Air Date: 7-10-2026

Today we look at what it means to live in an economy that has quietly split in two with a soaring stock market driven by AI on one side, a collapsing job market on the other, and the subtle shift in the right to own things, from your music and movies to your car's software, which all underlie the slide toward technofeudalism.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast. Today, we look at what it means to live in an economy that is quietly split in two, with a soaring stock market driven by AI on one side, a collapsing job market on the other, and the subtle shift in the right to own things, from your music and movies to your car's software, which all underlie the slide toward techno-feudalism.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today include The Recount, Max Fisher, Ben Jordan, More Perfect Union, and Second Thought. Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections: section A, the rising left, section B, everyday extraction, section C, the rigged machine, and section D, the ruling class worldview.

And now, on to the show

life in American cities is absurdly unaffordable, and people are getting more willing to try something new. Look, part of the reason this is happening in cities right now is simple, and that is that cities are by far the most liberal parts of the country.

DC, for example, has given Democratic nominees for president 90% of the vote for decades, and that's just a feature of history as well. Cities are historically where artists and activists and academics all move to congregate. It's a perfect melting pot for things like socialism. But there's something more happening here than just lefties live in cities.

We've talked on this show before about how the affordability crisis is the fulcrum of this decade of American politics, and it is true that it's affecting everyone in the country. Healthcare, prescription drugs, groceries, childcare, college, whatever. It's expensive whether you live in a suburb, a small town, a big city, the boonies, whatever.

But it is just plainly true that cities are a particularly unaffordable place to live right now. There's a lot of reasons for that. Some are local, some are national, some are international. Cities are unaffordable across the entire industrialized world right now. But however you diagnose it, it's just a fact.

Middle-class living in American cities has been on life support for decades, and it's now in danger of disappearing completely. In 1970, about half of the neighborhoods inside the 100 largest cities in the US were middle income. By 2000, it was less than a quarter, and that was a quarter century ago. Some estimates now place it around 10%.

More and more cities are populated by rich people and poor people, and increasingly, they're now becoming the playground of a wealthy elite class, where rich people raise rich kids, and then rich kids grow up and raise more rich kids. This is reflected in racial data. After decades of the white population declining in major cities, it's now noticeably increasing, which is coming from one very narrow slice of the white population.

And so with that as the trajectory, it makes sense that more people, especially the remaining middle and working class people, are becoming more open to something completely different. Something that, even if they might have some reservations about it, treats their core affordability problem with actual urgency.

Say whatever you want about Democratic socialists, think whatever you want about them, but wherever you sit on the political spectrum, I think we would all agree that they are more passionate about, more aggressive about economic disparities and injustice than establishment Democrats. Just like we would all agree that Trump is more passionate about, more aggressive about immigration than establishment Republicans.

But here's the thing, a lot of this isn't actually just the working class. Increasingly, even upper middle class incomes no longer provide an easy life in many US cities, and that's crucial here. More and more, you have a lot of college-educated, white-collar office workers, people who make six figures, watching city life slip away even from them.

And the combination of their educational and cultural background, plus that economic situation, is producing a lot of people sympathetic to Democratic socialism. Essentially, as long as the floor for livable life in cities keeps rising, there are going to be more and more potential customers for Democratic socialism.

By the way, if you like what we're doing here, make sure to hit subscribe to the channel and my newsletter down below. It's the best way to support us. Finally, and maybe most importantly, is the drop in concerns about crime. The farther we get away from it, the more clearly we can see a lot of what COVID did to us, and one thing that's become really obvious is that the combination of the lockdowns and the crime and disorder of this time fundamentally broke something in the electorate.

The polling on this is pretty astonishing when you look at it. According to Gallup, the immediate post-COVID years found Americans becoming more concerned about crime than any time since the 1980s. More concerned than the 1990s and 2000s, when violent crime was objectively way higher. Now, here's the thing, violent crime did tick up a little bit.

That was real. But also, Americans have for years and years believed that crime was going up when it was really objectively, provably going down. So in some ways, polling around what Americans think of crime is sometimes about something else, something parallel to crime or a little bit deeper.

And to me, the single biggest thing to understand is that after COVID, what we were mostly talking about was actually public disorder. Public disorder can involve crime, don't get me wrong, but not always. Sometimes it's just things- Being disorderly, boarded up window shops, people passed out drunk or on drugs in public, train stations full of homeless people having mental health episodes in public, people smoking cigarettes inside of buses or subway cars, people yelling at clerks, and that absolutely went up during and after COVID.

It's clear by now that 2020 was a perfect storm event for a lot of cities. Public resources pulled back, businesses and foot traffic disappeared from downtowns, people with mental health or substance abuse issues got cut off from resources and routines. And so when people returned to normal life in 2021 and 2022, even though crime was still way, way below what it was in the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, there was a lot to figure out, and a lot of awareness that there was a lot to figure out, and polling reflected that.

Voters, including Democrats, became much more concerned about crime during that time, and that was terrible for Democratic socialist candidates, who are just objectively, typically much softer on crime, especially after so many of them endorsed the Defund the Police movement in 2020, which was very unpopular with voters.

So for a while, more establishment, more moderate Democrats had a great cudgel against Democratic socialists. I'll be better on crime and public disorder. And we saw a lot of those kinds of Democrats run that very playbook very successfully during this micro-period. People like Byron Brown in Buffalo, Eric Adams in New York, Cherelle Parker in Philadelphia, and Daniel Lurie in San Francisco.

But now, crime has dropped, and polls show that concerns about crime have dropped even more. The percentage of Americans saying there's more crime in their immediate area has gone from the highest number since Gallup started asking the question to the second-lowest number they've ever found. And that actually makes a lot of sense given the facts.

According to FBI statistics, violent crime is now way down below pre-COVID levels, and the murder rate, which is what really spiked during COVID, is now at a 100-year low. And maybe just as importantly, a lot of cities have figured out much of their post-COVID disorder issues, and that's probably having a particular effect among non-white Democrats, who for years were more concerned about crime than white Democrats.

Which does a lot to help explain why Democratic socialist candidates are now finally seeing some inroads among non-white voters. In 2025, Mamdani had a breakthrough with Black, Latino, and Asian voters. In DC, Lewis George won big among white and college-educated voters, but also among Black voters. And in June, three candidates aligned with the DSA won majority-minority congressional primaries in New York.

And so again, as is always the case with COVID stuff, we need a little bit of distance to fully understand and contextualize- Everything it did to us, economically, psychologically, socially. But more and more, it's getting easy to construct this story of the Democratic Party's past 10 years. Their voters have been getting more liberal and more comfortable with socialism for years.

Then Bernie Sanders came along and almost single-handedly shifted the Overton window within the party, inspiring even more leftward movement. But then the COVID era disorder put that on pause, and now with crime having faded as an issue, Democrats are just returning to the trajectory they were on pre-COVID, with a boost from Trump's return and the affordability crisis.

And looking at it like that makes the wave of socialist victories make a lot more sense, and makes it look like the beginning of something bigger. Because what we're seeing now could very well just be the opening act of a much bigger resurgence in urban socialism. The last time we saw socialism with this level of political power was over a century ago.

Historians generally regard American socialism to have peaked in the 1910s, amid the inequality, upheaval, and labor organizing of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. And there were a lot of reasons for its decline after, but ultimately, a main one was that the Democratic Party absorbed a lot of the energy that was driving that socialist surge.

For example, leftists and progressive parties merged with the local Democratic Party in a lot of states. But most importantly, Democrats FDR embraced and co-opted some socialist ideals. FDR was not a socialist. The New Deal was not socialist. But it did incorporate and implement a lot of ideas that were previously on the socialist fringe.

So even as socialist office holders declined, the broader movement won a lot of the policy arguments of that era. Now, a century later, we're in a new era of inequality, a new era of upheaval. Just like then, we're seeing momentum in the labor movement, with union membership finally regaining at least a little bit of its lost ground.

And we're seeing a surge in socialist power, the likes of which we have not seen since then. And if the past is prologue, that might have longer effects than we know right now.

There's a certain intuitive, if ruthless, logic to this, that if you remove enough foreign-born workers from the labor pool, like this, say this is a foreign-born worker, then native-born workers, this guy, can take those jobs for themselves. That's the idea. But are they right about this? Is that actually how this works?

And one way to find out is by looking at what happened to the job market in prior rounds of mass deportations.

Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we're also a nation of laws.

This is President Obama in 2011 announcing what would become a huge deportation campaign.

Deportations of criminals are up 80%.

Remember, this was during the global financial crisis. Job scarcity was a huge issue. So did deportations help? Did more native-born Americans get jobs because of deportations? some economists looked into exactly that question. They analyzed the nearly half a million deportations in the country, which had been rolled out in stages county by county, and they tried to identify patterns in what happened after these deportations took place.

And what they found is that the employment rate among citizens, among native-born Americans, actually dropped. The reason for this is something called complementarity, which means that jobs mostly done by immigrants complement those mostly done by citizens. Here, we'll use the board to show this. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna mark off some of these jobs that are just, manual labor jobs that are done predominantly by immigrants, like construction.

okay, bear with me one second.

Okay, so this over here, this is immigrant labor. This is, these are jobs that are predominantly done by immigrants, things like manual labor or construction is a really big one. And what happens is that when you take these workers away, let's say because you conduct mass deportations that remove many of them from the country, what you think is gonna happen is citizens are gonna take those jobs, but actually they don't.

Citizens do not take those jobs. It's because these jobs tend to be strenuous, long hours, dangerous. They give you back and joint problems. Look, I don't blame people for not wanting them. But what it means is that, number one, you do not have more jobs going to citizens, and number two, construction firms, companies that predominantly employ immigrants, face big labor shortages, which means that those companies have to cut back.

And what that leads to is the loss of complementary jobs. Job over here held primarily by citizens, like foremen, architects, accountants, jobs that are held by native-born workers who might have a college degree, might have a high school degree, because the firms that employ them no longer exist because they've lost those construction workers.

Those economists that I mentioned earlier found that in all, mass deportations in any particular area, regardless of where it was, reduced employment among citizens by about three-quarters of one percent wherever those deportations took place. That's more than a million jobs, actually, that got lost just because of the native-born workers whose employers could no longer employ them because they lost that immigrant labor.

To put this another way, the economists found that for every one hundred undocumented immigrants kicked out of the labor market, about twelve citizens lost their jobs, too. And economists say that the impact of Trump's deportations could be even more severe by collapsing whole industries like childcare and construction, potentially eliminating the jobs of two and a half million native-born workers, including over eight hundred thousand just in construction.

You work in a field related to construction, anywhere from an architect to a site manager, you could be in big trouble. So this is all to say that Trump's big solution for the jobs crisis, deportations, is actually not only making it worse, but one of the biggest drivers of joblessness that we have in the country.

Same thing goes for tariffs. Remember, tariffs are supposed to turn America into a nation of

Millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones.

But what it did instead was cause American businesses to cut back or close. This is what I mean by Trump's dilemma on jobs.

Take a look here, Trump's net approval rating on jobs, they go from plus seven, way, way down off the screen to minus 30 points.

He knows his poll numbers are dropping hard, largely over the economy. And look, maybe he really believes what he said in December, that the economy is actually good, and it's good because of tariffs and deportations.

But the truth is that the job market is down in large part because of those two things, which means that Trump, whether he knows it or not, is facing a choice between upholding what are two of his highest priorities for his entire presidency, deportations and tariffs, or giving up on them in order to maybe salvage the job market, and therefore his odds of holding onto Congress in the midterm elections later this year.

This is the dilemma that could very well decide how the entire second half of his term goes. So far, Trump is holding the course, and as his poll numbers get worse as a result, I don't know. I expect that this question of which course they wanna take will get raised within the White House. This is actually a good moment to take a step back and ask how all of this can represent, like we said at the start of the video, an economy that is both obviously, in a lot of ways, quite bad, but in others, like the stock market, seemingly, weirdly, pretty good.

Let's actually take a look at that stock market. This is the S&P 500, which is roughly synonymous with the stock market. It's crushing it, right? Okay, but look at it this way. That top line is just the top seven tech stocks, which are going gangbusters, versus that second line on the bottom, the rest of the stock market, which is looking pretty flat.

This is the first hint of the larger thing that's going on here. There is all of this economic activity happening right now, and there's a lot of people getting rich off it. And not just, tech billionaires, but anybody with a 401or who put a little money in the market might actually be building quite a nest egg right now off of this booming market.

But all of that economic activity is super concentrated in one little sliver of the economy: AI. And the AI economy is weird because it's a boom that doesn't create any boom towns Like the auto industry built entire cities. All of these workers and other businesses that sprang up around the car factory.

Before that, there were logging towns and mining towns. And look, I'm not glorifying the past. Like today, San Jose or Seattle exists because of prior rounds of tech companies. But when it comes to AI, you don't get a Detroit, you don't get a San Jose. What you get are this. For something that is so huge in financial terms, like bigger than every other industry I have mentioned so far, there are very few jobs and very little effect, therefore, on the wider economy.

And I'm not saying this to beat up on AI. This thing that's happening is emblematic of the bigger thing going on with the economy, this idea of being two economies right now, a little economy that is doing crazy well, and then another much larger, much weaker economy hiding behind it, but with those two not really touching each other.

And this two-track economy thing, it's actually everywhere right now. Like companies are expressing optimism about the economy, but consumers are expressing really severe pessimism. And if you break that number down, with that top line showing confidence among people making more than $100,000 a year, that the next line for people making less than that used to run about parallel, which makes sense.

Both exist in the same economy, so they both respond about the same way in terms of optimism and pessimism, until a few months ago when those two lines split, which is really unusual. Actually, hold on a second. That shape looks familiar. Yeah, this. It looks like a letter K. We saw that shape before. It was here, remember?

Hiring rate on the bottom, stock market on the top. There it is again, letter K. And it turns out that's what this economy we're in is called, K-shaped. You may have heard this mentioned before. It's a pretty new concept, but it's everywhere right now. An economist named Peter Atwater first used it a few years ago to refer to pandemic lockdowns that caused the fortunes of one group of people to go up and another group of people to go down, like a K, right?

And this is different from just your classic inequality, the rich doing better than the poor. K-shaped economy is when there's a change in the economy that causes two things that were previously in sync to start to diverge, which we see all over the place now. So why is this happening now? Why today?

Atwater says that among other things, it's from all of this inflation, which is hurting some people and is actually helping others because inflation is making stuff that those people already own, like houses or investments in the stock market, more and more valuable. But it's not just inflation, it's also all of this stuff, like AI.

Remember we said basically the entire economy now is just investing in AI? This, right? there's another K. If you're unlucky enough to work or invest in an industry that is not AI, the dry up in economic activity maybe already feels to you like a recession. Mass government layoffs. Remember, that's 250,000 people who lost their jobs, the savings from which went to pay for tax cuts that just benefited the richest 5%.

Another K. And all of this K-shapedness is showing up in other ways, too. That AP story from earlier talked about how consumer brands like Coca-Cola are increasingly treating us as operating in just two separate economies: fancier and fancier stuff for the increasingly well-off, like rich people water and rich people milk, while the rest of us get poverty marketing and low-price mini cans

Whether it's a company or an absurdly wealthy individual, when a single actor's purchasing power is comparable to entire communities, it is more valuable to them to remove billions of dollars from here than it is to add billions of dollars to here.

All of a sudden, some of the confusing and chaotic things that are happening in the world start to make sense. Capitalism

doesn't work without growth. That is in its core definition, whether it's the Industrial Revolution or agrarianism or a crack dealer. Here's a question that I've been screaming for years and have not once seen it asked on any debates or news channels: why the would so many capitalists support closed borders and contribute to political campaigns that lower the population?

Even if they were evil Mr. Burns-style capitalists, wouldn't they want underpaid Latin Americans mining steel and aluminum and then going home and buying more groceries and prescription drugs without insurance and renting their private equity-owned apartments?

I really want to believe

that so many conservatives and fake libertarian billionaires are so weirdly racist that it somehow conflicts with and defeats every capitalist principle that defined their entire lives.

I want to believe that Trump and Elon and Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman are stupid, and the ruling class is somehow exclusively filled with morons who failed upwards over and over again. I wanna believe it because it awards me a lot of social credit to do I wanna believe it because it allows me to roll my eyes at the last two decades.

I wanna believe that in 20 years we'll point to this page in our history books as the stupid wild ride that we can't believe actually happened. But I don't actually believe that, because it makes way more sense that they're using xenophobia as a scapegoat to create a labor and supply shortage that forces the middle class to pay twice as

much for products using these materials.

I wanna believe that things will go back to normal at some point, but I don't think that they will.

Consider that four out of five of the wealthiest people in the world attended the presidential inauguration, and the fifth, Larry Ellison, was in the White House the following day. Or consider that the wealthiest person in history spent nearly $300 million on the presidential election, illegally paying between $47 and $100 to people who promised to register to vote in swing states.

He then selected right-wing registered voters at random and awarded them with $1 million checks. Then the wealthiest person in history, equipped with zero minutes of government managerial experience-

Gouge. Perhaps you've heard of it.

Perhaps ... was given his own government department that fired hundreds of thousands of government employees, terminated 15,000 grants, and gutted the Department of Human Services.

The administration then terminated the food stamp benefits of 4.3 million Americans and expanded work requirements to people over 55 years of age. And all of the money we saved from this is eclipsed by the amount of our tax dollars that were spent on ICE, border patrol, and a rapid expansion of mass government surveillance.

In fact, just from the first three months of our involvement in the Iran conflict, the economic impact on the American economy is actually higher than what the entire country pays for food assistance programs for the entire year So most people's retirement savings and 401Ks are in things like passive index funds and ETFs.

And passive index funds are traditionally safe, conservative investments for people who like dying on a mattress more than they like gambling. They're very mainstream and diversified, and they don't rely on an investment manager to make decisions. Instead, they rely on benchmarks. In fact, they're legally required to buy mainstream stocks listed on the Nasdaq-100 to diversify investments and reduce human error.

So the Nasdaq-100, or NDX, has historically had a strict index methodology to try and prevent fraud. So for example, if you had a startup and you wanted to bring it public and have it listed on the Nasdaq-100, you would have to go through a mandatory three-month seasoning period so your stock could shake out early speculators and get closer to its actual value on the market.

And if you're like most people and you don't know how the ins and outs of how an initial public offering or IPO works, let's just dig into that for one second for some context. So before a company launches an IPO on an index like the Nasdaq, they have an underwriter, which is usually a large investment bank like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley.

IPOs tend to be a bit volatile and chaotic, and so if that stock launches and things aren't going so well, an underwriter will buy shares at a higher value to create an artificial floor to keep it from crashing. Doing this is really risky, and propping up a company's entire public market cap for a period of three months or more could be extremely detrimental to the underwriter.

with the SpaceX IPO launching at an unheard-of $2 trillion valuation Last month, the Nasdaq 100 changed this three-month safety period to 15 days. This means, literally, that on July 6th, 2026, your passive index funds will be contractually required to start spending your savings on buying up massive blocks of SpaceX stock to track the index.

And then when your 401is forced to buy up this brand-new stock that may be artificially propped up by underwriters,

the siphoning of your life savings may commence. So how's that for a real-world example of leverage being used to rob you blind?

In 2020, the average monthly rent in the United States was $1,185.

Now it's $1,700. The consumer price index for groceries was $254 in 2020, even during the massive supply chain shortage at the time. Now it's $320. In 2020, Americans paid an average of 13 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. Now we're paying 20 cents. If your 401had $100,000 in a safe, stable, bond-oriented investment plan in 2020, you may have seen a whopping 25% gain.

But after inflation, your spending power right now is $96,830, and that's before taxes. The point is, if you're judging wealth by purchasing power, then you're likely working harder and earning more while getting poorer. Every single time you look at the news, when you come across yet another story that perplexes you or makes you wonder how the most powerful people in the world could consistently make such terrible decisions, it's worth asking yourself, will this directly or indirectly contribute to me working my entire life only to be left with just enough money to die on a mattress?

Because for those of my viewers who are lucky enough to have accumulated some form of wealth, even if it's your 401or a house that you're still paying off, once you see this pattern, you can't stop noticing that the majority of policies or change that's been made by the government in the last decade create a new pathway to siphon that wealth from you.

The

paranoid

conspiracy theory that I cannot get out of my head is that this isn't happening to steal your money. It's happening to steal your autonomy. When you combine all of this with the enormous amount of your tax dollars paying for unprecedented levels of government surveillance, how much more will it take to make you too vulnerable to fight back when you're mistreated?

How much more will it take to make you feel like your family's survival is at risk when you attend a protest? At what point will you feel weary to attend a city hall meeting to voice opposition to a proposed data center, or to make you scared to tell a joke about the president, or even comment on videos like this one or share it on your social media?

How far are we right now from the point in time when you will feel like you can't afford the risk or potential punishment for voting to replace your elected leaders? I once read a book that I expected to be really corny, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. It was written by Bronnie Ware, who was a hospice nurse who spent years talking to people at the end of their lives.

The most common regret from people who knew that their lives were about to end and they were about to leave this world, "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." To put it more bluntly, when you are at your wisest, equipped with the most memories and the most context, looking back at every single thing that you've experienced in your entire life, you will not give a about a single statistic in this video, and what you will regret is spending a single second of your life concerning yourself with it.

Circling back to where this started, the things I've mentioned in this video make me miss the capitalism I grew up with, but Contrary to that, they highlight the core problem that is seemingly always coupled with capitalism itself, and that's existing or being forced to exist in a constant state where you are valuing yourself by your earnings and belongings, and doing so in a way that is unfairly asymmetrical.

There's simply no denying that capitalism creates a world where a deadbeat dad with a trust fund is respected more than a single parent who works two low-wage jobs to provide for their family. If we're to think about it logistically, the asset that everybody should be hoarding and protecting the most is time.

