exactly this kind of foreign-aligned political influence. In 1962, Robert F. Kennedy, father of brainworm man, his Justice Department pressured AIPAC's predecessor organization, the American Zionist Council, to register as a foreign agent after finding it had received funds from the Jewish Agency, an Israeli government body.

The AZC lawyered up, ran out the clock, and the matter quietly died without enforcement. There was no registration, no consequences, and the legal loophole held. See, AIPAC's legal defense is that it's funded by American citizens, not the Israeli government. 

AIPAC is an American organization. 

While that is technically true, leaked Israeli government documents from 2018 show Israeli officials actively sought legal advice on how to avoid FARA compliance, specifically because they feared registration would make American donors reluctant to fund their advocacy groups.

Nearly half, or 46%, of AIPAC donations to moderate Democratic candidates- Come from donors who had given to Republican caucuses or candidates since twenty twenty. Republican billionaires are funding a super PAC that calls itself a pro-democracy group, and using it to eliminate the most progressive members of the Democratic Party who are willing to speak out against the genocide occurring in Gaza.

These are Republican billionaires buying democratic elections, and nobody is allowed to say anything about it because it's all perfectly legal thanks to Citizens United. And here's the best part. The attack ads AIPAC ran against both Bowman and Bush didn't even mention Israel. They distorted their domestic voting records instead, criticizing them for their Biden infrastructure bill votes.

The money was about Israel. The ads were about something else entirely, and the whole thing was funded by people who don't even vote in those districts. When the lobby for a foreign country knows that it can't mention the name of that foreign country, then that foreign country probably isn't doing anything 

And Finally, Section F, Bubble, Backlash, and the Way Forward

good.

Allbirds rebrands and rises by a thousand percent. Myseum follows suit and rises by four hundred percent.

But what if I told you that this isn't some sort of novel concept? It's not a brand-new thing. All the way back in 2018, during the blockchain craze this time, the SEC was actually pretty clear about how the process should be treated. Speaking in Washington, DC, then Chairman Jay Clayton, in a speech, said, quote, "Before I move on to the next topic, I want to raise one more narrow distributed ledger or blockchain-related legal issue by means of a hypothetical.

I doubt anyone in this audience thinks it would be acceptable-" For a public company with no meaningful track record in pursuing the commercialization of distributed ledger or blockchain technology to, one, start to dabble in blockchain activities, two, change its name to something like Blockchains R Us, and three, immediately offer securities without providing adequate disclosure to Main Street investors about those changes and the risks involved.

End quote. Honestly, that's very reasonable. That makes complete sense. Seeing a trend, renaming your entire company with no realistic expectation of ever succeeding in that new space simply to then become an investment vehicle under that new banner and run away with tens of millions of dollars in investor capital isn't exactly a healthy free market technique.

And yet, at the risk of over-politicizing the video, the current United States governing agencies do not seem to care about white-collar crime anymore. Let's go back in time because to understand the present, you have to understand the past. How many people have ever heard of a company called Long Island Iced Tea?

Anyone? Maybe yes, maybe no. But even if you haven't heard of it, back in 2017, shortly after receiving a Nasdaq delisting notice because they were a failing company even then, this beverage manufacturer decided, "Let's become a crypto company." Except they had no actual intention of becoming a crypto company.

Just like Allbirds, the shoe company, they pledged some money, changed their name. Instead of Long Island Iced Tea, they were now Long Blockchain, and the share price rose by, 300%. You can see it right here with the massive volume spike. Of course, that's not all they wanted to do. Immediately after they spiked the share price with nothing but a name change, they did a 1.6 million share common stock sale, thereby raising a whole bunch of money, I think $8 million plus, from unsuspecting retail investors, which had basically nothing to do with the company itself because they eventually were delisted from the Nasdaq, and then they got hit by a subpoena from the SEC.

So just well done, guys. Total and complete failure on that one. Long story short, the beverage company that decided, "Let's pretend to be a blockchain crypto company," unceremoniously failed, as if that's even surprising. But to really drive the point home fully, they weren't even the only drink company back then to do this.

A Chinese firm called Sky People Fruit Juice suddenly renamed itself as a financial technology company, and purely because of rampant, wild, unhinged speculation, the stock price went up, 200% because what if it's about Bitcoin? The story is actually pretty simple when you start to look at things with a historical lens.