And I don't mean this in the time is money sense. Maybe it's something that happens in your 40s, but if I order something and it requires four hours of my life to assemble it, I'm just sending it back. sure, this cabinet looks really nice, and it's worth the $250 that I paid for it, but I wanna play guitar or look at stuff under the microscope for four hours more than I want a nice-looking cabinet.

And then you just realize that it's all ironically coming back full circle. 30 years ago, if my grandfather ordered a new coffee table and a little thin, heavy box showed up with a 22-page assembly manual, he would absolutely lose his shit. That kind of thing would be absolutely unacceptable to consumers in the 1980s.

In fact, it would be seen as such an egregious scam that it would be on the evening news. This time theft isn't just some annoyance that old men bitch about in their yards. In economics and sociology, its clinical name is shadow work. It describes the uncompensated and unpaid labor that the ruling class have quietly outsourced to the consumer under the guise of convenience or innovation.

In a classic market, you've exchanged money so somebody else could spend their time processing a service for you. The post-capitalist mechanism works by charging you the full price and forcing you to act as an unpaid employee.

Also, at some point, we have to admit

that this is our own fault. We drove to IKEA and picked out the bedroom set, and then searched the warehouse for the parcel number, and then lifted the boxes and rented the truck to transport them, and then assembled the furniture in our own homes with our own tools.

Instead of laughing at the very proposal of being expected to do all these things on our own free time without compensation, we felt like it could save us a few bucks, and we were greedy about the wrong thing. We were greedy about the thing that wildly changes value without our control, the thing that is controlled by people who don't care about us, but who repeatedly, throughout history, time and time again, break our social contracts with them.

Perhaps the thing that Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't account for, nor could have predicted, when he drew a map to make capitalism work for everybody, was this inevitable phenomenon. Whether you're working three jobs at the same time just to keep the lights on or literally the wealthiest person in the history of civilization, it seems like capitalism's flaw is a very abstract one.

It robs us of the

ability to prioritize the appreciation of living.

Sandy Springs, Georgia, famously the first city in America to privatize nearly all government services. It was the darling of the libertarian press. Everything for profit, nothing public, and a consulting firm making a little cash off the taxpayers at every juncture. Those extra taxes for corporate profit started adding up, though.

Eventually, Sandy Springs un-privatized, saving taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

There are also nascent communities focused on Christian values that the network state media heralds.

Battle Ground, Washington, where a data center billionaire is buying up all the property to own the town, the mayor is on his payroll, and Highland Rim, a series of developments in Appalachia run by the investment firm New Founding.

And that's not even including the California Forever Project, a proposed tech city in Solano County funded by Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, and other billionaires. But what if this was never really about these little mini-governments? Here's Peter Thiel saying the quiet part out loud in 2010.

Technology is this incredible alternative to politics, and the task in this world where politics has become so broken and so dysfunctional is to find a way to escape from it.

Tech instead of politics. We already had DOGE and Palantir becoming the operating system of the United States, with a stated goal of being more powerful than the governments using it.

How can we help the government stop the bad guys while also putting systems in place to make sure nobody within the government was doing anything inappropriate? So you have to have p- you have to have systems that watch the watchers.

After leaving Palantir, Lonsdale, through his firm Eight VC, continued investments in what's called GovTech, tech for government clients.

That's surveillance tech, AI drones, AI weapons, even tech to replace 911 with AI. All aim to replace, privatize, and profit from tasks normally attributed to democratically accountable officials.

What's happening now, though, is that the companies are becoming more powerful than the governments they serve.

We suddenly have all these billionaire oligarchs spending so much money, they were able to actually capture the federal government with Trump. So there, it's this interesting moment now where we're getting a glimpse of what government by technology company would look like.

And Lonsdale is working to convince you that we need this by making you scared.

Lonsdale founded the Cicero Institute, a think tank that pushes anti-homeless messaging. Not anti-homelessness messaging, but messaging attacking the homeless themselves, and even legislation creating concentration camps where unhoused people would do forced labor.

You actually can go into states, you can, partner with governors, you can pass laws.

Cicero's in 15 states, we're getting dozens of laws passed, and then we're gonna teach people that and go to the national level.

Riling people up is definitely part of their game plan. That's what we saw in the San Francisco recalls. San Francisco had a spike in crime during the pandemic, but so did almost every big city in the United States.

Only in San Francisco, which has extremely low crime rates compared to most cities in red states, did they create this massive panic using social media and doom influencers to convince everybody that everything was worse than it'd ever been.

And as Lonsdale got into nonprofits and think tanks, Patri Friedman, remember him, Milton Friedman's grandson, started his own VC firm with backing from Peter Thiel called Pronomos Capital, existing entirely for investing in privatized governments.

In Honduras, Pronomos invested in the first government run entirely by a for-profit corporation, Prospera.

Prospera is this little enclave on the island of Roatan in Honduras that claims to be its own little charter city that was funded by American venture capitalists and has been touted as the flagship project of the network state movement.

But the real flagship project is something bigger, the entire United States government. It shows in policy. Remember the whole thing about taking over Greenland? That idea emerged and was celebrated by the people we've been talking about.

I think having a frontier is very healthy. I think part of America being great is that it's, is growing and creating more wealth for everyone.

If the people in Greenland wanna be part of us, if we can use those resources better and make sure Russia and China don't get advantages in the Arctic.

The Freedom City as a name didn't really gain momentum, but the idea is there, and the influence in the administration is clear. Joe Lonsdale helped staff up the Trump administration and just recently accompanied administration officials to the Philippines to christen a new regulatory zone.

Just last week we signed a historic deal with the Philippines, 4,000 acres right next to Subic Bay, where we're gonna build a first of its kind AI native industrial park.

That sounds a lot like a startup city. They've also embedded themselves with the rest of the right-wing movement.

I could not have envisioned that JD Vance, a Peter Thiel protege, would be the vice president of the United States. And so when Vance got onto the ticket, then it became real that this stuff could travel to the White House.

In September 2024, there was a conference at Fort Mason in San Francisco called Reboot 2024, and its website announced that we were now in a new reality, and that Silicon Valley was waking up and about to become this powerful force in politics. And the guest speaker was Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, who was the guy who had shepherded Project 2025.

So here you had tech VCs in San Francisco and Kevin Roberts in the same venue proclaiming the new reality, and the new reality is where we are today.

And that's showing in actual policy, like the administration's quietly announced plans for maritime prosperity zones, districts on American soil with fewer regulations for corporations to build ships and reinvigorate the industrial base.

Then there's the new American Industrial Alliance, a tech industry interest group pushing for unrestricted data center growth. They were listed as co-sponsors of the Blueprint for America, lobbying for prosperity zones on American soil, a plan to sell federal and public land to private companies to build low regulation, low tax havens for progress.

Their co-sponsor on the blueprint was the company behind Próspera in Honduras, whose lobbying disclosures show they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pushing for prosperity zones. But they also spent big on begging the American government for handouts of your money. They've lobbied on refunding the US International Development Financial Corporation, a government organization run by Epstein associate Ben Black, that uses tax dollars to invest in American companies abroad.

That's privatized foreign aid, and they might finally get their way.

Black went to Honduras and

promised investment in real estate and technology there, including an investment in La Ceiba, which is slated to be absorbed by Prospera.

But it's more than just government handouts. It's war crimes.

So we did a master plan and we've developed ways to redevelop Gaza.

Gaza, as President Trump's been saying, has amazing potential, and this is for the people of Gaza. We've developed it into zones.

It was insane to see it all come together in this way. But again, wherever you look these days with Trump or with these tech guys, there's always the idea of a new city that they're proposing.

And it's not clear why we need these new cities. Gaza should be rebuilt for the Palestinians, but these guys see it as an opportunity to take the land. And so that shows you the degree to which this thinking is starting to imbue everything that they do.

Look at how the people in this fringe movement reacted to other invasions.

In 2019, Mark Lutter, leader of a Peter Thiel-funded new city think tank, said that overthrowing the Venezuelan government would be an opportunity for these projects. And when the invasion did happen, Lutter suggested America establish a Florida or Texas-style government there. He cites America paying for a wholesale development plan after regime change, which is exactly what we're doing in Iran today, to the tune of $300 billion.

Palmer Luckey, Lonsdale and Thiel associate and founder of AI defense contractor Anduril, pictured here in cosplay, suggested a privatized city on Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which President Trump also threatened with invasion.

Again, nobody wants this. They know that. That's why they hate populism. That's why they

hate democratic representation, despite all of this being couched in freedom.

What they're asking for is to exit entirely from any government structure. But that's just not how it works, especially when most of these guys are government contractors and are still wanting to have the benefits of our society without having the responsibilities of our society.

These are people who don't like being told no.

They're angry at the pushback against data centers, that we don't want AI to take over everything, that no one supports annihilating a civilization to replace it with one they can profit from.

People need to understand that the billionaires have become radicalized against democracy, and they're in the process of using everything they have to try to destroy it, and that's the battle of our moment.

That's the battle of our time.

It's not too late to push back. Public response to data centers works. Many of the governance-as-a-service startups are starting their work in towns and states where you can still have a voice to stop them. The billionaire class wants to turn your home into their playground, completely change how everything is run to funnel more wealth to themselves, create chaos, and then when everything is all fucked up, walk away with their winnings to their own private enclaves, all under the guise of fixing a broken government, a government that they broke.

And yeah, sure, the government is broken, but it's not because of democracy or lack of corporate privatization. It's because of corporate power. We need more democracy and less corporate control.

What are we even talking about when we say the end of capitalism? Capitalism is a system that guarantees the existence of the rich in a world where the poor outnumber them, but need to work for them in order to live. That was about the shortest one-sentence definition I could come up with.

it's pretty vague, but it gets to the point. This is what capitalism's about, and that's how it works. For it to end, these things have to no longer be true Looking around, there's very little risk of that right now. So let's get a better, longer definition that gets progressively more complicated and accurate as we go so we can refine our analysis a little.

Capitalism is a political, social, financial, and economic order that began sometime in the 16th, maybe 17th century. What makes capitalism is the way that this order is organized around a specific set of rules and conventions, the most important of which are the right to private property and the imperative use of that right to make a profit.

For example, by hiring those who don't have private property to produce commodities and paying them less than the revenue that their work generates, or by trading debt as money with the confidence that states and central banks will protect the value of those assets in times of liquidity crises, periodically rolling over the moment that the market ceases to exist so that capitalists can continue to transact.

In other words, capitalism is a collection of strategies for the elite to stay the elite indefinitely. A status that is based on unequal access to and power over the resources necessary for human life and commerce. So this is a pretty theoretical definition. No society is ever completely 100% sticking to these rules at every single level of human interaction, whether it's the US, China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa.

Every one of these countries has a blend of capitalist and socialist, even feudal conventions overlapping with one another. But in this era of global capitalism, at the end of the day, the biggest decisions boil down to what generates profit for an elite class of businessmen. And for the last century, at least, we've been predicting the end of that.

To give you an idea, the term late-stage capitalism has been around for over 100 years. 100 years later, we're still waiting for that to mean we're getting close. Because every time it runs into a crisis, capitalism hasn't died, it's mostly just been tweaked. Take the biggest tweak we've ever seen. After capitalism went through its greatest liquidity crisis in 1929, the stock market crashed and the world went into a 10-year depression.

High unemployment, poverty, a nearly 50% cut in production, and price deflation meaning wages taking a huge hit. Thousands of banks went out of business. Millions of people were suddenly living through much scarier times, and all immediately following the peak of robber baron fortunes. If there was ever a moment where you could say that capitalism should have ended, it was then.

But it didn't. It was tweaked. Keynesian economics took over as the new governing model of capitalism. The primary imperative, keeping the elite as the elite, didn't go away, but now their status was conditional on new things like full employment. This is where the New Deal, the welfare state, the Fordist production model all came into being and brought capitalism back from the brink all the way up until the 1970s.

Capitalism was saved by disciplining the elite, not challenging their status. But that very thing ultimately became the source of a new crisis. 40 years of wage growth became just too much for capitalists who were making profits, just not faster than workers were getting better off. From the late '70s on then, capitalists revolted.

Capitalism was gonna need to get much leaner for workers, and this new era was kicked off with the Volcker Shock, a 20% hike in interest rates by the Fed that skyrocketed unemployment and simultaneously set up the US to elect Reagan, the UK to elect Thatcher, and Germany to elect Helmut Kohl. Even countries where socialists were in power, like France, suddenly found themselves forced to change their economic policy drastically.

Volcker reminded the world that as long as it's capitalism, the imperative of keeping the rich wealthy doesn't go away. And this time, it would survive on the condition of cheap consumer goods. Neoliberalism was the new name of the game. The welfare state was shuttered. The average job started to pay less.

Unions got crushed. Everyone started needing crazy debt to get by. And to offset everything else getting worse, the new social contract was held together by cheap TVs and shirts for $1. But this, predictably, led to another crisis. You can't have wages decline so much that people's basic necessities depend on taking on huge amounts of debt forever.

The housing market collapse created one financial crisis after another.

The signs were everywhere, but now it's official, we are in a recession.

Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse and some have failed.

2008 was another one of those moments where it really felt like this whole thing was cooked.

Neoliberalism had pushed global finance to chase extreme levels of debt at the same time as wages took a nosedive. Once banks realized this system didn't have the liquidity they thought it did, the crisis started bouncing from one part of the economy to another until the central bank stepped in. They brought the bank securities onto their own balance sheets, bailing out the banks and leaving the rest of us to absorb the costs.

Houses got foreclosed on, jobs disappeared that never came back, and entire generations have now come into the labor market completely unable to match the wealth of their parents and their parents before them. And now that we've been in this situation for a couple decades, what do the elite suggest as a solution?

A new tweak. On the global stage, the US is starting to pull out of the global exchange and production system and switching to a growth strategy that depends on inflation and price shocks. Wars are exploding all over the world with the chief objective of making oil costs skyrocket, increasing the sale of American weapons, and bringing up prices for everything else without any hope of them going down after the oil shocks pass.

That's on the policy side. Let's go back to Fink's letter for a second. In the face of all the problems he lists, Larry gives us his own solution. Just invest. He says it himself. In the last 30 years, wages aren't growing as fast as returns on the stock market. A dollar in the S&P 500 grew 15 times faster than that same dollar as a median wage.

So Larry's advice is, why not just hitch a ride on the one thing that's going up? you can probably think of why without me having to tell you. In a country where one in four people live paycheck to paycheck and millions are dealing with huge student loan debt, having money to put aside in savings, let alone financial investments, is just not something that's within reach for a lot of people.

Those who are most directly targeted by the violence of capitalism are the ones with the least flexibility to do things Larry's way, which I don't have to tell you either, he's only suggesting because it just so happens to be the solution that lines his pockets. The head of an investment company currently trying to get younger generations stoked about investing on TikTok obviously doesn't want that for altruistic reasons.

But beyond the practical reasons why this is BS, advice like this reads more like a confession to me. Did you know that 62% of Americans have money in the stock market? And honestly, that's not a bad thing. You should have some kind of retirement fund or- or something. But anyway, stats like these make it seem like a majority of us have something to gain from economic growth Except about 90% of all stocks are held by just the top 10% of investors.

Worse even, the top 1% own about half, meaning that when the stock market grows, when the economy is doing well, it's really only benefiting the top 10%, and it's specifically doing that at the expense of the 90% that are left. The little money we can get from our investments is a cover for the fact that money is coming out of our wages.

Between 2018 and 2022, after Trump's tax cuts, corporate profits exploded. And instead of putting that money into raising wages or doing R&D, billions went to stock buybacks and dividends. And when Time Magazine looked at some of these numbers, they found that the biggest offenders not only gave more money to their shareholders, they siphoned off more money from consumers by raising prices.

Pepsi laid off hundreds and raised prices by double-digit percentages eight quarters straight. Comcast rates went up, and they fired 3,000 people. UnitedHealthcare increased claim denials 800% and gave their investors $15 billion in buybacks. The whole just invest strategy isn't a solution. It isn't going to make capitalism work for more people.

It's a cover for capitalism to continue doing what it's built to do: exploit the poor, enrich the elite, and keep that cycle going forever. When Fink says capitalism is fracturing, what he really means is that he and his buddies are giving away the game, and he would really like it if capitalist countries would realize they're getting cocky.

He would much rather they get people to invest a little more and make a little bit of money so that the bigger problems, no jobs, no healthcare, no roads, don't seem as bad, even as he and his private equity friends keep making them worse, with the added bonus that he would manage some of these investments.

At the end of the day, you can't reform your way out of this. There is no capitalism without the enrichment of the elite at our expense, by its very definition. So either you negotiate for more crumbs on their terms, or we finally get smart and say, "No, I think we're done now," and we break the wheel that keeps this system crushing 99% of humanity.

We've just heard clips starting with The Recount mapping how shrinking middle-class neighborhoods, post-COVID disorder, and Bernie Sanders' Overton window shift set the stage for what may be the strongest urban socialist movement since the Progressive Era. Max Fisher walked through the economic research showing mass deportations reduce citizen employment by about three-quarters of 1%, costing over a million native-born jobs by collapsing industries like construction.

Ben Jordan warned that decades of shadow work, inflation, and rigged financial rules have quietly robbed ordinary Americans of purchasing power and, more fundamentally, of their time and autonomy. More Perfect Union traced Peter Thiel's network of billionaire-backed charter cities, gov-tech investments, and think tanks as steps toward replacing democratic governments with corporate-run alternatives.

And Second Thought charted capitalism's history of surviving its own crises, From the New Deal to the Volcker Shock to 2008, showing why the system never ended, only adapted to protect the wealthy.

And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper dive sections. But first, as you may have heard by now, the show is going through some financial troubles.

We've taken a big hit on ad dollars drying up since the beginning of the year, and I regret to report that things have not improved. We've had to cut expenses, which meant putting our new YouTube show project on indefinite hiatus and shifting our focus to growing the core show.

But I'm not stopping there. Right now I'm rethinking everything, which includes reimagining our entire social media strategy and working on building a paid marketing campaign to boost listenership. I've even been toying with the idea of launching a newsletter to attract newsletter readers who may never consider listening to a long-form podcast.

I know that for avid podcast listeners, newsletters can sound like a foreign or antiquated concept, but there are people out there who love them. The point is, rest assured that there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes here. So to our members supporting the show, you're the main thing getting us through right now, and we appreciate your patience while we work on cleaning up this mess.

If you haven't signed up yet but are thinking about it, just know that the emergency hasn't passed, and we really could use your help. So if you get value out of the show and think others would too, and want to get it delivered ad-free to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive,

sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes through our Patreon page or from right inside the Apple Podcast app

as step one of the rebuilding, I've relaunched the voice message segment that people would regularly say was their favorite part of the show. What's important to understand is that this is a classic social dilemma. I think people are discouraged from sending a message if they don't hear from other people first, which becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.

So think of leaving a message as casting a vote saying that you want others to do the same. Feel free to respond to my discussion questions or bring up anything that's on your mind. So here's today's question. If democratic socialism really is having its biggest moment in 100 years, as we hope it is, then the next question is about concrete demands.

What would you want elected democratic socialists to do? People are running for office promising to actually get things done for people again. So imagine you had real say over your town or your state starting tomorrow. Tell us some concrete things you'd change first to make life more affordable or secure for the people around you.

I consider universal healthcare as the free square that we can take as granted. If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show, you can record a voice message, re-recording until you're happy with it, by tapping the link in the show notes.

As for today's topic, the system of capitalism is amoral, not immoral. Same goes for individual corporations. They're not out to do evil. They're just indifferent to whether evil is done. What might be called evil is the human choice to enthusiastically perpetuate a system we understand to be amoral, knowing that our whole construct of morality was built up over the millennia because it's a successful human survival strategy.

We do better when we work together, and we work together better when morals are involved. Capitalism's defenders say it's the system best suited to fulfilling the needs of people. Its critics have long argued that the system is actually indifferent to whether it benefits people or fulfills their needs, which is why it so often doesn't, and AI may be the thing that finally makes that undeniable.

It would be ridiculous to say that humans haven't benefited from capitalism or to deny that billions of people have risen out of poverty while capitalism has been intrinsic to most of the economies of the world. But I'd argue those benefits were always incidental rather than fundamental to the system.

to illustrate on a smaller scale, people often confuse the interest of a corporation with the interests of its employees because they figure that if the company does well, the employees do well. But those benefits are incidental, too, because if the company can find a way to do even better while laying off its employees,

that's exactly what it will do. It's not untrue that the employees benefited before. It just doesn't prove that people benefiting was ever intrinsic to the company. It was always incidental. Same as an individual company, the system as a whole optimizes for capital, not for human need. And as long as those two things stay closely enough aligned, the system can plod along and people can feel justified defending it.

But if capital and human needs ever hit a fork where we end up genuinely out of alignment, it will become clear very quickly that the system will opt to make us expendable in exactly the same way it's already made every other resource on the planet, living and not, expendable. Not because of evil motives, but absolute indifference.

At the core, it's a debate about whether the economy exists to serve people or whether people are expected to serve the economy. So far, the system has functioned on one basic loop. Wages create income, income lets people consume, And their consumption becomes revenue for businesses, which then pays the wages for the labor that keeps the business running.

This feels so fundamental, you could imagine it as a law of physics, but it's just the system we built. it's held up because it basically works for most people most of the time, with several spectacular failures along the way. Those failures, like market crashes that cause destitution or market failures like not accounting for runaway climate change, are plenty of reason to criticize capitalism.

But so far, we haven't treated them as reason enough to transform the system. It's been allowed to adapt through each rupture and carry on. another major failure is one we don't usually see because it's the hole the government stepped in to fill. People get paid middle class wages only because about a century ago, the government stepped in on behalf of workers.

The market never chose to pay living wages. It was made to through minimum wage laws, labor laws, a system that helped boost union membership, and publicly funded schools that did double duty educating the populace and giving kids something to do besides going to the factory and work for near slave wages.

These reforms took the raw system of capitalism and bent it toward the needs of people. It was following that trajectory that John Maynard Keynes, writing back in 1930, famously predicted that as productivity increased, people would reap the rewards by keeping their standard of living while working only 15 hours a week within 100 years, which is to say right about now.

He was right about the trajectory of efficiency and productivity, but that prediction didn't account for the backsliding of labor rights and the many layered strategy to make sure rising profits would flow upward instead of dispersing down to the people doing the real work.

that's the tension between capital and human needs in a nutshell. We watched it play out over the last century in an uneasy alliance where power shifted from capital toward labor in the post-war era And then toward the end of the century, back from labor toward capital.

There was always tension, but never the threat of a full divorce, because at no point have the forces of capital ever been able to function without human labor. Now, if AI and AI-powered robots are finally able to sever that connection, the future of people who depend on work to survive looks quite bleak.

It won't have been a robot uprising that threatens them. It will be the system of capitalism finally able to optimize labor out of existence. But for now at least, humans are still in control of the system and which direction we let it run. If we take increasing automation as a given, the fork ahead leads to a couple of basic options.

One is automated autocracy, which basically reinvents feudalism. The other is automated communism, ensuring that the benefits of automation are enjoyed by all. Both assume automation keeps advancing, but only one is focused on making sure it doesn't wipe out large swaths of humanity in the process. Of course, this fork won't arrive as an identifiable moment in time.

It's more of a slope we're already on, gradually sliding toward autocracy, and it's every conscious person's job to help steer us in a more human-friendly direction. Because on the other side, the ultra-wealthy are already pushing for the future they want, and they're playing on their home turf. A friend of mine is an electric car fanatic and has been for decades.

He listens to every Tesla quarterly earnings call and has for years. Hat tip to him for pointing me to a piece of audio of Elon Musk from Tesla's Q3 2025 earnings call, which I think captures a lot about how he thinks about what he's trying to build.

the clip is open to interpretation, and you could take it a few different ways, but none of them are good. You might focus on his use of the phrase robot army and take that literally, reminiscent of Star Wars, though maybe he's just talking about it the way a 15-year-old would, since that seems to be about his well-documented level of maturity.

but even if you gave him the benefit of the doubt there, you can focus on his concern about who individually will have the most influence over that literal or metaphorical army of robots he wants to build

my, you know, fundamental concern with regard to h-how much voting control I have at Tesla is if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?

Um, that's my biggest concern. If I-- That's, that, that is the, the-- That is really the only thing I'm trying to address with, with this, uh, so-ca- what's called compensation, but it's not like I'm gonna go spend the money. It's just, you know, if we build this robot army, um, do I have at least, uh, a strong influence over that robot army?

Not, not control, but a strong influence. That's, that's what it comes down to in a nutshell. Um, like I don't feel comfortable building that robot army if I don't have at least a strong influence.

You can take that at face value and hear it as the straightforward reasoning of a comic book supervillain. but even if you wanna grant the most charitable framing that he sees himself as an incredibly trustworthy steward of a robot army who fears that someone else might not be as well-suited to the task as he is, you'd still be right to critique that thinking.

Because the structural problem of any one person having near total control or enormous influence over what they think of as a robot army is the core of the problem rather than the much smaller question of which individual it happens to be. And for the sake of this argument, it's equally valid to see it as a straightforward attempt to optimize for capital and individual power over the needs of humanity.

The robots are not the fundamental problem. if they were collectively owned and the benefits of their automation collectively enjoyed, they wouldn't be a threat to humanity, and neither would Elon Musk. The distance between what capitalism optimizes for and what humans fundamentally need has always been why the fight to wrest power and resources away from the ultra-wealthy for the benefit of the people is necessary.

This fight is not new, but it has been renewed by the intrinsic threat of privately owned AI. and I'd argue the pro-labor left and the pro-automation left aren't rival camps. They're just focused on different areas and different timelines. Automation isn't all or nothing. Nobody serious wants to hand off art or care or the work that makes us feel human to the machines.

The point was always to kill the drudgery, not the meaning, and to share the benefits. Going back to Keynes and his 15-hour workweek, the labor left has always been in favor of increasing efficiency as long as the benefits of that efficiency were widespread. but sharing the benefits of increased efficiency is not something capitalism optimizes for, which means it won't happen automatically.

It's a matter of politics, using the government to bend capitalism toward human needs. In the middle of the last century, that's the only thing that let wealth become even temporarily widespread. Now, we face the same challenge again, but with even higher stakes, because the disconnect between the needs of capitalism and the needs of people may be about to be separated irreparably.

The uncomfortable truth is that the last time average people were able to force concessions out of the capitalists by using the power of government, the leverage they used was the withholding of their labor, and that's the exact thing AI has been built to remove. So if the labor strike is being taken off the table in the near future, the ballot is what's left, which is exactly why the ultra-wealthy are already working to undermine the political system, too.

They understand perfectly that it's the only thing that can stand in their way, save for people tipping over into full-blown civil disobedience and revolt. if AI and automation do even a fraction of what people worry they will, then we need to understand this is no longer a fight between capital and labor, but between capital and humanity.

The dramatic rise in enthusiasm for democratic socialism isn't a mystery. That's the camp that planted itself squarely on the side of humanity, arguing that it was the moral stance to have our economic systems serve people rather than the other way around. Now, that debate is becoming existential.

The rest of the elite political class will no longer be able to hide behind the illusion of balance between what they long framed as two equally matched groups: business owners and working people. they argued their pro-business policies were fundamentally pro-people because a business doing well naturally meant people would, too.

Which is true until it isn't. Now, they'll be made to choose whether they support capitalism more than they support humanity itself, because the divide will have grown too large to ignore

And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today. First up, section A: The Rising Left, followed by section B: Everyday Extraction, section C: The Rigged Machine, and section D: The Ruling Class Worldview.

America will never be a communist country. Won't happen

And all these talks from the communists, they haven't got a chance, not even a chance.

We don't want communists in our country

The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn't want to work. Communism is a loser. It always was, and it is right now. It's a big loser.

Look, the godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions and a pr- and to really propose what's good. They don't want good. They don't love God, and they don't want God. They don't love religion, and they don't want religion, and they won't have it. To peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.

You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.

He then escalated with, "The citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly. We will send them away quickly. We will continue to build our country bigger and better and stronger than ever before.

America will never be a communist country." Just to make this clear, because somehow there is so much noise that everybody who talks about this specific bit, doesn't know the specifics of what's actually being said about all of this stuff, communism is not the same as socialism. I understand while Karl Marx planned for socialism originally to be the midpoint that leads into communism, these days, for m- a lot of people, they're two different economic models.

I'm sure a lot of you will probably argue with me about how different they really are and where they overlap, but that is another conversation. The point I'm trying to make here specifically is the communism dig that Trump is trying to use here, that angle, is trying to specifically smear three or four different groups' goals into one to smear them collectively.

They are lumping in progressives, liberals, leftists, as well as Democratic socialists and tankies. It's a lot. All of those groups may share a couple similar goals, but have meaningfully different ideologies in terms of implementation and theory, which is why it's so frustrating to see coordinated establishment groups like Promise to America attack the DSA "Huh, we believe in capitalism, not socialism."

My dude, your capitalism isn't even entirely capitalist either. You guys suck, Felix. But anyway, Trump continued on with a particularly harrowing line. "But if we terminate the filibuster, as we should do, and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years. We do that, we're not going to lose an election for 100 years.

The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody that doesn't want to work." All right. Very clearly, if you have followed Donald Trump at all throughout his career- This is like the tell of all tells about how this shit is going for him. For one, and I will give the DSA credit here, like they warned, this is the same kind of attack he used on moderates, right?

Same through line, "Oh, you're a communist or a socialist." He used it on Obama. He used it on Hillary. He used it on Kamala Harris. It is more aggressive in specific language, using the word communism as a very pointed jab, but that's only because he's losing to the less moderate candidates he's railing against.

And I don't necessarily mean just in votes, I mean in appeal. Here's the thing about Trump's political strategy, which you could see laid open in his speech, right? His goal is to define catch-all terms, with repetition. Again, he said communism how many times in those clips? He wants to call forth that word like it's Voldemort, because remember, we had to fight Russia, and Stalin, and all of that.

But the problem is, Trump is falling for the same trick he sprung on the Democratic playbook in 2024. If you look at most of the data that was available after the 2024 election, the two messaging strategies of Trump that poked through were, A, the economy is really bad. They are lying to you because they don't believe it, and B, Joe Biden is so fucking old.

And compare that to now. Trump is once again in front of a large amount of people, trying to smear his campaign message as the numbers look increasingly dire for him. The economy is doing so poorly, and they keep telling you, "No, it's fine, it's fine." And oh my God, he is so fucking old. Now, Trump called his speech the best Trump rally of them all.

Man, the Hatch Act really doesn't exist anymore, right? Like, why did we ever give a fuck about... no one has ever, Democratic, Republican, no one has cared for three decades. It's Half-Life 3, we're never gonna see it. The reactions online range from grief for the loss of America's 250th celebration, what makes this country unique and actually strong, right?

But also mocking the absurdism of this whole fucking spectacle that's gone on. But in general, Americans on there, and despite the massive amount of publicity they've been trying to get this anniversary, are feeling less enthused about the country right now. An AP poll back in April said only a third of Americans feel that the American dream still exists.

There are also reports and lawsuits that Freedom 250, the hand-selected panel Trump made to run this event, swindled donors with a bait and switch, thinking they had donated to a bipartisan commission. no, no, no, sir, this isn't America 250, it's Freedom 250. It's got a gold-plated Trump phone that you will never receive on it.

But anyway, in addition to Donald Trump's big speech and his entry into the 2026 Mount Rushmore draft, there was also the Great American State Fair. What a shit show. Now, look, it was supposed to be the centerpiece of the America 250 celebrations, and it was, but not specifically for the right reasons.

First off, temperatures for over the weekend were staggering, right? Averaging over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, causing a dozen attendees to develop heat sickness and shut down the daytime event early for safety concerns. Hugely embarrassing. In addition to that, none of the pavilions had AC installed, electrical outages caused food and ice cream to spoil, a stage light collapsed during a dress rehearsal.

The attendance was, like, not empty like a lot of people online would have you believe. And listen, I would've loved if nobody attended the Temu Patriot Tea Party Cosplay Convention, but there were a decent number of attendees who came to the Great American State Fair at the end of the day. Here's the thing, though, even with the Great State Fair and all of the PR and Trump trying to project his face onto Mount Rushmore like he's Richie Rich, right?

It wasn't the only speech making the waves on air for America 250.

The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes.

America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.

Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again, including two hundred and fifty years ago, tho- those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.

Malek Quiroz, beat US Rep, Diana DeGette. and yes, she's been in office for a very long time. What's interesting about this is that DeGette wasn't the most middle of the road candidate or, rep that we've had.

She just didn't do much. She hasn't done much for a long time. She's, for Medicare for All, but she also receives a lot of money from, healthcare industry. and I just think it's just so fascinating to see what's happening, and exciting to see what's happening all across the country, not just in New York City.

people being fed up with the status quo, people being fed up with voting over and over for these people and them doing nothing with it, just coasting by, coasting through. a lot of people, were giving, Kiros flak because she's not, again, not even, not the most centrist, candidate, but it doesn't matter anymore.

We want change, and we wanna get as many people as we can that loudly state their values and get some new blood in there. And I think it's all very, very exciting. And this is despite not having support from the Democratic establishment, despite that Matt Walsh's banging the drum of socialism is evil- and Mamdani's communist New York City is not a specter. In fact, it is inspiring people across the country. That's my takeaway from this.

Part of it is, it's strategic. You look at what districts you can, get somebody in there, and pull, have up a small part of the Democratic Party in Congress be, an actual, speaker to these sort of left-wing policies and values, and hopefully be able to participate in the rest of the party when Congress is in session, and have that part of it.

'Cause you don't have really a multi-party system beyond the two parties, and so you have to play with one of the two parties.

I am just trying to focus on positives right now at this moment in time. And I know we're all nervous about midterms, hopeful about midterms, but nervous To see how it shakes out, 'cause that will determine the next two years, and a lot of years thereafter potentially, how this goes.

But in general, seeing all of these people across the country running these races, very competitively is giving me a lot of hope for our future in general. Because for too long we've been looking around, twiddling our thumbs, "Who's next? Who's the next Bernie?" AOC, we've got AOC. Mamdani can't be president.

Yet. Can do other stuff.

Can do other stuff, but as it stands right now, he can't be president, and it's like, who... we need fresh people. We need young, energetic, passionate, idealistic people to be stepping up to the challenge, because it is a horrific challenge to be thrown through the wringer on a national stage like this, to, have The Twitter armies saying everything ugly possible, lying, just lying and letting, and getting away with it.

So you have to be very brave and strong and have the fortitude to survive this, and I'm really blown away and inspired by, people across the country stepping up to the plate. And it makes me feel good that maybe in 10 years from now we'll have a very different array of people to be supporting, nationally.

Yeah.

and the more, progressive people, Democratic socialists, uh, people on the left that win, it just is going to force the establishment Democrats to start to take it seriously. Seriously, yeah. It's not like they have to change everything they've always been, right? But there can be, like, a transition as people go from being more moderate...

we have seen moderate Republicans become absolutely, f- foaming at the mouth, racist- uh, maniacs.

Gleefully.

Yeah, gleefully. Gleefully

dragged across the... Yeah.

But what I'm saying is, that same thing can happen. The party can be pulled to the left. The party can push forward more progressive ideas, especially if the people who win are, like, young and charismatic and attractive and cool.

It might make some of those, the Andrew Schulzes of the world be like, "Oh, maybe this is the cool side instead of what I thought." Yeah,

now Democratic Party fucks now. Did you guys... Can you believe it?

Yeah.

I mean- That's an argument for him ... as, as silly as it is, that is, median voter stuff that works.

And also it, real normal people being able to talk is good. and not sounding like you're a stuffed shirt type of politician. I don't

need a candidate to be hot, but I do-

Some people

do ... appreciate- Some people do ... char- charisma.

Because they can sell a message to the population, can come across authentic, et cetera, but also perhaps can work with people and get stuff done by using that charisma in the parameters of their job.

Yeah. And just being able to keep, I find it frustrating 'cause, what you're talking about is yeah, you want to get some more passionate young people in the party to, pull left and-

Because

wrinkles are close ... like you're saying. We all know that. Exactly. But, while the Republican Party is doing that too, that makes it easy for dishonest people, some silly foolish types to equate them and say that it's the exact same thing.

And that is, I just, I, no real point. This is very frustrating to see, people take your- Yeah ... take your point and say, "Yeah, they're pulling them left like MAGA did. They're just like MAGA. It's a mirror image of MAGA." it's not. mechanically, Functionally, in if you look at it like this and they're pulling

them, but- A different way to And take all that same informa- that same argument would be to look at it as, look, it worked for MAGA.

It worked for MAGA to, lean into the... the party was dying. the Republican Party wasn't so g- hot, but they were fracturing, and then you've got these other factions that brought in more people, and they're listening to the populist message. the, what's our version of that? W- do we wanna win elections?

We've got a lot of people that are dis- satisfied with the status quo. I don't know if I'm articulating this properly or if people are gonna get mad at me, but basically I'm saying as a strategy, when your party is hollow and broken and a husk of itself, where's the energy and where's the momentum?

And for us, it's in leftist, in the progressive circles. It's in creating new ideas, new attention to Medicare for All, solving the issues that people actually care about. and you would be smart to take note that something is missing at the heart of the Democratic Party, and these people are doing outstanding work organizing on a grassroot level, inspiring people to get out, to get involved- We've got good ground

game.

Ground game's

there ... yeah, without corporate donors, that it's possible. And now imagine if the Democratic Party supported them.

Yeah. And I know it won't convince, the people on the right when New York City does not fall apart and is fine- ... and actually people get, cool public services and, those things.

But, there's a,

there- If they survive that 78 degree-

Yeah, but people who are, like- ...

declaration ...

vaguely right of center have become okay with some of the extreme stuff over there, even if they're not, vocalizing it, even if they're not, ranting on X racistly. they still vote for that party 'cause they're like, "These people kinda get me and have my best interests at heart."

And I think a leftward-thinking Democratic Party would do the same thing and bring people along.

Let's talk about the Democratic Party. I know from having followed your political career that it's the Democratic Party that has been the engine to try and destroy you politically. That was also true for Ralph Nader when I worked for Ralph. so let's talk about the, the kinds of things the Democratic Party has done and is doing to thwart your campaign, and then, let's talk about, the, the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party itself, in particular focusing on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Yes. So the... My main opponent, as you mentioned earlier, Chris, is Adam Smith. He's a 29-year incumbent in Congress, and he's a classic example, I would say just an absolutely classic example of, and i- illustration of the, one of the key features of our times, which is the chasm between the f- fury that working people feel against the Democratic and Republican parties with both parties having approval ratings in the toilet, and yet a very high incumbency rate in Congress.

How do you explain the two absolutely contradictory facts, right? if, if the vast majority of working people hate Congress, then how is it that these people are getting elected, and how is it that somebody like Adam Smith gets to be in Congress for 29 years, almost 30 years? he's been in Congress as long as, the Republican Susan Collins from Maine has been.

And so the only way to explain that is that there has been for decades, and it still isn't other than the exception of my campaign, there hasn't been any real left militant working class challenge to the Democratic and Republican parties. And that is what's so unique about our race, that we have An actual revolutionary socialist running against a genocidal Democrat, a revolutionary socialist not only with a powerful program of demands that are extremely popular among the American working class all the way from Seattle to Florida, but also a socialist with a track record of having gone up against the billionaire class.

And yes, the Democratic Party, and as you said, Chris, Seattle is not a Republican stranglehold. It's a very left-leaning city, and the party that controls the politics of this city, the party that represents the Chamber of Commerce and all the corporations that are headquartered here like Starbucks and Amazon and T-Mobile, that party is the Democratic Party.

So yes, the Democratic Party, was always at war against us, and it, it reminded people that this is class war. We are cl- capitalism is class war. We didn't choose it to be so. Working people didn't choose the system, but this is the system. And our only choices are we r- sit down and accept the class war from the billionaire class against us, which is the status quo under capitalism, or we stand up and go to class war back against the billionaire class and their political representatives.

And that is exactly what we did using my one elected office, And so even the Seattle Times, which hates my guts, they stand up for the, they stand for the billionaire class. They were forced to admit that my first election victory in 2013 was a referendum on $15 an hour. Because unlike, all these other election campaigns of the Democratic and Republican parties, I was not running on personality or personal narratives.

I was running on actual concrete demands, and it was not about, elect me and make my career. I am not a careerist. I'm the antithesis of a careerist. Instead, our campaign said, "We're fighting for $15 an hour to tax the rich and for renters' rights and for rent control. If you want to win those things for your own family, for your coworkers, for your friends, then you need to join us."

This campaign that we ran in 2013 was a call to action for $15 an hour. And w- when I won the election against the most powerful Democrat that year in the city, it became a referendum on $15 an hour and provided the momentum For us to actually win 15, when I was, when I took office, I launched the 15 Now movement.

That is the same principle, that is the same fighting strategy that we are using now for our congressional campaign. And, we are seeing not only Adam Smith, but also another Democrat in this race. And Adam Smith, just to be very clear, Adam Smith is awash in, his record is drenched with the blood of over a million Iraqis who have been killed in the war on Iraq, and also the Palestinians who have been slaughtered in the genocide in Gaza, because this guy hasn't met a war he did not like.

He's one of the remaining five Democrats in the House, in the US Congress, who voted for the war on Iraq, but he has also voted for tens of billions of dollars for the genocide in Gaza. He voted to ban United Nations food assistance to Gaza. He voted to create and fund ICE. But what is most, important for us to remember is that Adam Smith is obv- he is caricaturally villainous, but he is not an exception to the rule.

He represents the agenda of the Democratic Party. 173 Democrats voted to fund the genocide in Gaza, including 56 members of the so-called Congressional Progressive Caucus. And a strategy the Democratic Party often uses, and which is exactly what they're using in this race, is to run another Democrat. they're not able to launder Adam Smith's reputation.

they're trying to, but it's impossible for them to do that because he is so clearly a, a warmongering candidate of Palantir and Anduril and the billionaires, and also the Zionist lobby like AIPAC. AIPAC was his biggest funder in his last election in 2024. They're not able to sell him as something else.

And although they're trying their best to, but so what they're doing is they're running another Democrat in this race. And the, the whole est- establishment as a whole, the Democrats and Republicans together, have made sure that there's only one and their strongest Republican candidate running in this race, unlike in other years.

He, this Republican actually said publicly, I'm paraphrasing him, but he said publicly that he was recruited to run in order to keep me from getting into the general election, not to defeat Adam Smith in any way. He's run against Adam Smith many times, and he has, he has never, he... The intention was never to defeat Adam Smith because Adam Smith is, as, one commentator said, m- more, he sounds more Republican than Republicans themselves.

And so the idea here is to keep the revolutionary socialist out of the general election, and that is what the Democratic Party is trying to do.

I'm trying to think of a time in history when elite power brokers were more agog at the fact that they keep running into the brick wall of reality.

Yeah.

Like- If you look at the general population's opinions of AI, ICE, Donald Trump, they're all down there with the Democratic Party.

Yeah. and Congress. Yeah. But that's the thing, is people don't realize how so much of our political moment is explained by how historically unpopular everything is. It's... Do you know what I mean? it's, it is a round rejection of the cosmos. Of

everything. it- of literally everything that they're trying to put in...

But yeah, go ahead. I'm

really enjoying watching, also these very centrist Dems just going "I don't like this. What do you mean you're gonna do something? Why do they like Mamdani?" Yeah. "Oh, he explains things clearly, and he does stuff, and he governs with intention, and we can point to the things he's done."

"I don't like that."

Yeah.

Balanced budget, expanded childcare. no, none of that. Day three we got the Zohran ramp.