Right now, 2026, companies are simply rebranding with no credible business infrastructure or foundation supporting them and seeing ridiculous valuations because of that. Back in 2017, same exact thing. Drink companies at the time saying, "Oh my God, blockchain," and spiking two, three, 400% in their share price.

But even further back, as in the early 2000s during the dot-com crash, the same precise thing was happening, this time leaving a veritable graveyard of names because most of these companies could not justify their valuations. In the dot-com situation, there were hundreds of companies doing this all at the same time.

A postmortem of the crash found that simply adding dot-com to the name of a company created, on average, a 74% stock appreciation, like stock rise, for no other reason aside from internet big money go up, AKA just totally delusional hype. Remember, the AI bubble, okay, and it is a bubble that we're experiencing right now, as per the Wicksell spread of misallocated capital, is 17 times larger than the dot-com crash, which again had ripple effects across the entire world.

And if you then look at the parallel catalyst of how that bubble popped in the first place, it gets even better. The simple version is that the dot-com crash was heavily preceded by infrastructure over-investment. Companies were racing to build massive fiber optic networks, anticipating that overall traffic online would double every 100 or so days, culminating in a scenario where most of these companies couldn't justify their valuations despite owning a tremendous amount of infrastructure behind them because they simply weren't making money.

The result of that bubble obviously was catastrophe, and if you now draw a comparison between the 1990s dot-com craze and the mid-2020s AI craze, what is almost the exact same thing. For starters, the relative consumer interest in large language models is declining. At an enterprise level, as in big businesses, it's declining as well because the quality and speed of work assisted by language models doesn't necessarily justify the cost.

The pilot programs are mostly failing is what I'm saying. But at the same time, initially reported by Bloomberg, half of all US-planned data centers are either delayed or canceled outright because of power restrictions, component shortages, and financial drawbacks, which is eerily similar in terms of over-hyped infrastructure when compared to the dot-com bust.

It's not precisely identical necessarily. There are some differences. A lot of these AI companies who are engaging in what's called circular finance as they invest in each other around and around like a pinwheel, or maybe a better analogy would be a snake eating its own tail. A lot of these companies do have some sort of revenue somewhere, but the scraps that they earn pale in comparison to their spending because the goal isn't to make a sustainable business.

The goal is to get the valuation astronomically high, execute a public offering in some cases, and then everybody on the inside gets rich. It doesn't really matter what happens to the bubble afterward, as long as you cash out before it pops at the expense of regular people. So basically, everybody on the inside gets rich, and everybody on the outside loses everything.

Look at this, okay? Just look at this. The former CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati, leaves, starts her own company. Okay, cool. Good for her. And that company receives a ten billion dollar initial valuation immediately after two billion dollars in seed funding led, overall catalyzed by major technology firms.

And this happened while the company had no product. Okay? But not only that, the company wouldn't even disclose what its own purpose was. Think about this. Investors were breaking records, throwing never-before-seen amounts of money at a company that was actively refusing to tell them what the fuck it even was simply because of AI hype.

That is insane and delusional. Ultimately, it's the same sort of accounting tricks, the same valuation schemes, the same hype-driven irrationality, and the execution of a well-known, well-established pattern because economic hype cycles, for some unexplainable reason, seem to exist outside the world of collective logic.

Back when I talked about how crypto was a massive unsustainable bubble, I literally got hate mail for saying that. Flash forward to now, and practically every single crypto project has categorically failed. The capital wipe out is best measured in the trillions, and yet even with a more precise historical example, that being Long Island Iced Tea, which rebranded, sold more stock, and then got delisted and subpoenaed.

People are lining up behind a shoe company, spiking the valuation by a thousand percent, and throwing their money on a burn heap because the words artificial intelligence were involved. Earlier, I said that if I failed to convince you that AI is a Titanic-level iceberg, you should dislike the video, but let me clarify that.

It shouldn't matter whether or not you think that AI might, in some future version of reality, become a societally shaping construct, right? Back in the nineteen nineties, people said the internet would be just like that, and it is like that. Okay? It is that monumental. But just because the vision behind the bubble can be accurate twenty or thirty years later, doesn't make the bubble itself any less real or damaging You could be the biggest fan of large language model development on planet Earth and still accurately acknowledge that the amount of wasted capital, the number of companies driving up their valuations in what I would say is a fraudulent manner, on top of the debt spiral that all of it's creating, is an iceberg.