Oh, he fixed the Williamsburg-

The Williamsburg Bridge. Yeah. Yeah. I rode over that ramp, baby. That ramp sucked. It

was- I've s- I've said this on the show many times. One of the first things he said he was gonna do was build thousands of public restrooms, which is, what could be a more key thing?

It's also, it's such good, it's such good leadership. Yeah. It's such good government, and it's such good politics. Because there are so many parts of politics, like so much of the right wing in this country is like, "How do I convince you that your relationship to Colin Kaepernick is more important than any-

material facet of your life?" But on the reality side of things, what is a more profound experience than being like- I'm trapped in New York because something happened and I'm in between two things, and I'm suddenly like, "I'm gonna shit in three minutes."

Yeah. Unbelievable.

Where,

is that gonna- Yeah, I've never shit this fa- Folks, we've never shit this fast.

Yeah. It's the most we've ever p- we've never pissed so conveniently. and

you go, "Where is this going to physically happen?" Because it's happening in T-minus. And here's a guy going, "I'm gonna fix this for you." Yeah. And the fir- what I, what... It's the Zohran ramp. The first time someone goes to a brand new public bathroom and it saves their life-

Yeah.

... they're gonna in their head go, "Thank you, Zohran."

Yeah. his name is gonna be on the side presumably if he's like any other elected official in America, he'll put the name on the side of anything he builds.

But the Democrats don't do this shit. Yeah. Donald Trump signing the stimulus checks is smart politics.

Yeah.

And the fact that day three he built that ramp, I don't know how many thousands of New Yorkers go over that ramp every day, but every da-dunh- Yeah ... off the Williamsburg Bridge- You're thinking about it ... is accompanied by a silent, "Thank you, Zohran."

here's what's fascinating about it, because I agree with you.

That's, it's incredible that he's been running on that. That's what we need Democrats to do is, actually build shit that makes people's material lives better. and so to some extent, I felt like the rest of his progressive commitments were great, but a little bit beside the point, right? he, for instance, obviously a big supporter of Palestine-

and against the genocide happening in Gaza. But hey, he's the mayor of New York. this is his personal belief. It's not that important. or it is important, less, less so than the material stuff. but for him to immediately wade into national politics and- Yeah ... get people elected congressionally that share those values...

And that is a live issue for- Yeah ... like the number of pro-Palestinian, or Israel, Israeli skeptical, ... members of Congress just, quintupled overnight because of this.

It's really... But also to, to reframe what you just said for a moment, because I think your point about, okay, that moment on the debate stage where he said, where you had every mayoral candidate say, "I would travel to Israel," and he said, "I'd stay here in New York and talk to Jewish New Yorkers in the city-" Yeah

"that I want to be mayor of," that was... That did have to do with being, him being mayor because he did address a political shibboleth and say, "No, I'm gonna do the pragmatic thing. I am the mayor. I'm focused on meat and potatoes." Yeah. I... that moment where he says that, his... I think his politics around- The genocide in Gaza and around Am- American foreign policy support for what the IDF is doing there is specifically, very germane because he's saying, "This is wrong, and also an enormous distraction from the, my affordability agenda."

"I'm gonna be a good mayor for this city and not support this insane foreign policy that is only morally reprehensible and helps us not at all."

100%. Yeah. I completely agree with you, but I th- what I think is a little bit unprecedented is him wanting to influence national politics this quickly and this directly.

Yeah. To, essentially what he and DSA New York are doing, and I think other DSA chapters around the country, is they're building a separate political machine from the Democratic Party that's going to get different types of candidates elected that can do so reliably- Yeah ... through their own power.

They don't need anybody else's help, they don't need any other donors, they don't need to make anyone else happy. They knock doors, they raise their own money, they get candidates that they like, and they get them elected. And they change the policy of the country as a result.

Yeah.

And, I was trying to figure out, what other mayors have done this throughout history.

It's first of all, people from 50 years ago, 70 years ago, it's Huey Long, it's, Boss Tweed stuff. Yeah. And they were doing it for... Huey Long was a leftist, but they were doing it for a lot of, personal political gain, and it took them decades. Zohran's been in office six months and he has already, flipped a whole bunch of the delegation.

Ed. S-

something I really like that Zohran does as well is he's a videographer, boringstein_ on Twitter and BlueSky, look him up, he's fantastic. His video stuff is really great because he explains what's going on. When he was balancing the budget, he was like, "Yeah, this is what's going on. This is the problem we have with this, why we have the overage."

When the massive storms hit, I was in New York for one of them, wasn't for the other, he did these excellent videos being like, "This is how we're dealing with this. If you see a homeless person, call this number." And it go, gets back to the thing of Democrats not writing their names on stuff. It's also Democrats not explaining governance at all.

Yeah. the average person has this very social media maligned perspective of the government that either does everything or nothing. And usually, the Republicans do things to the country, and Democrats have stuff done to them or nothing.

And so seeing what Zohran's doing, I think what's so scary to the Democrats about it is that he's doing stuff, and he's "Yeah, I'm doing this.

This is why I'm doing it." And the people he's running are like, "Yeah, I too will do stuff," which is terrible. And I say this as someone from England and watching what the Labour Party isn't or is doing. Who knows what's happening there? It's just nice to see, and truly it shouldn't be unique, but it is, and it's genuinely marvelous because I learned some shit.

I barely know anything about politics these days, but the actual ability for a regular person to go, "Oh, this is how my city works."

Yeah.

I think that you're, there's an amazing thing there, which is, the Overton Windows often uses this metaphor just about, what is acceptable conversation.

But there are weird ways where you push the Overton Window so far that it snaps and reforms in a way- ... that you couldn't have anticipated. And I f- I do apologize 'cause someone actually articulated this much better than I have, and I read this online, but essentially it is, look, if you spend 40 years as the right-wing project- e- expanding the definition of socialism to be any time the government does anything but fuck people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that suddenly you might wake up one day and people have an overwhelmingly positive association with socialism. If you're... if it's one thing if you go "Whoa, nationalizing an industry," which we should do. Yes. Or doing any of these other things, that's socialism.

But suddenly you're just like, "Giving a kid help at school, that's communism." You're like, "Brother, I guess I'm a communist?"

there's a lot of talk right now in the Democratic Party, in, in liberal circles about affordability, which is very welcome. the Mamdani campaign definitely brought that back into the conversation.

The material concerns of, working Americans, average Americans as being something that Democrats need to address. Hey, who would have thought that might be a focus for, politicians in this country? But why is just affordability not enough? What does it miss?

thanks, Adam. Yeah, I think the affordability thing is a step in the right direction for the Democratic Party.

It puts economic issues right at the forefront, which is important. but what it's missing right now is a focus on jobs and a focus on designing an economy that can actually provide higher wages. So we can't just try to cut, costs. We also have to raise wages for millions of people, and how are we gonna do that?

The question I think a lot of working-class people are gonna be asking the Democratic Party is, "How can I get a good job in the age of AI, automation, and all these things? How am I gonna be able to support a family, buy a house," all these sorts of things. if we're just talking about cutting some taxes, maybe some tax breaks that try to bring down, cutting Trump's tariffs, that try to bring down costs across the board.

So this is a big problem. I think the progressives in the Congressional Progressive Caucus have a lot of great plans, but if you read this stuff, there's almost nothing about infrastructure, about trade, about industrial policy, about all those jobs that have gone away for specifically non-college educated working-class people that have not come back.

They haven't come back under Trump. They came back a little under Biden, but they didn't really talk about it a lot. That needs to be the focus. If you wanna win places like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, you need to focus on jobs, trade, industrial policy, infrastructure, these kind of issues.

Yeah, when you think about it, the focus on affordability, good, but if all you're doing is trying to reduce prices, you're only working on one half of the equation, and in some ways, you're only working on the easier half, right?

you're only working on the part that the consumers have to deal with, which is how we deal with a lot of problems in America. We deal with them at the cash register, and we never, ask anything more difficult of the people who are making the thing or the people who are employing, people.

uh, first of all, what's, what's happened in America, to make those jobs go away, and how has, life changed for folks over the past couple decades, that has made the affordability problem so big? 'Cause it's not just the price you pay. it's the input that you get through your life, monetarily.

Yeah, so I think this is part of the bigger philosophical problem here with affordability. There was a really high cost to allowing cheap goods to be the main economic driver for American growth. And we started that under NAFTA, maybe a little before NAFTA, but under NAFTA, and really accelerated through when we allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization and basically say, "Hey, we're gonna fling the doors open.

We want cheap goods from all around the world to come into the United States. And to pay for that, we're gonna basically get rid of a ton of manufacturing jobs, high-wage, decent jobs for, working-class people." we did get those cheap goods, but at the cost of high-wage jobs, and that was the bargain that a lot of Democrats and Republicans hand-in-hand made from the 1990s through today.

They said, "Look, it's better for us, it's more competitive for us if we just let all these other countries make our stuff, and if we focus on, the high tech, the college educated, the knowledge economy," all that sort of stuff. the result of that is now we're having trouble with both. We can't keep costs down, and we can't keep wages up.

So the crux of the problem with affordability is much bigger than just the price of eggs. It's an entire global system that has been built around the question of globalizing the manufacturing sector instead of focusing on high-wage jobs here at home for everybody, not just for the college educated, not just for the tech people, but for people who work ordinary jobs without a college education, without a whole lot of- Yeah

high skills and that sort of thing.

And, i- if all you focus on is making the goods cheaper, "Hey, let's get rid of the high-wage jobs and make goods cheaper," maybe you can hope that the cheap cost of the goods outweighs, all the wages you got cut, right? If you're just looking at two big levers.

But what happens when you get an imbalance like we have right now, and all you try to do ma- is make the goods cheaper. there's some goods you can't make cheaper. You can't import apartment buildings from China. You can't import medical care from China, and you got other systemic issues in the country that we refuse to address that are causing those things to be expensive.

the price of eggs gets a lot of attention. The price of eggs is not the biggest problem in America. It's all that other shit, right? and you can't, globalize your way out of a housing shortage or out of a for-profit healthcare system, especially because, healthcare is also related to employment the way we've structured it in this country.

uh, y- in broad strokes, what needs to be done?

the main thing that needs to be done is we need to figure out how to re-industrialize and bring- I think the United States needs to step down from the global scale when it comes to, the economic stuff and start focusing on stuff here at home.

Our infrastructure is crumbling, right? You drive around any major city, you see it, it's falling apart. It's 100 years old. The last time we really invested in it was i- in the New Deal. And these are jobs. if you look around the country and see all the things that are falling apart physically, those are jobs.

Now, what does that do all the way down the chain? If we put a ton of money into infrastructure, suddenly you need the materials that go into building bridges. What is that? That's steel, right? Are we gonna say- ... "No, we're gonna build a bunch of new bridges, but we're gonna import all the steel from China"?

Why? Why not reopen some of our steel foundries that are actually proximate to where we have these projects? This is the way we can start to say, "Look, not only are we going to address a lot of the social problems in the United States, but we're gonna give good high-wage jobs as a result of it." To do those things, you need to have a progressive economic message that isn't just focused on bringing costs down or adding some more programs here or there, or cutting some, giving some tax credits here or there.

It's a structural change. It's actually saying we're gonna redesign the economy in order to accommodate working people, rather than we're simply gonna tinker on the edges and hope that at the end of the day, Democrats come out with 50 plus 1% of the vote and skate- ... by another election.

Yeah. I think we do need to dispense with that way of doing politics, and we need to have a bigger message.

And I, again, I think, like Mamdani just pointed out to all of America, that, if you just have the basics of "Hey, I'm gonna do some big shit that'll make your life better," that can really power an entire campaign. And he was... That wasn't even an industrialization message. There was a lot of neo-FDR stuff, but it wasn't what you're talking about, 'cause that's not something you can do as the mayor of New York.

But when you say re-industrialization, that's really fascinating, because a lot of people will say that's impossible, And, a lot of the ways that, say, Donald Trump will toss out this idea it is impossible. for instance, I have heard the argument many times, and it makes sense to me, that we're not gonna build iPhones over here because first of all, the in- the iPhone was built around the Chinese, manufacturing system.

they built an entire infrastructure over there that the iPhone was literally born from. we'd have to move so much shit over here, train so many people, basically create an entirely new economy that is... that's not realistic. Now, let me know whether you agree or disagree with that, but- Is there some other form of re-industrialization that you mean?

are you talking about more like a New Deal like works project? let's just have people... Let's build some bridges. Let's build some water- let's fucking carve some new, or, roads out of the mountainside. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, that, that's a start, I, I'd be happy with some new br- r- re- bridges and roads, but- In

LA I certainly would. I'm sure, uh, you would too in Philly where you are.

Yeah, ours are about to fall into the river. But I think the bigger question is it's about trade, and it's about trade policy. We don't need to go back... when people talk about re-industrialization, they immediately think, "Oh, we're not gonna go back to 1950 where we were the, the...

Supplied all the world with all our goods." We don't need to go back to 1950. We basically have to go back to, 1996 in terms of industrial output. That's not that hard to do. Think about, just think about the public goods in this country that are used by everybody every day. School buses, transit buses, trains.

All these things require mechanical parts. They require steel. They require tons of manufactured goods to go into them. In order to make those things, you need to have factories that are running at a decent capacity, that are run well, and that are organized well. we have let all of that go fallow.

We've basically said, "We're not emphasizing that. We're not worried about that. We don't wanna be competitive in those fields. We don't wanna care about those fields." Reversing this is a policy choice. Now- There is a secular decline in the amount of jobs that manufacturing is going to produce, but we have not reached it.

There's no way that we can say with the terrible amount of transit that we have in this country, and mass transit that we have in this country, with the lack of a unified electrical grid, that we've maxed out our capacity for- Yeah ... building stuff in America. It's crazy to think that way. Yes, China is going to have a dominance over certain high-tech goods, but the fact is we don't need to make those high-techs goods for most people's lives to be better.

We need better basic things, better low-tech things in order to have more jobs and rebuild a manufacturing sector that can function. Not one that needs to compete on every single level with the big manufacturing countries around the world, but one that can provide goods here in America and jobs here in America that need to be basically made in America.

Next, section B: Everyday Extraction.

Did you know the average American now says they need a net worth of nearly $840,000 not to feel wealthy, but just to feel financially comfortable? When asked what it would take to feel wealthy, that number shot up to $2.3 million. And when I first heard that, I thought it sounded a bit absurd, but then I thought about housing, groceries, healthcare, and suddenly it didn't.

But the real eye-opener came when I saw how those expectations were broken down by different age groups. Gen Z said they need 329,000 to feel comfortable, millennials at nearly 850,000, Gen X at 783,000, and boomers coming in at 943,000. The oldest group feels they need the most money. Now, here's what the actual median net worth looks like by age As you'll notice, everyone under the age of 35 was grouped together, and that's because of how they did the survey.

So yeah, there's a massive gap between what people feel they need to survive and what they actually have. And sure, I suppose it's always been true that younger people tend to have lower net worths than older generations. But what is different now is that younger generations are dealing with a totally different set of economic conditions.

And to be clear, older people still feel these pressures, but many of them aren't dealing with today's terms and conditions. They bought homes before prices exploded. They went to college before tuition ballooned. And so these numbers confirm just what a lot of us already feel. We are falling behind. So the real question then becomes, how did the gap between what we expect and what we actually have get so wide?

And maybe more importantly, is there anything we can actually do about it? Let's break down the biggest reasons why so many young people today feel financially trapped. First, let's talk about wages in the US. For decades, both progressive and conservative economists have agreed that average real hourly wages, meaning wages adjusted for inflation, have barely moved since the 1970s.

On paper, paychecks have gotten bigger, but inflation has eaten away at that buying power. So even if you're technically earning more, it often doesn't feel like it's going any further. Now, some conservative economists push back on using the 1970s as the starting point for this stat. They argue it's more accurate to track wage growth from the 1990s when certain economic factors had stabilized.

And to be fair, if you do that, wages have gone up since then. But here's why I disagree with that and why it doesn't change the story. Even if wages have gone up since the 1990s, the cost of core essentials like housing, healthcare, and childcare have risen even faster. So most people don't feel any better off because their income still doesn't cover the basics.

Inflation is measured as an average across a wide range of goods. And while some things like electronics or clothing may have gotten cheaper over this time, the things people actually rely on day to day haven't. And in fact, they've gone up at a much faster rate than many other categories. And that's ultimately where this disconnect comes from.

And this can be part of the larger problem with economic data. It's technically objective, but how it's framed can totally shift the narrative. Data can be accurate and still misleading depending on what you choose to emphasize. Now, the second of the main drivers here is housing. The median price of a home in the US is right around $417,000.

Now, this is out of reach for so many young Americans unless they're getting down payment assistance from their parents. The average age of a first-time home buyer is currently 38, which marks an all-time high. But here's another wild stat to put some of this into perspective. In the US during 1985, the average home price was around $85,000, and that was about three and a half times the average household income at the time.

Today, that price to income ratio is over five times, and as a result, one-third of Americans are burdened by housing costs, and this includes people who rent. This means they're spending more than 30% of their monthly gross income on housing. Now, historically speaking, financial advisors have suggested never exceeding more than 20 to 25% of your gross income on housing.

But some have now had to increase that to more than 30% because of the cost of housing today And this gets worse for Americans who do rent. According to a study done by Harvard, half of Americans who rent are currently cost-burdened. And I know for a lot of Americans, that ideal is out of reach, and it seems like it's only increasing in the wrong direction.

There are many reasons for this, and I've covered them more in depth in a previous video. You can check it out after if you're interested. But one thing that needs to be said upfront is the housing market has shifted from being a basic need to being treated as a financial asset over the years.

Investors are buying up single-family homes to rent them out, and starter homes just aren't being built anymore, certainly not at the levels they were many years ago. Builders realized they could make more profit by constructing larger, more expensive homes instead. And I know some critics will push back and say that corporate ownership still makes up a relatively small percentage of the housing market in the US, and that's true on a national level.

But in certain regions, it's far more than enough to distort prices and limit supply.

These properties are single-family homes owned by corporations, not people, and Atlanta is the number one location for these houses in the entire country according to GSU Professor Taylor Shelton.

Just a decade or so ago, none of these companies even existed.

On top of that, local governments often block new development with outdated zoning laws, and corporate landlords have no real incentive to keep things affordable. They just push rent as high as the market will tolerate quarter after quarter, chasing returns. And let's not forget the housing market never fully bounced back after the 2008 crash, leaving behind a nationwide supply crunch that still hasn't been fixed today.

But here's the thing about housing. It's a negative sum game. If you don't already own, you're at minus one, not zero. I mean, after all, everyone needs a place to live, right? CNBC emphasized this by pointing out that today's housing market is dominated by repeat buyers, people who've already owned homes and can use their existing equity to buy back in, sometimes outright.

Baby boomers and retirees they say are the real winners in this housing market. The average older buyer now has around $300,000 in home equity to work with, something most young buyers, especially millennials, simply don't have. Now the third main driver for this unaffordability crunch is debt, and this is because the reality is the older generations didn't carry this kind of debt burden, especially when it came to education and housing.

College was more affordable because tuition wasn't so expensive, and as a result, many could graduate without loans at all. Today, that obviously couldn't be further from the truth. The average federal student loan borrower now carries over $38,000 in debt, and when you include private loans, that number jumps to over $41,000.

This is essentially the cost of entry into the workforce for many Americans. Of course, you don't need a college education to get a decent job, but in many fields it's non-negotiable. And unfortunately, the debt doesn't stop there. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans' total credit card balance is over 1.1 trillion as of the first quarter of 2025, and this is just off its all-time high from the fourth quarter of 2024 since the New York Fed began tracking this stat back in 1999.

And it's younger people who are struggling the most because borrowers under 30 now have the highest credit card delinquency rate of any age group. I don't think that's just happening because people are blowing money on luxuries. I think it's because daily living costs have become a huge burden for young people trying to get ahead or even just staying afloat.

And then there's the explosion of buy now, pay later, which took off during the pandemic and has only sped up in the recent years. A LendingTree survey published in June of this year found that 25% of BNPL users surveyed reported using the loans to buy groceries, and this was up from 14% just a year prior.

And since I've covered this BNPL craze in a recent video, I know that some people will be thinking, "Well, it's not that different from a credit card. I mean, people put groceries on credit cards all the time." But the thing is, they are different from credit cards. And I'm not saying buy now, pay later is inherently bad, but there are many pitfalls that come with this kind of debt that I think the average user of it underestimates.

And what can be dangerous about these- Sure ... BNPL services is you feel like you've got more room in your budget than you actually do.

One reason is because BNPL isn't regulated like traditional credit cards, at least not yet, so people can stack up debt across multiple platforms without much visibility from lenders.

And if they're not financially literate, they may not realize how deep they're in until it's too late. There's also a lot of predatory tactics that some of these BNPL companies use, often without people realizing it. But anyways, its ease of use is also much more apparent than traditional credit cards.

So for me, the major takeaway with some of this debt, not necessarily all of the consumer-facing debt, but with things like college and housing, it feels like this necessary tool that we have to use, but it's also gonna set us back financially in a way that may not always make sense.

Removing subscriptions from your life isn't easy. As companies connect more products to the internet, the distinction between owning and paying for access gets blurrier.

Printers, security cameras, exercise equipment, and even cars all limit features behind subscriptions.

These are all things that are software dependent, and so when you don't have control over the software code, that means you don't have control over the physical product itself. Sometimes that means features get added, features get taken away without the consumer's consent.

It even gets to whether the device continues to operate at all.

Aaron co-wrote a book in 2016 called The End of Ownership. Since then, he's only become more pessimistic.

I think things are worse than we imagined they would be. Our daily behavior is really built around the idea that the things that we use every day are within our exclusive control, and I think when we move away from that, what's the model for what a non-ownership economy looks like?

There's some very smart people out there who, describe this as a kind of return to feudalism, a world in which we don't own anything, we don't control anything, and the benefits of these resources are hoarded by the handful of technology and media companies that control our access to them.

Mergers further concentrated this control, and with less competition, prices could rise.

They're in a much better position to eliminate consumer surplus and push consumers to paying the maximum price that they can bear. That might look good for a handful of companies, but I think ultimately it's pretty harmful for society as a whole.

The erosion of ownership has already happened to media. In 2024, 84% of US recorded music revenue came from streaming. Physical sales accounted for 11%. It's even lower for movies and TV shows. Spending on physical media made up less than 2% of revenue. Consumers don't own the majority of media they consume, which means they give up the right to resell it, loan it to a friend, or pass their collection down through generations.

When Netflix blocked password-sharing, it made this imbalance clear.

When you move to digital, those secondary markets are essentially eliminated, and that's something that a lot of publishers, studios, video game developers, that they've been hoping for a very long time

But a growing number of consumers don't want ownership to die.

Take a look at this graph. Since 2005, the number of vinyl records shipped grew by over 1200%.

It's an old idea to physically hold something and look at it, but at the end of the day, it just feels good. It's so wonderful to be a part of this reemergence of a physical life that I think people are really missing in an age of complete digitization and dehumanization.

This neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York sees itself as fighting against that dehumanization. Shop owners refer to it as Analog Alley, because within a few blocks you'll find board games, books, records, and VHS tapes.

After one night of complaining one too many times, Jess yelled at me to start the store, so we started the store.

Pretty much that's what happened, yeah.

Night Owl Video's merchandise proudly declares, "Death to streamers."

I think the pitch from these streamers when they started was affordability and accessibility of great movies, and now it's the complete opposite because they've started making their own movies, and they want to push those onto people, removing the titles that clearly people actually want to watch.

While prices started out low, every major streamer has increased the cost of its subscriptions.

You're being fed from an algorithm and fooled into thinking that this algorithm is super, super tailored for your particular taste.

You're probably just gonna end up scrolling for an hour and not finding anything you wanna watch anyway.

Jess and Aaron hope Night Owl's human curation reminds patrons they don't have to let an algorithm pick their next movie.

For your consideration, Spirited Away. This is, pretty rare.

Night Owl offers an estimated 8 to 10,000 movies on DVD, Blu-ray, and VHS.

When I tried to order copies through the distributor too, and I couldn't get them. They're back ordered. Young Frankenstein is back ordered. It's really cool to see a younger generation who didn't necessarily grow up buying DVDs like we did embracing that idea, really enjoying it and enjoying, searching through the stacks to find great stuff.

DVDs and Blu-rays haven't experienced the same comeback vinyl has. But for Night Owl, selling dead media has been a success. A physical collection comes with tangible benefits. Streaming catalogs change all the time as licenses swap hands or companies like Disney remove titles to write them off as financial losses.

Blu-rays can also look and sound better than streaming because they're less compressed, and the quality doesn't change depending on your internet speed. But more importantly, curating a collection is the way Jess and Aaron show their love for their favorite media.

Streaming has devalued art in almost every way.

I think that it's really important to preserve the films that you love and to really experience them.

The expressions on a lot of people's faces when they come in, it's like, "Wow, this still exists." it's really a nice thing.

Fighting the subscription trend became a personal mission for James Cuda too.

I deeply hate subscriptions unless they make sense.

His company, Procreate, has become wildly successful by asking its users to buy its apps once.

Yes, we would technically make more money if we were going down a subscription route.

We're all in business to, to generate revenue, but I think the other part of that story is we're here to generate revenue and provide value to the customer, and I think that part is just not being evaluated. We're prioritizing revenue generation at the expense of the customer. I think that creates quite a lot of brand damage, because you're not eliciting a feeling of joy or fun when you're interacting with that brand.

You're creating a sense of aggravation and a feeling of entrapment, which customers don't forget.

Gamers are feeling the aggravation too. Micro-transactions, battle passes, and online-only functionality are all too familiar in modern gaming.

The customer should ha- should have more, basically, freedom to own their media, 'cause the more of the control lies with the company that either distributes or creates the ecosystem, the more opportunities for just unfair practices.

They are becoming the standard, and no one knows that they're un- unfair anymore, 'cause they haven't seen anything else.

The platform GOG is committed to preserving retro games. But even with new titles, it offers users an offline installer without digital restrictions. That means you can install a game even if the publisher no longer sells or supports it.

The aim was to solve that for consumers and to build a digital distribution platform that would keep the good things about physical distribution, but m- move them into the more convenient digital era. You have the files, but they're yours. you can keep them. It's a matter of liberty. It's a matter of, whether I can actually own something and whether a company takes something away from me.

Am I free to own things? Is that, is that okay for me to own, or should I rent indefinitely?

We're not delusional. I don't think streamers are necessarily going anywhere, but I do think that people are going to become more aware of how they're spending their money on entertainment.

Consumers should make whatever choices work for them. I'm not here to tell everybody that they're wrong for having a Spotify subscription and everybody just needs to buy vinyl records.

But one of the things that troubles me is that for people who want to buy tangible copies, that's becoming increasingly difficult to do.

There are products that many of us no longer want and we're still subscribed to, and that's generating revenue for those companies, and it means that a new company which is offering a product that we do want, they may not have an opportunity because our money is tied up somewhere else.

But the FTC is going to keep playing Whac-A-Mole unless it actually issues a rule that applies to every company in the economy saying you can't trap people in subscriptions and you can't lie to people when they're signing up.

What worries me is I think the status quo is more, desirable to the companies that control these markets, and I don't think they're likely to yield that control without a real fight

When was the last time a car actually became easier to fix? For most of automotive history, repairs were relatively straightforward. If a starter went bad, you replaced the starter. If a water pump failed, you installed a new one. If your check engine light came on, there was a good chance the problem could be diagnosed with a few basic tools and some mechanical know-how.

Cars used to be simple, but today's vehicles are a completely different story. Modern cars contain an incredible amount of technology. They're packed with computers, sensors, cameras, radar systems, electronic modules, touchscreens, electric motors, and software that controls nearly every function of the vehicle.

The average new car contains millions of lines of computer code, far more than most people realize. And while many of these advancements provide a real benefit, they also create more opportunity for things to go wrong. When something breaks on a modern vehicle, the repair often involves far more than simply replacing a failed part.

A sensor may need to be calibrated. A module may need to be programmed, a safety system probably needs to be reset, and a component may need to communicate properly with over half a dozen computers before the vehicle will operate correctly. That complexity adds time, labor, and cost to almost every single repair.

And it's not just repair costs. It gets even worse after any kind of car accident. So consider what happens after a relatively minor accident. Years ago, a damaged bumper might require some body work and a fresh coat of paint. Today, that same bumper could contain parking sensors, cameras, radar units, multiple wiring harnesses, and advanced driver assistance systems.

Replacing it often means replacing electronics, performing calibrations, and verifying that multiple safety systems still function correctly. What would've been a $500 repair years ago can easily cost several thousand dollars. Even routine maintenance has become more expensive. Components are often harder to access because of tighter engine compartments and more complex vehicle designs.

Jobs that once took a few hours can now take several days, and diagnosing a problem frequently requires specialized scan tools and extensive troubleshooting before the actual repair even begins. Insurance companies are noticing this trend as well. Repair costs have risen so dramatically that vehicles are increasingly being declared a total loss after accidents that would've been considered relatively minor in the past.

This fender bender's hard to miss, and while it's ugly, it doesn't keep the car from driving. But when you ask your insurance company to fix something like this, you may be shocked to learn that they'll consider your car totaled.

A damaged headlight assembly can sometimes cost thousands of dollars because it now contains sophisticated electronics rather than just a simple bulb and housing.

And then there's the long-term concern. As these vehicles age, all of those sensors, modules, cameras, and electronic systems will continue to wear out. Every new feature adds another potential failure point. While modern vehicles are incredibly capable machines, they're also some of the most complicated consumer products the average person will ever own.

The result is a reality that many drivers are already experiencing. Repair bills are becoming unaffordable, insurance costs are skyrocketing, and keeping a vehicle on the road is more expensive than ever before. Cars today may be safer, faster, cleaner, and more advanced than at any point in history, but they're also becoming incredibly difficult and expensive to repair, and many drivers are beginning to wonder whether all that technology is creating as many problems as it's solving.

But repair costs aren't the only concern. A growing number of dealers believe that automakers are slowly creating a world where your only realistic option is taking your vehicle back to the dealership. Now, manufacturers are gonna tell you that's not the goal. They'll point to safety requirements, increasingly complex technology, cybersecurity concerns, and the need to make sure repairs are done correctly.

But from the perspective of many vehicle owners, the end result looks the same. Many vehicles require specialized scan tools, proprietary software, security access systems, electronic calibrations, and manufacturer-specific procedures that simply didn't exist a generation ago. Even experienced independent repair shops can struggle to keep up because every manufacturer has its own systems...

its own software, and its own ever-changing requirements. And this isn't just something the critics are saying. Recently, Ford CEO Jim Farley made comments that caught the attention of a lot of car enthusiasts. He essentially acknowledged what many drivers have been noticing for years. Farley said he could work on an old Ford Bronco himself.

He understood it. He could diagnose problems, replace parts, and keep it running. But when it comes to newer Fords, that's a completely different story. I

think Ford's position is very reasonable. We're really a big advocate for the ability to repair a vehicle, but it has to be done at a reasonable cost.

You don't want people repairing their own vehicles?

No, that's fine. Not for warranty work though. These are very complicated cars and I, I have no problem working on a '73 Bronco. To work on a brand new Bronco, I need all sorts of specialty tools. That's something that, we would put people's lives at risk

Today's vehicles contain so much technology and require so many specialized tools and systems that even the CEO of one of the world's largest automakers admitted that working on them is far more difficult.

If the head of Ford says he can wrench on an old Bronco but wouldn't realistically work on a new one, what does that say about the average vehicle owner? Think about that for a moment. For decades, one of the biggest advantages of car ownership was independence. If something broke, you had options. You could fix it yourself, you could get help from a friend, even a local mechanic can handle a job.

The vehicle was yours, and maintaining it was largely within your control. Today, that independence feels like it's shrinking. Many repairs now require access to systems that the average person just doesn't have. Some procedures require manufacturer software, others require expensive calibration equipment, and some repairs can't even be completed until electronic systems from the dealer communicate with manufacturer databases and verify that everything's been installed correctly.

The average driver isn't gonna spend thousands of dollars on specialized tools to repair a single vehicle, and most small repair shops can't justify purchasing every proprietary tool and software subscription from every manufacturer either.

If a certain manufacturer requires a $40,000-a-year subscription, we're just not gonna service those cars because we don't have enough volume of that specific vehicle to, to afford the subscription.

As vehicles become more computerized and connected, many drivers worry that the traditional relationship between people and their cars is changing. The days of fixing problems in your driveway with a basic toolbox may not be completely gone, but they're certainly becoming harder to find. And if getting repairs done is becoming more complicated, finding the parts you need is becoming a completely separate challenge all in itself.

One of the biggest problems facing people who own older vehicles today isn't repairing the vehicles, it's finding the parts to repair them in the first place. And unfortunately, this isn't some theoretical problem that's years away, it's already happening right now. I kinda know about this firsthand because my sister's daughter is a teenage driver, and she has a '99 Jeep Grand Cherokee.

It's not exactly an antique, and it's not a classic car from the 1960s, not some rare collector vehicle. It's just a regular Jeep that millions of Americans drove not that long ago, and a lot of people even drive today. So recently it needed a replacement part, and normally you'd think that wouldn't be a huge deal.

Find the part, install it, and get it back on the road. Except that's not what really happened. That Jeep has now been sitting in the repair shop down the street from my sister's house for nearly three weeks. Because finding the part has been incredibly difficult. Shop after shop has searched for it, suppliers have checked inventory, and online sources have even been searched.

Used parts have been considered, and the biggest issue keeps coming back to the same thing, the age of the vehicle. The reality is that once a vehicle reaches a certain age, manufacturers will sometimes stop producing many of the components needed to keep it running, and part suppliers sometimes even stop keeping them on the shelf.

What was once a common replacement part slowly becomes harder and harder to find. At first, it means waiting a few extra days, then it means searching nationwide. Then it means that hoping a used part can be located somewhere. Eventually, it means that part simply doesn't exist anymore, and that's the concern many vehicle owners are starting to have.

Millions of Americans depend on older vehicles because they're affordable, familiar, and often paid off. Not everyone wants a $50,000 or $60,000 car payment. Many people would rather keep maintaining the vehicle they already own, but that becomes difficult when the part supply slowly starts drying up. Every year, more older vehicles reach the point where critical components are no longer readily available.

Some parts can be rebuilt, some can be salvaged from donor vehicles, some can be reproduced by aftermarket companies, but many simply disappear from the market altogether. And when that happens, a vehicle can become almost impossible to repair, not because the engine failed, not because the transmission exploded, but because one relatively small component can no longer be found.

That's a scary thought when you consider how many people rely on older vehicles every single day, because finding parts for a '99 Jeep Grand Cherokee is already becoming really difficult. What's it gonna look like five years from now, or even 10 years from now? At some point, the question may no longer be whether you can afford to repair your vehicle.

The question may simply become whether the parts still exist at all, and things are gonna just get even worse.

Let's talk about Sony, PlayStation, and the apparent death of physical media as we know it. Earlier this week, Sony announced that they would no longer be printing brand new PlayStation games onto discs anymore starting in January 2027.

All games from that point forward will just be entirely digital. That's it, right? PlayStation for the foreseeable future will be divorcing with the concept of physical media. If you know anything about this fight, you should know how fucked up this decision is. On the surface, of course, digital sales make up the bulk of all sales of all media, but that makes sense.

But the issue has never been that. The issue has been Ownership and rights holding. Because listen to me, you don't actually own any of these movies, TV shows, or games that you are purchasing off these digital storefronts, okay? You download them when you buy it, but you're essentially just low-key renting this media from that company.

Here's an example of that, and it's fucking crazy that it happened so close to this story, right? Right before this announcement, Sony announced that 551 movies from their digital catalog that their customers had purchased would be removed from all Sony accounts because the rights had lapsed with that studio.

That's insane. That means movies that you bought with your money would just vanish from your account and you couldn't touch them. You just pretty much burned your money right there. No refund, nothing. Now, with console prices rising and physical media on death's door, the backlash was instant and universal.

This kind of anger that we're seeing right here feels like it is only matched by, and I kid you not, the reveal of the Xbox One, which is so similar. It literally started with an announcement that Xbox was doing away with the disc drive and pretty much handed Sony dominance of the market there afterwards, who capitalized on the fact that, oh, no, we're totally gonna have disc drives.

Fun fact, they weren't. They were also planning on eliminating their disc drive, and they pivoted when they heard that announcement. And a lot of people called it that Sony was gonna go this way. If you've been in the games industry long enough, you've seen the writing on the wall, but the callousness of how this is being done, and Sony's own piss-poor management of the media they themselves sell, is not a very big, bright spot in all of this, or trust in the company that is seemingly just doing away with the ownership of media that people have.

And before we go forward, I get Asmongold's bullshit take about "Oh, you don't actually own the disc." Yeah, dumb motherfucker, you don't actually own the disc, but your ability to access those games Right? Has been there for almost all old media in general. Very few games from the PlayStation 4 era or the PlayStation 3 era are locked off if you have the disc, okay?

You can play them. And I know what many of you are thinking. I guess piracy is just gonna happen again. And to be fair, according to the data, that trend has already started. A UK study in 2022 revealed that at least one in 10 gamers pirated a game, 30% stating that it was due to being unable to afford the game at market price, while 15% stated that it was due to boycotting the distributor by denying them a direct sale.

That number rose to a fifth of respondents in 2023 in terms of who pirates games in general. Now, I know a lot of people are actually really worried about this in terms of, ownership of the things you buy and the way all this is happening with corporations. So I'll give you a couple things to look at.

Number one, Sony is feeling the heat from this, right? They went quiet on their social media for, 24 hours afterwards because of how bad this is, right? I have been somebody on big organic social teams. I was on the Apple Music organic social team. It's a lot to cancel that many scheduled posts. Go tell the managers of any FGC event, "Hey, cancel all of your scheduled posts for the day," and watch them go, "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Number two, this is not the first time Sony has tried to do this, failed, and backtracked, right? The PSP Go was a huge example of this. As soon as it... B- by the way, just in case you don't know, the PSP Go was a small little PSP variant they released, and they were like, "You know what? No UMDs." They even had their own fucking media for PSP, but they were like, "No more UMDs.

We're just gonna ha- You just download the games on the PSP Go, and you go." And it looked really cool, and it sold like shit, and nearly tanked, a ton of the PlayStation division, okay? All right? It was a huge fucking fumble, and then soon afterwards, they went back to "Oh yeah, get the UMD. We'll print the media."

But obviously the landscape has changed quite a bit since the PSP Go, right? And Sony does own a large share of the console market, but they don't own all of it, and there is still some significant competition that exists, and an avenue through competition that can put some pressure on Sony. It's what's going on with Adobe right now.

Adobe's actually a similar story to Sony, right? Back in the day, they were actually, the black sheep of editing software. Photoshop was still enormous, but Adobe Premiere was specifically not super widely used, right? Adobe Audition was laughable even after they bought s- things like Cool Edit Pro.

Real rappers know what I'm talking about. But After Final Cut Pro, which was the Apple program for editing, shit the bed out, Final Cut Pro was dominant on everything, right? After they screwed up, suddenly over years of being super creator-friendly, and being really smart and ahead of the curve with, making sure that it could do really amazing things universally, Adobe Premiere became the dominant editing program in everybody's ecosystem.

Adobe Premiere, After Effects, it was a lock. if you've followed Adobe over the last five or six years, what I just said may seem like fucking blasphemy because these days Adobe sucks. They are super shitty to all of the people who pay them to use their product, right? Their subscription model is a fucking headache.

The prices are insane, and the technology does do more at times, but glitches other major things that are reliable consistently. There is a continuous vocal frustration with everybody I know who uses Adobe, and guess what? A lot of those people, a lot, are shifting to DaVinci Resolve for video editing, which has been catching up with Adobe and does not have the same pitfalls that Adobe does, right?

There are other similar programs also out to replace other Adobe things, like Illustrator and Photoshop. The share of people leaving Adobe and churning has substantially grown over the last few years. There's real movement here, boosting up alternatives and taking the place of whatever was really being shitted to creatives.

The same is happening in the music world, too. Pro Tools is no longer the widespread industry standard. A lot of places use Logic, a lot of places use Ableton. Even Ableton is behind the times in some places. Dominant camera systems like Canon and Sony Alpha are getting a lot of competition from, Nikon.

There are so many industries with examples similar to this, where technology is just pushed on people in a very anti-consumer way, and there are opportunities in all of those instances to actively push big companies into listening to consumers because we're buying your shit, motherfucker. If you don't notice, corporations push really hard to put you in a box, and there are some places where there is slippage.

It doesn't need to be a huge setback for the corporation. In fact, a lot of times, huge statements, corporations just think they can ride out the storm and get away with it. "Oh, they're just being dramatic right now," right? But small little things like, hey, GTA underperformed just a little bit. It didn't do as amazing...

It's gonna do amazing in sales, but it didn't, do as amazing as we thought it would. It missed projections a little bit. And PlayStation sales have kinda slowed down, And not a lot of people seem super hype about the PlayStation 6 or 12 or whatever the fuck, right? Just a little bit.

People aren't renewing their PSN. Man, digital sales are a little bit slow this quarter. And suddenly you have two consecutive quarters where, hey, things are underperforming a little bit. And corporations don't treat that as nothing, they treat it like, holy shit, the Titanic is sinking, and freak the fuck out.

I am not saying we're 100% out of the woods and we're gonna be okay. I am not saying this is a nothing burger and it doesn't actually matter. Absolutely does matter. Really frustrating and angering and scary shit. But I am saying, like I did at the end of 2024, we are in the middle of a massive hurricane.

Discomfort feels like this. You're not supposed to feel, just super chill in a fight. It's uncomfortable. You're fighting somebody. You're getting hit, right? And there are alternatives to the triple A studios. There are alternatives here to than just having to give Sony your money. Use them. Use those alternatives, and then you won't have to follow Sony, they'll have to follow you.

Perhaps 10 years ago, there would've been some genuine excitement for this, not just because most of the people already familiar with the franchise would be still alive, but because back then it was still an interesting novelty to see old children's media interpreted as serious action movies.

But it's 2026, we've seen that stuff. We've seen all of the stuff we liked as kids already adapted into movies. W- it's not surprising anymore, it's expected. Pardon me if I sound cynical, but I don't think that this is, a story someone was burning to tell. They have interpreted the He-Man mythos, which was already extremely shallow, in the least interesting way that one could.

There is nothing here other than nostalgia, and I'm not sure if that nostalgia matters anymore. who is this movie for? I'm one of the very few people old and brain-damaged enough to have actually watched this Stone Age cartoon when it aired, and I certainly don't give a shit. Does Gen Z think He-Man is based?

I was certain He-Man was unk. I guess I should explain to the youngs. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an American cartoon series which premiered in 1983 about the adventures of a man who was very strong and his friends, who were likewise strong in variously toyetic ways. The characters would ride their trademark vehicles, use their trademark weapons, and go to lots of landscapes with potential play features.

The show, you might be surprised to learn, was produced to promote a toy line of the same name. It is the ur-example of a television show designed merely to sell toys. The toy line itself wasn't even original. It was conceived as a line of Conan the Barbarian toys and then hastily reworked into a generic space fantasy when they couldn't get the Conan license.

At its core, the Masters of the Universe is a group of characters that all have suspiciously similar body shapes in order to save time molding new dolls, each with their own play gimmick. Maybe one of them stinks or has a big fist and fists really well. Then, working backwards, fictional lore and world-building was hastily cobbled together at the last minute.