And if you hit the iceberg wrong, you sink the ship. My goal here is not to make a universal argument about whether or not any one piece of technology is good or evil, even though I do think the danger and negative downside right now far outweighs the benefits when it comes specifically to AI development.

But regardless, my goal isn't to argue in absolutes. My goal is to showcase that the AI craze, with big air quotes there, is now the largest financial bubble in human history, with warning signs that perfectly echo prior economic meltdowns, multiple of them. And when the music stops, it will stop eventually, regular people get screwed.

Executives cash out, founders walk away with golden parachutes, and billionaires get, government bailouts. But little Timmy, with his life savings in a cookie jar trying to make some extra money by trusting the experts and putting that money in the data center market, he gets screwed. Just because a company puts AI in their name doesn't make it a good investment.

Currently, around 30 to 40% of Harvard graduates end up in what a good friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of talent, so that's consultancy, corporate law, and finance. It's this gaping black hole that sucks up so many bright young people. It's no surprise that talented young people want to have high-paying jobs.

But it's also a bit problematic because researchers have found that how much work pays often correlates with how immoral that type of work is perceived to be. So if our most talented young people follow the money, then they will often end up in what society believes are the most immoral industries.

There's this quote from a guy who worked at Facebook more than a decade ago now, and he said it well. He said, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Now, what do we actually want? We obviously want the combination of ambition on the one hand, and idealism on the other hand, and that's what I describe as moral ambition.

So if we want to live morally fulfilling lives that actually matter, then we should spend our lives in this top right quadrant. But why are so few of us doing that? Rutger argues that this is because we buy into six myths about doing good.

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. 

This is Gordon Gekko from the 1987 movie Wall Street. In this scene, Gordon expresses a belief that runs deep in our economic system today, 

that selfishness, even greed, can still be moral.

This idea builds on a perverted version of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the idea that if everyone just chases their own self-interest, the market will magically transform this greed into benefits for everyone. 

And with that logic, obviously, we don't even need to think morally because greed is enough.

Profits will make the world a better place. 

Today, we know what even Adam Smith realized, which is that greed and profits alone won't create a better world. But even if you reject the greed is good story and genuinely want to do good, Rutger argues that there are six powerful myths that still hold people back.

And Rutger calls these the six myths 

of the noble loser 

So the first myth we gotta talk about is the awareness myth. Awareness is vastly overrated. The fact that people watch this YouTube video, it's nice, but it's just a very small first step. People are aware that we treat animals horrendously.

People are aware that there are massive disparities, how we distribute wealth globally, and still we choose to ignore most of it. The challenge really is to bridge that gap from awareness to action. Yeah, the second myth is the intention myth. Intentions are also quite overrated. Yeah, there are just many examples of well-intentioned people not achieving much or even doing harm.

Take a simple example like fair trade. You pay a little bit extra for a product, and then that ends up with the poor farmer who really needs that money. Look, economists have studied fair trade a lot, and most studies are really negative. If you really care about the poor, then there are much more effective interventions.

So the third myth is the myth of the right reasons. People forget that in history, very often the right things happen for the wrong reasons. So I'll give you an example. The fight against the slave trade in Britain in the 18th century. This was the greatest movement that the world has ever seen in my view, and it was super effective because it used a technique called moral reframe.

The abolitionists had first tried to convince the politicians in Parliament that slavery should be banned simply because it was morally wrong, but that argument didn't resonate with the politicians. 

But then the abolitionists discovered that around 20% of white sailors were dying on these slave ships, and then they had this epiphany, this is gonna be such a powerful argument in Westminster.

Because when these politicians hear that our boys are dying on these ships, then we'll... they will surely turn against the slave trade. And indeed, that's what happened. Very often in history, the right things happen for the wrong reasons. So the fourth illusion is the illusion of purity, the idea that you can only work together with people who agree with you on all things.

I personally believe that this illusion of purity is fueled by our obsession with left versus right thinking. As I explained in a video last year, the left/right spectrum fools us into thinking that we have to have opinions about all issues that we face today based on where those issues are currently positioned on the left/right spectrum.