All of this was possible because just two years prior, then American president and Lord of the Pit, Ronald Reagan, appointed Mark Fowler as head of the FCC, who oversaw the complete deregulation of laws regarding advertising to children on television. Fowler argued that televisions were just another appliance.

It's a toaster with pictures.

Should someone have to have a government-issued license to drive a car?

Hell no. What's next, requiring a license to make toast in your own damn toaster?

In addition to being such a dismal view of the medium of television and the artistic merit of television programming, it's also just such a, a dumb argument.

'Cause, in this analogy, the TV is the toaster. That makes the TV shows the bread. so are you saying we shouldn't regulate the contents of bread? W- we don't need to do that because a toaster is very simple to operate, and therefore one should expect that the bread is full of who knows what, and you just, you

It might have glass in it, and that's fine. is that your analogy? Children's programming, which at the time, due to the tireless activism of groups like ACT, had previously been characterized by educational and enriching content, gave way to an onslaught of stimulating but ultimately vacuous toy commercials.

G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Transformers, M.A.S.K., Rainbow Brite, Thundercats. All were designed as toys first, and stories, including Saturday morning cartoons, were commissioned after the fact to promote sales of those toys. They are not made to communicate something, not to entertain. They are made to sell something.

Fast-forward 40 years, and that pattern of cynical extraction now manifests in gruesome AI-generated videos of pregnant cat people shitting themselves to death. Mark Fowler is smiling up at us from hell. He's not dead, but he worked for the devil, so I just assume he spends a lot of time there. This movie is a reboot of a commercial for a toy conceived as a means to profit off of an unrelated property.

It is hard to imagine something more crass and commercialist than that. We're, like, 50 layers deep on the simulacra and simulation here. On what level does any of this reflect anything real at this point? What are we trying to say with this film? Does it matter? Will having an emotionally affecting story arc sell more collectible Castle Grayskull and/or Skeletor popcorn buckets, which Collider reports are shaping up to be the coolest popcorn buckets of 2026 so far?

yeah, probably it would. People would wanna buy more merchandise if they were emotionally invested in the story, but th- that's not my point. My point is that all of this, eh, this movie, it is technically art. Nothing about it is outside the definition of art, but something about it feels perverse to me.

this isn't a movie, this is content. Thi- this is a lifeless, dead thing kept moving to distract you from the emptiness at its center. It is distinct from AI slop with Subway Surfer footage overlaid to keep your attention, only in terms of the skill of execution, not in its intrinsic value. And I say all of this, but it's also like it is half an inch away from shit I do and consume with two O's.

I'm excited for them to shovel a new Spider-Man movie into my fat gullet. I have never enjoyed a Spider-Man movie, except Spider-Verse, obviously. I'm not that much of a contrarian. I don't think I can seriously make the claim that my distaste for this crass, commercialist He-Man movie is principled when I am standing up, hooting and hollering for the crass, commercialist Spider-Man movie that I'm almost guaranteed to hate, but will pay money to see anyway.

Did you know that he can shoot a web? Not only that, but that web can be of any size. I'd like to see that on the big screen. Am I stupid? Am I a stupid idiot person? Am I 11 years old? When the romantic poet and painter William Blake was four years old, he beheld the face of God pressing against his window in a beatific vision.

Blake's works often invoke biblical imagery, but recontextualized to suit his own grand ad hoc mystical framework. I wonder if the heavens were to open themselves to me, to reveal the beauty and infinitude of creation, would I look upon this and say to myself, "This is just like my beloved Superman comic books."?

Would I demand a Lego set of the Monad? My first introduction to William Blake, likely yours as well, was his most famous poem, The Tiger, which is a metaphysical description of the cruelties of nature and how they're simultaneously beautiful, destructive, and necessary. The Tiger comes from Blake's Songs of Experience, the corollary to a poem in his previous collection, the Songs of Innocence, called The Lamb, which I only read while writing this portion of the video because my enjoyment of Blake's work is markedly superficial.

I enjoy the grandiosity of it, the spooky, mystical sense that Blake had received magic wisdom from the cosmos, and some dark part of me wants to impress people by pretending to be more invested in Blake's work than I actually am, but I don't, maybe can't, engage with Blake's work the way he would have wanted.

My introduction to the poetry of William Blake came from a frankly middling episode of Batman: The Animated Series, where Catwoman becomes a literal Catwoman. Roughly a third of the audience has now clicked off this video to go watch and/or masturbate to that. I'm not trying to make the argument that this shit or shit like it are intrinsically devoid of artistic merit.

I might have facetiously said that earlier in the video. I don't actually think that. I probably should be making that argument, but in my heart of hearts, I don't believe that. All of these properties are occasionally elevated by the efforts of the hundreds of talented writers and artists who were hired to breathe life into them.

The He-Man cartoon that I demonized for being just a toy commercial was one of the first gigs of a young J. Michael Straczynski, whose later comic book work, incidentally, is the major inspiration for the new Spider-Man movie. But, they'll definitely get it wrong. They can never make a good Spider-Man movie.

Just as I'm sure there are probably thousands of talented artists wasting their precious lives on this new Masters of the Universe movie. There are things to like within all of this. There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see. You're not stupid or shallow if you like these things. I hope not, 'cause I like these things, and I'm not sure I should, but I do.

I wonder if the reason I like these things is because I've been conditioned to like them, if my brain was hijacked at the right age with no regard for how it might affect my development and coerced into forming an appetite for this type of mental junk food, and often literal junk food as well. Does any of it actually appeal to me, or have I just been convinced that it does by marketing to such an extent that I can no longer tell the difference?

Has my imagination been so thoroughly colonized? And for that matter, which would be worse? That I like juvenile, violent, power fantasies because I was primed to like them? Or that I'm just like that naturally. Sure, I might rationalize all of it to myself by pretending there's some hidden depth to the childish genre fiction I'm so obsessed with, but all of that is simply an excuse to indulge in mindless consumerist masturbation.

Sometimes literal masturbation. It's fine for adults to like childish things. Naturally, it's fine for an adult to watch and enjoy a children's movie or read a YA book or whatever, but increasingly, I do feel like, at least for me, my entire media diet is for little babies. Some of it might have content not appropriate for babies, but very seldomly do I feel like any of it engages with, a mature idea, like something that resonates with me as an adult on emotional levels.

A- and I wonder, would I even recognize them if they did? My generation are known for our arrested development. Millennials never grew up. We love to complain about how we were robbed of all the traditional ways that someone transitions into adulthood: getting a job, buying a house, having children, getting really into model trains, having an affair, all completely out of reach to us.

Our entry into grown-up life was sabotaged at every turn by economic and political factors beyond our control. Lacking agency over our lives has rendered us psychologically incapable of accepting responsibility for those lives. Whereas later generations saw the writing on the wall, millennials like me generally expected to, at some point- be okay eventually.

everything's gonna be fine eventually, right? 'Cause it always has been, right? Coming out of COVID, Austin, Texas was booming.

Its status as a trendy tech hub was burgeoning pre-COVID, but the emergence from the pandemic seemed to supercharge the phenomena as Texas relaxed social distancing restrictions early, and the capital became a magnet for remote workers looking for warm weather and comparatively low cost of living.

Naturally, this large influx of transplanted high earners drove airport traffic up. Whereas the country overall only experienced full demand recovery in April 2023, Austin saw it a year earlier in April 2022. Its airport was not considered a hub by any of the big three US airlines. They all serviced it, but only as an out station predominantly with flights to and from their hubs.

American saw this as an opportunity, and in summer 2021 started to massively expand their network from the city. Whereas they started the year servicing just eight destinations from Austin, they ended with almost 40, driving an almost fivefold increase in seat count. Part of the logic was to counter Delta's growth at the airport.

They'd named Austin a focus city just before the pandemic, but then hadn't done much to grow their network there yet, so American wanted to preempt that. The airport had a rule that essentially in order for an airline to retain use of a gate, they had to operate at least seven daily departures out of it.

Of course, the airport was built before Austin's massive boom and was therefore operating close to capacity. If American could operate enough flights out of Austin, it could take up enough gates to prevent Delta from growing, ensuring it majority market share until the airport's major expansion project wrapped up in the 2030s, by which time all the new Austinites would've become loyal American Airline flyers.

At least that was the theory. The problem was, despite tremendous growth, the Austin market didn't yet have the demand to support a fivefold increase in seat count. American attempted to rectify this by operating many of these services with smaller regional aircraft. But then that ran afoul of their longstanding agreement with the union that represents their pilots.

They'd agreed to only operate a certain quantity of non-hub flights with regional aircraft, given that regional pilots are paid less than their mainline colleagues, and Austin was now pushing them above that limit. By 2023, the Austin bubble was beginning to burst. Housing prices had inflated to such a high that it no longer had that cost of living advantage, and half as many people moved to the city than the year prior.

With this stagnating growth, American's already beleaguered strategy made even less sense, and just like in Seattle, they were forced to give up, dramatically paring back their schedule. Once again, they just wasted time, resources, and money trying to make Austin work, and it just didn't. And incredulously, as they were floundering over the Pacific and inundating Austin, American also wasted time, resources, and money on another failed strategy in the Northeast.

They called it the Northeast Alliance. Just as American has long been the weakest of the big three at LAX, so too did it fall behind in New York. They have the smallest market share of the highly valuable market and little ability to rectify that given the capacity constraints at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark.

Their solution was collusion. They partner with JetBlue, co-chair their flights, share revenue, and coordinate their networks to be compatible with each other, gaining the scale to meaningfully compete. In practice, what this looked like was, for example, American terminating its Orlando route, allowing JetBlue to up its flying to the city and reallocating the American aircraft to other expanded routes.

In total, they cut 18 destinations, but 10 of those were really just handing them over to JetBlue while American focused on expanded long-haul service with new flights to Santiago, Athens, Tel Aviv, Doha, and New Delhi. It was a complex network-wide reconfiguration that the airlines argued added up to greater than the sum of its parts.

And that argument was existentially important because the Department of Justice didn't love the look of the alliance. They thought it was bad for competition. Therefore, the DOJ sued on antitrust grounds. In court, the alliance's strategy was to argue that it was actually good for competition rather than bad since American and JetBlue were weak competitors to United and Delta in the city, and therefore, that one strong competitor would help weaken the duopoly more than two weak ones.

Ultimately, the judge was not convinced, stating that this was the wrong argument to be making entirely as American antitrust law focuses on preserving competition rather than building it through strengthening a rival. So the pair were forced to terminate their partnership and, as part of it, their networks reverted to more or less what they'd been previously.

Here, too, in yet another instance, American had just wasted time, resources, and money trying to make the Northeast Alliance work and it just didn't. With revenue faltering, American looked for ways to cut costs, and one solution that proved attractive was declaring war on travel agencies. While widespread use of travel agents was largely ended by the internet, agencies are still used by companies to handle their corporate travel.

These agencies will ensure that bookings follow company policies around cost, fare class, refundability, and more, and American believed they had leverage and therefore rolled out a series of changes attempting to get these agencies to work more on their terms. In particular, they really wanted agencies to stop using the antiquated GDS booking system.

This had been the predominant way agency and airline systems communicated with each other for decades, but it was costly to operate and lacked certain capabilities. American wanted them to switch to the new NDC system, but agencies were reluctant to spend tons of money redeveloping their IT when it didn't benefit them.

From the agency perspective, the status quo worked. From American's perspective, it did too, but it was costlier than the newer alternative and provided less opportunity for upsells and ancillaries. The biggest stick in this fight was American pulling the cheapest 40% of fares from that old system, only allowing them to be booked through the new one.

That essentially meant that agencies that lacked compatibility with the new system would only be able to book their clients higher priced tickets, making them uncompetitive. Then they only added to the disincentive by eliminating mileage earning on bookings made through these non-compliant agencies.

There were myriad other carrots and sticks in this campaign, but in broad strokes, it was American believing that they could cut out the middleman and create a better, more lucrative relationship with corporate customers. They were, unsurprisingly, wrong. En masse, agencies chose not to comply with American's demands and rather just avoided booking on American.

And corporate customers didn't circumvent agencies en masse, they just kept the status quo and gave more business to American's competitors. By summer 2024, American reversed their changes, but the endeavor was estimated to have led to $1.5 billion in revenue loss in its first year, and the consequences of burned bridges undoubtedly still remain.

Yet again, American wasted time, resources, and money trying to make this new corporate sales strategy work, and it just didn't. As American distracted themselves with fruitless new strategies for Seattle, Boston, the Northeast, and corporate sales, there was also the matter of what they weren't doing. They weren't focused on their Chicago hub, allowing for its continued decline while United expanded its market share in the valuable city.

The airline offered 21% fewer seats from Chicago in 2024 relative to 2019, while United's capacity remained roughly equal. As a consequence, not only did American lose the loyalty of plenty of the city's customers, but they lost highly valuable gates, too. Much like in Austin, the city of Chicago allocates its gates based on usage and American was under-utilizing theirs.

Therefore, the city took four from the airline, whereas United, after a reshuffling that included plenty of the airport's other airlines, would gain five and be able to further build up their hub. American escalated this all the way into a prolonged lawsuit, but eventually, they lost that, too. American hasn't been in such a poor financial position relative to its rivals for over a decade now.

Quarter after quarter, it's earning billions less than Delta and United. Understandably, this has lit a fire under what's left of its management team. Vasu Raja, the chief commercial officer that oversaw the squeeze on travel agencies, was shown the door in June 2024 and the airline started to steadily rebuild its corporate sales team.

A steady drip of 787s are being delivered, building capacity in that still hot long-haul market. With those deliveries, the airline is righting one of its past issues. Business class is by far the most profitable part of the plane, and demand for business class travel has been tremendously strong in recent years as consumer spending on travel grew.

But American's planes have always been under-indexed on these seats. Their 787-9s, for example, only had 30 business class seats to United's 48. That left revenue on the table, but with these new 787 deliveries, American has rolled out a new configuration with 51 lie-flat seats. They're also fixing the hole left by retiring their 757s as they get ready to operate their first A321XLRs in the coming months.

Like the 757, these are narrow body aircraft configured for long-haul service with lie-flat business class seats and large fuel tanks enabling long range. And their introduction will allow American to improve the economics or expand to lower demand European destinations. But these changes more or less get American back to where it started pre-COVID, and pre-COVID, it was already in the worst financial position of the big three.

Over the past five years, the airline has hardly solved any of its major problems. It's only attempted to, and through these attempts, made the problems worse. American Airlines will need to find some major answers soon, lest it risk getting left in the dust, allowing the American airline industry to turn into a mere duopoly.

Now section C: The Rigged Machine.

Most of us are taught to think about the economy like this. If the world is calm, businesses make more money, people spend more, companies grow, and stocks go up. If the world is chaotic, businesses struggle, people spend less, companies make less money, and stocks go down.

sounds logical, and sometimes it's true, but only sometimes. The thing is, the stock market is not the economy. It's mostly a collection of big public companies. That means the stock market can go up while ordinary people are struggling. Look at this chart. It shows how much of the S&P 500 is made by each company.

And what you'll notice is that the index isn't as evenly spread out as people imagine. A tiny handful of giant companies make up a huge share of the whole thing. So when you hear that the S&P 500 just hit a record high, that doesn't necessarily mean the whole economy's booming. It might just mean that the biggest companies in the index are making enormous profits, or that investors believe they're going to make enormous profits in the future.

Meanwhile, your rent can still be unaffordable, your grocery bill can still hurt, your wages can still feel like they're going nowhere. Because the stock market isn't the economy. Sometimes it's just a scoreboard for the companies powerful enough to dominate it. Here's the second key idea. Markets don't always rally because the news is good.

Sometimes markets rally because the news is less terrible than people feared. Imagine you walk into school thinking you completely failed a test. You're expecting a D minus. Then your teacher hands it back and you got a C. Is a C amazing? No. But compared to what you expected, it feels like a win. Markets work the same way.

If investors are expecting the worst case scenario, such as oil prices exploding or trade routes shutting down, then even a tiny reduction in that fear can make stocks jump. This is why something as innocuous as one of Trump's tweets about getting closer to a ceasefire can cause markets to rally Now, let's talk about interest rates, and we'll make this really simple.

When interest rates are high, keeping money in the bank is more attractive. But now, imagine the bank cuts interest rates. Suddenly, more investors start thinking, "Why would I leave my money in the bank earning almost nothing, or maybe even getting eaten by inflation? I'd rather buy something that actually gives me a better return."

So they buy businesses, houses, stocks, gold, anything that might make them more money than cash sitting in the bank. And when lots of people want to buy the same assets, the prices of those assets go up. After the 2008 financial crisis, central banks cut rates aggressively. During the pandemic, rates were also extremely low.

The economy was crashing, so making money cheaper to borrow was a great way to try to get people spending, lending, and investing again, and that helped push up the price of almost everything: stocks, houses, bonds, private companies, collectibles, and even random internet coins with dog logos. But here's the weird part.

Recently, rates have been much higher than they were during the post-2008 and COVID periods. So the old explanation, stocks are only high because rates are low, doesn't fully explain what's happening now. This is where we need to talk about deficits and crisis spending. During a crisis, governments spend a lot of money to stop the economy from collapsing.

Sometimes that money goes directly to ordinary people. Sometimes it goes to companies. Sometimes it goes to banks. Sometimes it goes to defense contractors, energy companies, or bond holders. And over time, a lot of that money can end up in the hands of people and institutions that already own assets. Now, here's the important part.

When regular people get extra money, they usually spend it. They pay rent, buy food, pay bills, fix the car, replace the washing machine. But when very wealthy people or large institutions get extra money, they buy assets, stocks, property, bonds, companies. More extra money accumulating at the top means the demand for these assets rises.

And when demand for assets rises, asset prices rise. That's why the stock market keeps reaching new highs. It's a sign that wealth is becoming more concentrated at the top. If you already own lots of assets, rising prices make you richer. If you don't own assets, rising prices make it harder to ever catch up.

Politicians will point to stock market records as a sign that everything is going well

The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that. One year.

which in reality is proof of inequality. This is why the pandemic represents the biggest wealth transfer in history.

There's another layer too. People are losing trust in cash. When governments keep printing money during every crisis, money starts losing its value since more money in circulation means that the money everyone already has is less valuable. The US government is currently around $39 trillion in debt, and it's paying roughly $3 billion a day just in interest, not paying the debt down, just paying the cost of carrying it.

In this fragile economy, instead of holding cash, investors move the money into assets like stocks, houses, gold, Bitcoin, anything they think can hold value better than currency. Now, let's get to the point most financial news barely explains. These days, lots of trading is done automatically by algorithms, and algorithms don't sit around debating geopolitics.

They look at price. If the trend is down, they sell or short. If the trend fleets up, they buy. So when stocks suddenly jump through certain levels, these systems can flip from bearish to bullish. That creates another wave of buying. Then comes options dealers. Options are basically bets on whether stocks will go up or down.

A call option is a bet that stocks will go up. But here's the weird part. Sometimes one small piece of good news can turn into a huge rally. When lots of traders buy these call options, the big firms selling these contracts often protect themselves by buying the actual stocks. Trend following algorithms start buying, and all of that buying piles on top of itself.

So where does this lead? The stock market can't keep rising exponentially forever. Something's got to give. The real question isn't just why are stocks going up, it's who actually benefits when they do? The faster asset prices rise, the faster inequality rises. And I can only imagine that that's going to end in tears.

There's something funny about our economic system, isn't there? It's taken for granted that a successful economy is one that grows, and politicians and economists talk almost constantly about how best to encourage growth, foster it, and what to do if it falters, how to get it back on track. We refer to an economy that doesn't grow as stagnating.

In fact, we plan our lives according to the expectation of growth. In America, if we're lucky enough to have any savings at all, and 27% of Americans have no savings at all, while 41% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. We put it in a 401k plan invested in the market, or we buy index funds or mutual funds or whatever, because historically the markets have outperformed mere savings accounts or things like CDs that give you a guaranteed return.

The problem, of course, is that, as has been pointed out by plenty of people, growth can't continue forever. And as I've indicated in previous episodes, and we'll go deeper into here, there's reason to think maybe we're reaching some kind of plateau of actual growth even as the stock market continues to spiral upwards towards the sky with no referent to anything resembling real world economic conditions, like people being able to feed themselves or keep a roof over their heads.

But sustained economic growth is actually an extremely recent phenomenon in historical terms, dating back maybe 150 years or so before which what we think of as economic stagnation was the norm, and with it a lack of inflation as we know it. As the saying goes, past performance does not necessarily predict future results.

The question isn't will the economy stop growing, but when and under what conditions? And if it did begin to turn, to stop, perhaps to fall, we have no plan, no structure in place to deal with the destroyed retirement plans and plummeting GDP, the companies whose investors expect growth and who will initiate mass layoffs that will only accelerate the decline.

Nothing except to panic and try to, quote, "get the economy back on track" with government action. But there's no reason for growth to be necessary for an economy to function. In fact, if you wanted to, you could even do a carefully managed de-growth to do little things like save the planet, but no major politician I know of would dare suggest it.

No, growth isn't necessary for an economy to function, but it is what we've built our economy upon. And the reason is because it may not be necessary to function, but it is necessary to accumulate wealth. The reason is pretty simple. If you have a system in equilibrium, the inputs equal the outputs and don't accumulate at any given point.

If the inputs stop equaling the outputs, if wealth is hoarded up somewhere, eventually money ceases to circulate. If you have three people who each have one dollar they pass between them, now you've got an economy. But if one of the people takes first one dollar and then the other, now there's no more dollars circulating, no more economy.

However, if you keep injecting new dollars into the system, then one guy can keep taking extra dollars for himself as long as those sweet injections keep coming, and so they have to keep coming And no, this is not a tirade against fiat currency. If you think fiat currency is the problem, you're missing the forest for the trees.

It's true that if you inject money into the system without growth to sop it up, you end up with inflation, though if all the money goes straight to the top, all you get is asset inflation, as we'll see. But if you went back to the gold standard, you'd still need growth to absorb the money you create every time you dig up more gold.

Fiat currency has nothing to do with whether or not economic growth can continue. But there's only so much any person can spend on consumer goods, which is why while the ultra-rich might live lavish lifestyles, they still have and make more money than they can possibly spend. In economics, this is called the relative marginal propensity to consume.

And so they take that extra money and put it into investment assets that will make more money for them as passive income, which is to say earnings that don't require labor. That money may go to businesses that create new jobs and services and grow the economy, which is the ideal case in your classical economics textbook.

However, there are limits to how much can be spent on goods and services, and so just as often that money goes into different sorts of assets like gold, art, cryptocurrency, real estate, or whatever, which of course is another example of the insanity of infinite growth. You can't have housing be an investment vehicle that will always appreciate faster than inflation and have affordable housing.

And the oft-touted solution of merely building more housing will not by itself solve that paradox, only at best put it off to the future That money can even be used to buy government bonds, which are like taxes that fund the government, except instead of the rich person losing the money, they make a profit off of it on the backs of actual taxpayers.

But of course, it's also so much worse than that. When public companies have had money to invest in growth, they've often instead used that money on stock buybacks, which artificially inflate stock prices for shareholders without changing anything about the underlying business. And corporations have been buying six times more of their own stock than all stocks bought by regular stockholders.

Meanwhile, even a business investing in itself is no guarantee it will create many jobs. Indeed, to the contrary, companies have been falling over each other to invest in AI, with corporate spending on AI now greater than all spending on personal consumption put together. Meanwhile, the spending on AI has been linked to mass layoffs since AI is specifically touted as a technology that will generate profits by slashing labor costs.

Though as I talked about in my techno-feudalism episode, AI job elimination is in no small part a way of transforming well-paid work into the low-paid piecemeal work of training machine learning algorithms. There's absolutely nothing about corporate spending that necessarily promises job creation. To the contrary, corporations have every motivation to see how few workers they can get away with using, and the much heralded reshoring push in manufacturing is based chiefly not on bringing those jobs from overseas back here, but on automating most of them away.

Meanwhile, much of the spending on AI seems to be linked to different companies passing the same money back and forth in order to prop up each other and their stock prices. The result is a feedback loop of wealth continually accumulating at the top without any relation to the wages that actually form most people's income.

Today, 10% of Americans own 93% of the stock market, 1% of Americans own 54% of the stock market, and the trend has been toward greater consolidation, with that number up from 40% in 2002. And of course, the public stock market is only a tiny part of the picture that also includes things like hedge funds and private equity, which non-rich people aren't even permitted to invest in.

Meanwhile, 48% of Americans have no investment assets at all. Indeed, even most consumer spending has nothing to do with average Americans anymore, with the top 10% of Americans by income accounting for nearly half of consumer spending, while the bottom 60% by income account for a bare 10% of consumer spending.

It's like the entire economy is being sucked up into the upper echelons of society with no reference to the rest of us. Indeed, there seems to be a way that the government deliberately funnels money to the top, not just through using debt from bond issuance to the wealthy instead of the taxes they should be using, but also through things like quantitative easing, which seeks to inject money into the economy by buying back bonds, but not canceling those bonds' debt pivotally, just hanging on to them.

The government effectively and paradoxically owing itself money. This money, of course, goes to the rich people who own the bulk of bonds, who then spend it on other investment assets, which as we've seen, seem to funnel much more to the top than the bottom. During the pandemic, forgivable loans to companies totaled at nine hundred and fifty-three billion and went to figures including billionaires like Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Trump supporting property developer, Joe Farrell, Kanye West, and the Church of Scientology.

And the majority of which free money actually went on to line bosses' pockets rather than actually, quote, unquote, "Protecting paychecks." And this was more money than payments given directly to individuals throughout the pandemic, nine hundred and thirty-one billion, and even that direct stimulus was an outrage to certain corners who warned it would lead to inflation.

However, the evidence is that the stimulus payments only caused a very small amount of inflation, which shouldn't be surprising, both considering how small a piece of the economy spending by the average consumer has become and how consumer spending is the thing that actually creates the kind of economic growth that then soaks up those extra dollars before they can become inflation.

The Biden administration did have some fun on Shitter pointing out politicians complaining about moochers wanting loan forgiveness, who themselves received forgiven loans. Funneling money to the top, on the other hand, just causes asset price inflation, as we've seen, but everyone cheers when the stock market goes up.

The equation, by the way, that explains the fundamental rot at the core of the system is R is greater than G. This equation appears in the magisterial tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, which upon its publication in 2014 caused an unexpected sensation for an economics text. R in this equation is the return on investments.

G is economic growth. In other words, the return on investments increases faster than the growth of the economy as a whole. Part of the brilliance of this insight is its simplicity. The growth of wages is linked to the growth of the economy as a whole, and so if the growth of investment returns outpaces the growth of the economy, the result is ever-increasing wealth inequality.

Capitalism on paper is dependent on economic and technological growth. On paper, the idea is that everybody gets a slice of the pie, and if we make a really, really big pie that keeps growing, then everybody can get fat. And not only is that example a literal one when we look at the American obesity epidemic, but capitalism also led to agricultural innovation and global supply chains and wealth creation in developing countries that played a huge part in decreasing global hunger.

It's worth recognizing that in 1970, one-third of the people on this planet were starving, and now that number is down to about 8.2%. How much of that achievement can be awarded to capitalism can be debated, but ignoring that this drop in famine happened in a time when all but four countries rely on a capitalist structure would be disingenuous.

Let's revisit that on paper part. So like even if we limit our examples to Coca-Cola, who I seem to frequently use for economic examples for some reason, capitalism leads to a lot of evil shit. In the early 2000s, Coca-Cola was suspected to have hired right-wing paramilitary death squads to assassinate union leaders.

Coca-Cola is the number one top plastic polluter in the world despite their constant marketing of their sustainability goals. They've caused water shortages in Latin America and India by depleting local aquifers. They have bottling partners that have been repeatedly accused of human rights violations and suppressing union organization.

They have Israeli franchises that have sourced their resources from occupied Palestinian territories, which is considered illegal under international law. Is the existence of capitalism the problem here? Most progressive people would answer that question with a resounding yes. I think it's debatable. I would argue that most of these things that Coke did violate the rules written by capitalist governments, and the problem is greed, which is a byproduct of jealousy.

Since capitalism is frequently associated with hoarding more resources than your neighbors, we tend to associate capitalism with being a douchebag, and that's totally fair. So much so that we even get popular memes and fake Karl Marx quotes "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism," which is a completely sane and reasonable thing to shout at lemonade stands and farmers markets.

The reason I'm discussing this to begin with is to highlight what American capitalism means on paper and how apparently nobody has seen that paper in decades.

One thing that I regret not covering enough in my last video was what happened between the Great Depression and the 2000s. Let's go back to 1933, and I think we need a Holton scale for this.

Hey, I'm in 1933. Shit sucks. Nobody has any money. I've been eating shit like dandelions and potato soup, and a bunch of poorly thought out ways to eat hot dogs. All this happened because a bunch of people got really greedy and borrowed more money than they could ever pay back and invested it in wheat.

What is the deal with that?

Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration was both aware of capitalism's potential to increase the

American quality of life, but also its potential to cannibalize itself. And it is truly remarkable to me that nearly 100 years ago they saw the exact same mechanism that's playing out today.

And this was at a time when some of your baseball-watching and apple pie-eating Americans were still on the fence about communism, and they had solid representation via the CPUSA. A lot of American citizens believed that the Soviet Union was a rising egalitarian society that was immune to the Western economic crisis that they were experiencing.

The New Deal took this into serious consideration, and ultimately wasn't about social services or directly addressing wealth inequality like the Soviet Union, but instead about sticking to the whole freedom thing and redefining capitalism in a way that would allow Americans to organically solve these problems using their own capitalist motivations.

All of this kicked off with the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. No longer would a commercial bank that provided consumer and business loans be allowed to deal with, underwrite, or invest in private securities, and investment banks would no longer be able to take consumer deposits. So to give you an example, JP Morgan was forced to start a separate business for all the risky stuff, and that eventually became Morgan Stanley.

This act also created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC. This guaranteed that if you had money in a commercial bank and that bank failed or went out of business, you would be guaranteed reimbursement up to a specified limit. All of this, combined with a whole lot of historically progressive labor laws and a tiny little skirmish called World War II, set America up to make the most savvy financial move in the history of trade You know those crazy conspiracy stories where the elite Illuminati members will meet up somewhere in the woods and decide how they'll control the world?

That actually kinda happened, and to some degree, the economic fate of you and your family was decided in that meeting. Towards the end of the Second World War in July of 1944, delegates from 44 Allied nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire with the goal of designing and negotiating a post-war financial system.

At the time, pretty much the entire world was economically devastated, but due to our size and geographic isolation, American soil was mostly untouched by the war. We also held between 70 and 80% of the world's gold reserves and were easily the largest manufacturing economy on the planet. The Bretton Woods compromise offered a way that countries could facilitate international trade with a trusted currency without having to lug literal bars of gold everywhere.

The United States pegged the US dollar strictly to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce, and it was guaranteed that any foreign bank could turn in $35 and receive a physical ounce of gold from Fort Knox. Then every other nation in this agreement pegged their individual currency to the US dollar, which was then used exclusively for trading commodities such as oil with one another.

Normally, if a country spends more money than it takes in, their currency and spending power would devalue, which would cause domestic inflation. But now the world would need to use US dollars to conduct any form of trade, and over time, the US started printing more and more dollars to import commodities like consumer goods and oil from other nations without having to worry about the US dollar losing value.

Another advantageous side effect of this was a unique type of stagnation. While watching America go on a shopping spree, other nations realized that their US dollars would lose value just sitting in a vault somewhere, so their safest option at the time was to buy US Treasury bonds. This created and inflated an extraordinary global demand for US government debt, allowing us to borrow money for absurdly low interest rates to fund our infrastructure and become the most powerful military in the history of the world By the late 1960s, the world started losing confidence in this system.

Economists like Milton Friedman and Robert Triffin saw this as a flawed and dangerous economic rule set. One of the US gold standard's sharpest critics was French President Charles de Gaulle, who frequently publicly condemned the monetary system, calling it an exorbitant privilege. And de Gaulle called the US out on their bluff and demanded to trade massive amounts of US dollars for American gold.

Between 1963 and 1966, 24 secret boat trips supervised by the French Navy and several flights crossed the Atlantic Ocean carrying back a total of 3,313 tons of gold from America. This would be worth nearly half a trillion dollars today. After printing and spending incredibly reckless amounts of money on the Vietnam War, the American government knew that the jig was up.

The wild conspiracy theory that the American dollar wasn't actually in parity with American gold was now a frequent public discussion by international leaders. Nobody knows how far out of parity gold and US dollar was, but it wouldn't exactly be a stretch of the imagination to think that if England or Japan or any other large nation decided to cash in their currency like France did, there'd be no more gold left to give them.

So instead, on August 15th, 1971, President Nixon addressed the nation and told Americans that they were, in fact, the victims of the Bretton Woods Agreement.

The speculators have been waging an all-out war on the American dollar I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators.

He ambiguously villainized and referred to West Germany and Japan as international speculators and accused them of creating economic crises to rob money from Americans. He drew vague parallels between himself and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he announced a new deal of his own. In order to protect Americans from these international speculators, the US dollar, the currency in which world trade almost exclusively took place, would no longer be backed by gold or anything tangible.

If you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.

Over the next few years, the inflation rate of the US dollar doubled, and the US and most of the Western world entered into a severe recession. OPEC, or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, tried to price oil against gold to create international economic stability, but this led to even less stability.

This made previous oil production complications much worse, and oil prices quadrupled from three dollars per barrel to twelve dollars per barrel overnight. And by the end of the decade, crude oil prices skyrocketed by roughly one thousand percent. As a result, gas stations could no longer afford to resupply their storage tanks, and in many places, Americans would spend entire days waiting to fill up their vehicles.

In the North, many people reverted to heating their homes with wood-burning stoves, and in an effort to save fuel, Nixon ordered that the maximum speed limit be set to fifty-five miles per hour nationwide. This led to truckers going on strike, and they started coordinating via citizen band radios, inventing their own slang and terms to confuse law enforcement.

Many of those who were on strike spent their time slashing tires, shooting trucks, and dropping cinder blocks from bridges on non-participating truck drivers. More than a few people were killed over these disputes, and the entire country suffered enormous supply chain disruptions. And then Nixon had another one of his brilliant ideas.

In 1973, he signed a bill extending daylight savings time to last the entire year. As violent crime rates rose to the highest point in recorded American history and children walked to school in total darkness because there was not enough fuel for their school bus, Americans rightfully started wondering if the people in charge had no idea what they were doing

The only thing that has ever really forced change is enough people refusing to accept the status quo, and that all begins with awareness. The more people who actually understand what's happening, the harder it will be for the top to keep pretending that this is normal or that it will somehow just magically get better.

It won't. The widening of the gap will continue. So if this video made you see things differently, share it, talk about it. Make sure people around you understand and start seeing the bigger picture because once you see it, you can't unsee it

You've probably heard of the term maximizing shareholder value before. It's the idea of putting the company's stock price above everything else. But here's the thing, there is no legal rule or law that obligates corporations to maximize shareholder value. And if you're anything like me, when you first hear that, you'll think, "Wait, what?"

it seems like everywhere we look today, we see another example of a public company and their pursuit of endless growth. So if that is in fact true, and these companies aren't bound by some corporate law to do this, then why does it seem like they are? And why do we hear this term of fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns?

that's my job, that's our board's job, is to do whatever we can to create value for shareholders.

what if I was to tell you that this idea has largely been made up and manipulated over decades by a small group of powerful investors and economists? And as a result, it's leading to some of the worst decisions in not only corporate history, but also in the US economy.

Now, I promise you, this topic, however boring it may seem on the surface, is so vitally important to understand because, not only do very few people ever talk about it, but this absolutely affects every single one of us. So today, we're gonna look at how investors, executives, and boards push companies to destroy themselves, all under the guise of creating value.

The Justice Department began legal action today against BP and other companies involved in the Gulf Oil spill. Nine companies were named in a civil lawsuit aimed at recovering billions of dollars in the largest offshore oil spill in US history. In Washington, Attorney General Eric Holder said the companies failed to live up to safety standards.

But in order to understand how such a powerful misconception can come to dominate an entire economy, we need to talk about one crucial legal case that dates back to nineteen nineteen. This was the year of the landmark Ford versus Dodge case. The case centered around Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, and two shareholders, the Dodge brothers.

See, Ford had decided he wanted to reinvest profits back into the company, increasing workers' wages and expanding operations. But the Dodge brothers argued that Ford was not acting in the best interest of shareholders by choosing to grow the company rather than paying out those profits as dividends.

Now, the Michigan Supreme Court ended up siding with the Dodge brothers, ruling that Ford was in fact obligated to maximize profits for shareholders, even if that meant limiting reinvestment in the company's future. In the book, The Shareholder Value Myth, author Lynn Stout points out that the Ford versus Dodge ruling didn't actually set a binding legal precedent.

Unlike what many assume, this case hasn't been widely cited to justify shareholder primacy in later court decisions. It was also unique in the fact that Ford wasn't even a publicly traded company at the time, meaning that the ruling didn't involve the kind of corporate governance issues that most modern shareholder disputes do.

And I know I'm getting in the weeds here, but just trust me that this context is crucial to understanding this topic as a whole. See, Ford's decision to reinvest in the company and raise wages wasn't about altruism. It was a strategic move to boost worker productivity and create a more stable customer base.

He believed that if his employees could afford the very cars they were producing, it would drive demand and fuel long-term growth. The court ultimately ruled that Ford had to distribute a dividend, but not in the full amount the Dodge brothers were demanding. And crucially, the judge didn't block Ford's ability to continue reinvesting in the company.

Yet despite all of this, the case became one of the first to institutionalize the idea, not the legal requirement, that companies should focus on the financial interest of shareholders rather than stakeholders. That includes employees, customers, suppliers, or even the broader community at large. This shift in focus helped lay the groundwork for the shareholder primacy myth that dominates corporate thinking today.

And if we fast forward to the 1970s, this idea of maximizing shareholder wealth had become the ultimate goal of businesses. And here's where influential economist Milton Friedman comes into play. In 1970, Friedman famously argued that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, and that anything else, from social causes to employee welfare, was simply just a distraction.

Friedman's stance was clear: the only obligation corporations had was to their shareholders, and this wasn't about long-term health of the company or wellbeing of its workers. It was about driving short-term profits and maximizing shareholder returns. He believed that any attempt to divert from this goal, whether for social responsibility or for long-term growth, was not just unwise, but immoral.

And this is where we first really begin to see how morals are playing a role into this idea. But as you can probably tell, this philosophy had huge implications. It became a guiding principle for corporate America, legitimizing the idea that companies should be driven almost entirely by the pursuit of shareholder value.

And since you're watching this video, I'll just assume you can spot this kind of philosophy in just about every public company one way or another in their never ending pursuit of growth. But not just any kind of growth, profit driven growth. And this has opened the door for what's known as activist investors, which are corporate groups of investors that buy up large amounts of shares in a public company in an effort to try to pressure them into changes which are generally centered around short-term profits, but not always.

Now, even if they are at the expense of the company's future, workers, and even consumers, they will still often push for short-term profits. So while the idea of this shareholder primacy may seem like common sense in the world of business, it's actually rooted in a myth that's been perpetuated for decades, especially in the wake of Milton Friedman's theories.

In the book The Shareholder Value Myth, author Lynn Stout argues that corporate law never required companies to prioritize maximizing shareholder value. In fact, there's no legal obligation for corporations to focus on short-term profits at the expense of other interests.

When you look at economics, economic theory doesn't support the notion that you have to maximize shareholder value either.

Let's start with the idea that shareholders own corporations. Legally, that's just plain wrong. Corporations as legal persons own themselves. What shareholders own is a contract with the corporation called a share of stock that gives shareholders very limited rights, just as creditors have debt contracts with corporations and employees have employment contracts.

Shareholders don't own companies. Companies own themselves.

Stout says, "To put it bluntly, conventional shareholder value thinking is a mistake for most firms, and a big mistake at that. Shareholder value thinking causes corporate managers to focus myopically on short-term earnings reports at the expense of long-term performance, discourages investment and innovation, harms employees, customers, and communities, and causes companies to indulge in reckless, sociopathic, and socially irresponsible behaviors.

It threatens the welfare of consumers, employees, communities, and investors alike." Now, Stout argues that businesses should consider a wider range of stakeholders when making decisions. Now, I wanna give you a stark example of this short-term shareholder first thinking, the 2010 BP oil spill. This was one of the worst environmental disasters in history.

In the years leading up to the spill, BP had aggressively cut costs and prioritized shareholder returns despite clear warnings about safety risks. Internal reports had flagged serious concerns about well integrity, but rather than invest in stronger safeguards, BP focused on cutting expenses to maintain profitability.

This decision ultimately led to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 workers, spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and caused environmental devastation, much of which is still largely unknown to this day. The disaster wiped out billions in shareholder value, but more importantly, it devastated communities, local businesses, and ecosystems that depended on the gulf.

It was a textbook case of how prioritizing short-term stock gains over long-term sustainability can end in ruin, not just for the company, but for everyone connected to it. Stout argues that disasters like these aren't just accidents. They're often the natural result of a corporate system that rewards reckless decision-making under the guise of maximizing value.

But somewhere along the way, this myth took hold. Corporations began to prioritize immediate shareholder returns over long-term sustainability, leading to short-term thinking that ultimately hurt the companies and the people they served. Executives driven by the desire to keep stock prices high and appease investors made decisions based on quarterly earnings reports rather than long-term investments in their workforce or their products that built their brand.

I'm Maya Kaufman. I'm a reporter for Politico, and I wrote about how paid influencers are hyping Polymarket's odds.

This was, once again, about a lot of undisclosed promotions. This time, instead of college students, it was a lot of, progressive and conservative commentators that they caught on the take.

many times undisclosed promotions. But what's worse about this one is who's doing the paying. It turns out it's the company's chief marketing officer, Matthew Madaber, who used a personal PayPal account to send money to content creators. Now, why does it matter that the CMO's getting involved with particularly paying people?

again, they claim "Oh, we're trying to improve trust. We're gonna c- do a comprehensive audit." that all has to imply that they didn't know about this fake website, right? At the highest level, oh, this is just some rogue intern somewhere. So what does it look like when the CMO is involved?

We found that he was using a personal PayPal account to send money to all kinds of influencers, and we were able to verify the identities of about two dozen influencers who all combined were receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of payments from this PayPal.

Not disclosed. many of these peoples, their audiences had no idea that there were these posts, and they didn't know they were basically paid to promote either the trustworthiness of Polymarket, to promote certain mayoral bets, to promote, different event contracts, whatever you wanna call them.

But, it's kinda funny. Maya, the thing that I've been thinking about is these are companies that purport to be about truth, right? they say they are better engines for truth. And yet this is deception right at the heart of getting in the front door.

Yeah, the FTC has rules around advertising disclosure for precisely this reason.

They want people who are seeing paid promotions to know that these are paid promotions, and our data team did an analysis of the posts from all of the influencers that we identified, and during a 14-month span, we found that they posted at least 490 times on X without disclosures about Polymarket.

So yeah, the CMO didn't notice that?

The CMO didn't notice all these people he's paying from his personal PayPal are not disclosing it's a paid ad? And so Polymarket knew, "Hey, it's better engagement if these people don't say they're paid by us. It looks better as some organic thing," right? So that's what over and over again. Once again, the casino playbook.

But forever they've been denying the allegations of, we see it time and time again, and these two investigations brought it all together. You have the fake betting website, and then you have the CMO directly involved with a lot of these partnerships that are not disclosing these advertisements. Now of course, I don't wanna leave you with the impression that Polymarket is the only one who might have done activity like this.