That type of thinking fuels tribalism, and it prevents us from actually solving problems. 

Every great movement throughout history the abolitionists, the suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote, they were coalitions of people who very often didn't agree with one another on really substantial issues.

The fifth illusion is the illusion of, synergy. This is a concept that was coined by the economist Albert O. Hirschman. He noticed that very often progressives like to think that all good things come together. We need to solve climate change, but at the same time we also need to re- reform our whole democracy.

We need to implement a universal basic income, a job guarantee, provide equal rights for everyone. We gotta do all of that together, and this is, by the way, the only way it will work because all these different ideas and proposals, they all build upon one another. There are some cases where indeed different proposals can empower one another, but I think very often it's an illusion as well.

Let me give you one example from the abolitionist movement again. British abolitionists had to answer the question what they would fight. Would they really take on slavery, the whole institution as such? Or would they only focus on fighting the slave trade, right? The transport of enslaved Africans to the colonies.

Today you may think, obviously they had to take down the whole system, right? These entrepreneurs, because that's what they were, they came together and they made the very pragmatic decision to initially only focus on the slave trade. So they founded the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

They said, "If you stop the flow of enslaved people to the colonies, then that will force these slave holders to start treating their enslaved people better." And they believed that once you abolish the slave trade, then that will create the fertile political ground that you can build upon to then finally also start attacking the slavery, and this is exactly what happened.

After a 25-year-long campaign in 1807, they did get that law through parliament. The slave trade was abolished, and then another 25 years later they managed to abolish slavery across the British Empire. The perseverance of these people just deeply inspires me, and they achieved their goal by being radical in their ideals but being super pragmatic in their methods, and that's what it really takes.

So the final myth that we gotta talk about is the myth of inevitability. There's this famous saying from Martin Luther King that, "The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice." And MLK said a lot of very wise things, but this was not one of them. There is absolutely no inevitability. History has no destination whatsoever, and if there is justice in this world, then it has to come from us.

That's why I talk about moral ambition. It's about the combination of the idealism of an activist and the ambition of an entrepreneur, and then maybe also the rigor of a scientist and the humility of a monk, right? And when all those things come together, Then, yeah.

Some people watching this may think, "Look, I am just not one of those people. I am not one of those historical heroes. I'm happy to do the basics of being a good citizens, but moral ambition, that's a bit too much." And then I would like to emphasize the great heroes of history, they were people just like us, and it's not because they were good persons that they did good things.

No, it's the other way around. This is something that history has shown many times. For example, during the Second World War, as Nazi Germany occupied more and more of Europe, when most people did nothing, a small minority risked everything to resist. Now, after the Second World War, there've been some really big studies in which researchers interviewed hundreds of resistance heroes who had the courage to hide persecuted Jews in their cellars, for example, really risked their own lives to help those people.

In these studies, the researchers searched for patterns among the resisters, patterns that can tell us who are likely to act morally. Were they mostly young men, mostly poor? What type of person is likely to be morally brave? It really turned out to be a cross-section of the population, people who are rich and poor and young and old and introverts and extroverts.

But then after a while, they discovered that there was one factor that predicted very well whether people would join the resistance, yes or no, and it was the mere matter of being asked. So in 96% of all cases, when w- people were asked to do the right thing, they said yes. So moral ambition is not something you're born with.

It's not necessarily something you're, getting from your parents. No, it's more like a meme. It's almost like a social virus that can spread. This also explains, by the way, why resistance, it wasn't evenly distributed over the country. No, it was a local phenomenon, right? Very often spread by these super spreaders who asked a lot of people like, "Can you help?

Can you help?" For me, this is such a simple but such an important insight, is that you can just get started and then one thing will lead to another. Aristotle made this remark as well, is you do not become a builder because you were born that way. No, you become a builder by building. You become a good person by doing good.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Team Human

Trevor Noah

struthless

PissedMagistus

Robert Reich and Inequality Media Civic Action

This Is Hell!

Pitchfork Economics 

Michael Burns

Marcus Werner

The Market Exit

Harper O'Connor

Benaminute

Upper Echelon

and The Market Exit and Rutger Bregman

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.