They're just the most credibly accused right now, to be clear. This industry is extremely competitive. Everyone's trying to jump in, trying to use growth at all costs to start it. the king of steal your idea, Mark Zuckerberg, has recently directed Meta to create a prediction markets app, and Mark Zuckerberg knows a good platform idea for exploiting teens when he sees one.

wow, he must be lights out with this idea. Right now, The New York Times claims users would not wager money, and the apps would probably rely on video game points, although the company has not ruled out the eventual use of real money betting. Let's be honest, we know where this is headed. Even the president himself, Truth Social, I think they're starting a Truth Predict or they're trying to.

You've got the president's son. I believe he's some type of advisor for Kalshi, which the CEO of Kalshi was actually asked about, "Why would you actually bring on this guy? what experience does he bring?" And, the answer there is pretty priceless.

Why did you guys make Donald Trump Jr. a strategic advisor?

We have a lot of advisors.

and they span across the board, across different functions. but really this is all about growing this industry, the prediction market industry that a lot of people really believe in.

W- what kind of advice does he give you?

So it really is, again, about growing prediction markets.

Does he come to meetings? How much do you pay him? What's his role? this is the son of the president.

We, again, we have a lot of advisors with different- But he's

not just any advisor. He has a direct line to the White House

We have a lot of advisors

Yeah, the reality is people are gonna do anything to grab as much of this market, as they can, which is essentially like casinos, but legal in all 50 states and on your phone.

that's basically the pitch. There's obviously gonna be a lot of money, and people are willing to kinda do whatever it takes. But of course, that begs the question. if that's the case, then we need to rely on regulators in order to stop the excesses of people trying to grab as much money as possible.

And, there are rules in place, as Maya the reporter actually talked about. There's the FTC guidelines. You are not supposed to promote something and not disclose it. Of course, that's what a lot of people have done. So I wanted to know, d- do these reporters believe that something's actually gonna happen here?

We did ask the FTC about what we found. We presented a summary of our reporting, and we asked, is this something that would fall under their rules? And they didn't respond to any of my follow-up emails. So my indication is I really don't have that much insight into what they're thinking about this, if at all.

generally, these agencies, if they do have investigations, they're not confirming those to reporters while they're open. But the silence, I think, was pretty deafening when we reached out to them.

Honestly, no idea. it's really weird being a journalist these days and really at any point in history 'cause you never quite know what the public reaction will be.

we haven't heard anything specific from the CFTC, but also generally, government agencies don't comment on if they were going to do investigations into much of anything. if, if they want to investigate, that is their right, but we haven't heard anything.

at least they're honest.

We don't truly know what's going to happen,

And finally, section D: The Ruling Class Worldview

LLMs are not alien artificial intelligence. They are human collective intelligence And they belong to humanity collectively, but because our minds have been cyber primed by decades of sci-fi cinema, we do not see in ChatGPT the human collective intelligence talking.

We hallucinate HAL 9000. We hallucinate Samantha from Her. When we type a prompt into this digital archive, and it responds with a polite, slightly detached tone of an android, the trap snaps shut. We mistake the statistical average of our own libraries for a brilliant alien intelligence. We whisper into the void.

The void regurgitates our own blog posts, and we fall to our knees in worship. We have replaced the gods with a chatbot, completely convinced that if we just give it enough electricity, it will solve climate change, cure cancer, and absolve us of our moral failures If the chat AI on your laptop is the intimate delusion, the gigawatt data center in the desert is the macro psychosis.

To the modern secular mind, ancient animal sacrifice looks like a chaotic, barbaric theater. But the ancient polytheistic worldview was profoundly pragmatic. In Rome, the relationship between humans and the divine was governed by a strict legal contract, do ut des, I give so that you may give. The gods were like mafiosi who demanded their portion of smoke and fat as sacrifices to sustain their power.

If a society neglected its sacrifices, the gods would grow angry and throw the cosmic order into chaos. Furthermore, to slaughter an animal, which was the ultimate measure of wealth in antiquity, was to literally burn your capital. When an emperor sponsored a hecatomb, the ritual slaughter of 100 oxen, he was engaging in extreme conspicuous consumption.

He was proving his dominance by showing how much of his civilization's wealth he could afford to set on fire. The modern logic of building AI data centers operates on the exact same pagan framework. The tech oligarchs are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into NVIDIA GPUs and cooling systems, dedicated power grids.

Why? Because of the scaling laws, the theory that these models only become more intelligent by being fed exponentially larger diets of data and electricity But what needs to be scaled isn't the processing power, it's the human collective that is the source of the intelligence. The gods of Silicon Valley are ravenous.

The tech priests believe that if they just sacrifice enough power, land, and capital, the machine will grant them the ultimate reward of artificial general intelligence. If the model simply outputs a slightly better auto-complete or hallucinates an absurd answer, the engineer does not conclude that matrix multiplication cannot spontaneously generate consciousness.

The psychotic logic dictates that the sacrifice simply wasn't big enough. We need more compute. We need more gigawatts. We need to build a nuclear reactor to power the server farm. This is the sunk cost psychosis. When a sovereign wealth fund or venture capital firm backs an AI IPO, they are participating in a modern hecatomb.

Hoarding hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge GPUs is a performance of dominance aimed squarely at rival factions. It is the ultimate geopolitical flex. Look at the sheer scale of the resources I can afford to incinerate in the desert. Bow before my capacity to bear the cost of the future We cling to the comforting delusion that the men leading this charge are rational actors, objective engineers, and benevolent visionaries dutifully pushing the boundaries of applied science.

They are nothing of the sort. The modern AI CEO is not a scientist. He is a psychotic pagan wearing a Patagonia fleece. Their pursuit of an artificial god is not a technological endeavor, but a strictly imperial one. Driven by an insatiable Caesarean ambition, they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the literal lifeblood of our civilization, our energy grids, our water tables, our capital on the altar of their own greatness.

They demand these modern hecatombs not because they possess a rational, empirical blueprint for flourishing, but because in the twisted logic of the silicon priesthood, whoever summons and controls the oracle controls the empire. They are happily burning the present world to ashes, entirely convinced that they alone are destined to rule the smoke.

When we read about the Xhosa, we feel a patronizing pity. We diagnose their absolute faith in ancestral spirits as a tragic primitive superstition. Yet we are entirely blind to the superstition of our own era, the dogma of the machine universe. Silicon Valley operates on the fundamental unquestioned belief that the cosmos is merely a highly complex computable mechanism, that human consciousness is just a by-product of scale, and that if we simply stack enough processors in a warehouse in Utah, a digital messiah will spontaneously emerge.

But this mechanistic worldview is fundamentally false. It is a reductive, brutally limited framework masquerading as objective science. In a few centuries, historians will look back at our gigawatt data centers with the exact same anthropological pity we reserve for ancient altars. The best sociological analysis suggests that sacrifices worked because they brought people together and focused them on communal problems, creating solutions.

It had nothing to do with gods, just humanity Emil Durkheim in his 1912 work, The Foundational Forms of Religious Life, called this collective effervescence. Sacrifice inadvertently activated human collective intelligence. LLMs aren't AGI. They are us. They work because billions of us already solved these problems.

They're a way to access and activate our human collective intelligence. The way to make better AGI isn't to burn silicon wafers in a desert. It is to understand that we, humanity, are the source of intelligence, and to fully educate and value every human on this planet to contribute to our collective intelligence.

A mass psychosis is not merely widespread error in judgment. It is a closed loop of magical thinking. When empirical reality contradicts the belief, the psychotic society does not abandon the premise. It simply escalates the ritual. This is the escalation trap of twenty twenty-six. The firewall has burned away.

We have billionaires spending their fortunes to build escape pods to barren planets, researchers ritually attempting to align digital gods they themselves are writing into existence, and financial markets valuing science fiction over terrestrial survival, all because of a psychotic belief in the myth of the machine universe.

The tragedy of the Xhosa cattle killings was not just the absurdity of the prophecy. It was the absolute horrific finality of the cost. Once the cattle were slaughtered and the grain was burnt, no amount of realization could undo the famine. And the British who the Xhosa sacrificed to destroy simply watched the mass psychosis unfold.

The people starved, then took over the land without a fight. Do nothing, win, as the Chinese have been saying rather a lot recently. We are currently standing by the river listening to the tech prophets tell us what the spirits of the machine require. We are being asked to sacrifice our energy grids, our water, our capital, and our grasp on objective reality to summon a utopia that exists only in the paperback novels of the nineteen eighties.

A civilization that burns its present sustenance to summon a mythical savior does not inherit the future. It simply starves.

This is a group of people who are not really loyal to the communities they come from.

They're not- their loyalty is not downward to places and communities and even countries. This is a kind of borderless network of people who are more loyal to each other than to places.

Epstein only respected his ruling class peers, and he used and abused working class women as a means to squirm his way into their ranks and gain even more power.

As the likes of Musk and Gates churned carbon into the air aboard their own, or possibly even Epstein's private jet, nicknamed the Lolita Express, they either took part in or knowingly ignored the destruction of human souls happening regularly within the confines of Epstein's eight properties.

Because that's the morality of the ruling class, and in particular, the decadent bourgeoisie that thinks all of you and all of us are disposable things, and they can do anything with us, and in fact, it's enjoyable To use us as disposable things and trash human life.

This is the twisted view of humanity that Epstein and his ilk hold at their core. The Earth and most people, but specifically working class people, and even more specifically working class women, are just pawns on the chessboard of capital accumulation and sexual pleasure. They are to be used and discarded at a whim.

And this disposability worldview seeps into the ruling class's conception of the natural world. And Epstein's few correspondences on climate change lay this bare. In one back and forth with theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, Epstein sent a link to a video titled Nobel Laureate Smashes the Global Warming Hoax.

And then he wrote, "I like the argument that more CO2 is good for plants." Epstein was a climate denier, but the particular way in which he denied climate change reveals that his denial has been forged in the disposability logics of capitalism and patriarchy. A logic that tells us we can let millions of people die because in some places climate change could be good for some plants and perhaps bring more profit.

This is a classic myth pushed by right-wing think tanks. In fact, more carbon in the air will not be good for plants, because whatever increased growth plants might enjoy from higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, the droughts, fires, deluges, and extreme conditions will certainly cancel it out. But perhaps the most illuminating of Epstein's climate denying emails comes in a 2016 exchange with philosopher Joshua Bach.

He writes, "Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation, the Earth's forest fire, potentially a good thing for the species." This is the patriarchal capitalist disposability worldview distilled. Climate change is good for the species because it will kill millions, if not hundreds of millions of poor and marginalized people, the unwanted, the disposable.

Because in that ruthless equation, Epstein is never factoring in himself or his rich compatriots as those who need to be sacrificed for the quote unquote, "greater good." A mentality that is mirrored in Trump's callous speech on sending soldiers to Iran.

The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties That often happens in war

Or the killing of environmental activists to extract even more from the land.

Close to 200 people died defending the environment in 2023.

Or the construction of a 40,000 acre water guzzling data center in the Utah desert.

The facility would generate and consume more energy than the entire state of Utah.

This is the disposability ideology of patriarchal capitalism, an ideology that has pervaded the last 50 plus years of denial by the oil industry, sacrificing potentially billions of lives and the future of the whole planet so that the capitalist class can watch the numbers in their bank accounts go up.

Under the logic of capitalism, the planet, the atmosphere, thousands of species, and the working class can all be disposed of, because a capitalist economy only cares about one thing: capital Specifically, the accumulation of more capital in an endless cycle that can only ever lead to destruction. Take oil giant Chevron's disregard for human life in the Niger Delta in 1998.

There, where crude oil flows like water, Chevron murdered the protesting Ogoni people to ensure the security of their oil. In a crucial investigation, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! traveled to Nigeria to understand the extent of Chevron's violent coercion.

The protestors were occupying a Chevron-owned oil platform called the Parabe Platform, demanding jobs and compensation for environmental damage to their communities.

Soon after landing in Chevron-leased helicopters, the Nigerian military shot to death two protestors and wounded several others.

This is the sick and twisted logic of capitalism. In the quest to make maximum profits, the people, the land, and the atmosphere are nothing but disposable tools, or worse, distractions to be used or murdered, and murdered they were.

When Goodman went to confront the head of Chevron's operations in Nigeria about these deaths, he wasn't even ashamed. He explained that Chevron flew in Nigerian soldiers to shoot at the protestors on their oil platform.

Who authorized the call for the military to come in? That's Chevron's

management.

Who took them

in? Listen, we did.

To the landing. We did. We did. We, Chevron did. We took them there.

For Jeffrey Epstein, for Bill Clinton, for Elon Musk, for Prince Andrew, for all the ultra-rich that took part in or turned a blind eye to the sexual assault of potentially over 1,000 survivors, this is the logical conclusion of a worldview that builds power on the oppression and exploitation of others and their environments.

That Chevron executive would fit right in with the likes of Epstein. This is what we must understand. The very same capitalist patriarchal forces that facilitate, allow, and reward a man to establish a network of sexual violence across decades are the very same forces that breed the destruction of the planet, settler colonial genocide, and the immiseration of millions under the shackles of wage labor.

The ultra-rich are ultra-rich and powerful because the rest are not. Their wealth comes at our expense, be it human life or the natural world. Ultimately, this is patriarchal capitalism at work, a system that pushes power into the hands of predominantly men, but more broadly rewards those who prioritize anger, dominance, violence, sexual power, and disregard for other humans and life.

And that reward comes in the form of profit. Those that win in the endless cycle of capitalism are the very same that win under patriarchy: liars, manipulators, those with little regard for life of all kinds. To the ruling class, ordinary people are just things, like a super yacht or a Maserati, only much less expensive.

Workers, the majority of the population, are mere factors of production from the point of view of those who control capital, and using people for their own enrichment easily transfers to using them for sexual gratification We need a wholesale toppling of this rotten system, one that flattens the ruling class's power into smithereens.

Because jailing Epstein or the rest of the capitalist class does not transform the forces that will inevitably push a new batch of ultra-rich destroyers into power. We must dismantle this system. We need a revolution that puts the everyday worker in charge so that one day we might build a stateless, classless society built on love and harmony between people and the land.

For me, this means a feminist eco-socialist world. It means recognizing that climate change, Epstein, American imperialism are all intertwined in the same systems that view everything as disposable and that drive destruction in pursuit of profit and power. So to truly cleanse ourselves on this destruction, we, particularly those in the US, must transcend the Western liberal capitalist schism of Democrats and Republicans.

As Chloe Rafferty from Red Flag Media writes, "Elites are fundamentally the same. Republican and Democratic Party presidents like Trump and Clinton could share the same social world. Their sense of elite solidarity went beyond sexism, entitlement, and impunity. Epstein's emails reveal a porous network of unofficial politics, backroom deals, and grift available only to the mega-wealthy."

So we must find solidarity across the working class, across gender, across race, and across ability, because the elite seem to have already found that. They only care about and respect each other. There are two sides to this struggle.

There's an imperialist world system that is demolishing the conditions of possibility of human life

Again, that's Marxist philosopher Gabriel Rockhill.

He goes on to add...

And you either support that directly, condone it, or find other ways of supporting it implicitly Or you line up and you say, I'm on the side of humanity. I'm on the side of nature. And what I want is a world where we can all live in some way a dignified life in which we have access to basic goods and services and where we don't have this plundering, corrupt, decadent, immoral financial ruling class that is intent on and is literally strangling all of us.

So we must call Epstein what he is, not an aberration, but one man of many soaked in the capitalist patriarchal norms of a world on fire. To rid ourselves of these Epsteins, we must build a world that rejects these norms and forces wholesale. A world of dignity where all life, whether human or otherwise, is seen as indispensable.

If the material base of society determines what is incentivized and thus what we value, the obvious solution to creating a new human nature that incentivizes cooperation and solidarity is to create a new material base that incentivizes these pro-social behaviors. One where the means of production are owned collectively rather than privately, so workers own their workplaces and can make decisions about those workplaces together while collectively contributing to building society.

That's called socialism, which is the necessary transitional period before we can achieve a classless, stateless, moneyless society, which is communism. And this isn't just me being like, if we try really hard, we can change people for the better. It's never been done before, but we can make it happen if we try, maybe."

No, this is not just theoretical. Changing human nature to be more cooperative by incentivizing cooperation has successfully been done before multiple times. Before I get into that, let me prime your brain to better understand what I'm going to be talking about with a very small scale example, the smallest you can think of.

You can see how cooperation can be incentivized even on a small scale and even under capitalism when you look at workplaces where everyone is rewarded for working together towards a common goal. When I worked in skincare retail, like 10 years ago, remember to wear sunscreen daily by the way, one of the stores I worked at would get a holiday bonus if the store as a whole made a certain amount of money.

We also had an amazing manager, which certainly helped. And obviously, this was under capitalism. But despite that, this working together towards a common goal fostered an environment of cooperation and friendship among all of us. we still strove to get the best KPIs and whatever, but no one attempted to sabotage anyone or anything like that because it would literally help no one and hurt everyone.

In this scenario, cooperation was very much incentivized, which is why that was, like, one of the best jobs I've ever had, and I've had, 13 jobs. A few of my coworkers at the job had previously worked for the same parent company, but in department stores where workers earned an individual commission and were rewarded for getting as many sales as possible individually rather than as a store And of course, because competition was incentivized rather than cooperation, my old coworkers described their former workplaces as not really conducive to fostering a sense of community or friendship among workers, unlike our store.

Instead, people were like cutthroat and backstabby, and would do things like stealing other people's regular clients so they could maximize their own incomes. people just really didn't care if what they were doing was at the expense of others, as long as they got that bag. And this is just a micro, tiny, tiny example of how incentivizing certain things can influence individual behavior.

As you can imagine, incentivizing cooperation on an even larger scale by creating an economic system built around it yields some pretty good results. Anna Louise Strong talks about this exact phenomenon in her 1936 book, The Soviet World, where she shares her brilliant observations of how people were actively changed for the better by the incentivization of pro-social behavior under the Soviet Union's socialist economic base.

Anna Louise Strong even makes a point to be like, "No, dude, trust me, Russians sucked before the revolution, but they're way better now, thanks to the socialist system where workers collectively own productive property." Americans often ask me whether Russians are not naturally more altruistic than Americans, more fit for communism, they imply.

No, it is something quite different. Russians at the time of revolution were more medieval than Americans, which means naturally more petty, unreliable, inefficient, given to bargaining and cheating. Joint possession of the country's resources and productive mechanism is the economic reality which unifies Soviet life and makes it dynamic.

It is this that washes out the antagonism between personal and public good, that makes men say we. It is this that makes men conscious planners of the future, for owners plan, but non-owners can only fight or drift. The chief quality of Soviet civilization is the sense that the world is ours to seize, understand, and make over.

This is because, according to Strong, "Ownership brings freedom in planning, clearness of goal, harmony of intellect and will in expanding life. Joint ownership brings comradeship reinforcing freedom and a new widened will to conquer space and time." In a socialist system, the people, the masses, are also able to function as a single unit working towards a unified collective goal, which, you guessed it, incentivizes cooperation.

It makes people cooperate more, and means that large scale changes for the better can be made way more easily and way faster. Unlike under capitalism, where a bunch of different capitalists develop whatever they have power over in whatever way they personally think will be good for their bottom line, and compete against each other while constantly looking to expand into new markets.

And that's resulted in all sorts of terrible things like imperialism and colonialism and neocolonialism. Because of this unity that Soviet people felt as a result of their collective ownership over their workplaces, their country, and society, you can find a lot of older folks from the former Soviet Union who say that they miss the USSR because the vibes were just way better back then.

People were kinder. They had everything they needed. They could do all sorts of fun activities for basically free. They felt a sense of pride in being a part of something larger than themselves, and everyone was equal.

the bad stuff in the Soviet Union, it's always like we didn't have enough stuff and we couldn't go on vacation outside the country, and we had to wait in line to buy things, which honestly, sure, that sucks. But that's not like that big of a deal. I know so many people in the Russian and Ukrainian diaspora because I am part of that, and the majority of them are pretty anti-Soviet by default, because you can't immigrate to this country, to the US as a communist.

And those are like unanimously their complaints. It's really funny actually. damn, you just want a blue jeans and rock and roll and a vacation to Western Europe and didn't care at all about equality and peace and building a better world. Okay, I see why you're in the US. But if those were your biggest problems, then you have it pretty good, Anyway, enough diaspora roasting. Back to human nature. The Soviet Union, despite the fact that it's no longer around, and despite the fact that it had many contradictions, showed us that you can indeed change human nature for the better. It proved the Marxist point that if you change the economic base from private to collective ownership, you change social consciousness along with it.

You can create a populace that is kinder, more cooperative, and more trusting of each other if you simply structure society around people's best impulses instead of their worst impulses.

The current system we live under in the West incentivizes you to either seek to dominate others via exploitation and violence, or to keep your head down and obey in hopes that you'll maintain some semblance of safety and stability. It basically feels like your only two options are being under the boot and obeying it to not get crushed, or becoming the boot.

But again, this is not human nature. Even though not acting is incentivized, it's not safer to not act. My friend Lady Isdihar made an excellent video that you should definitely watch about this very point. She talks about how fear is political, and how relative comfort under capitalism makes people afraid to resist out of fear that the system will discipline them and take away their access to necessities like housing or healthcare.

But even though that's what's incentivized by the system, and this leads many people to being defeatist before even trying to change things for the better, doing nothing is not safer than resisting. In fact, the only way that the working class has ever gotten concessions from the ruling class in this country is through resistance.

If you feel hopeless and nothing can be done, that's exactly what the system wants you to think. That's not your human nature, and neither is whatever other capitalist conditioning you may have. Obviously, the best way to change human nature is to change the economic base, but even under capitalism, who you are is not set in stone or 100% determined solely by the economic base.

You are also constantly changing, and you are not doomed to be the worst version of yourself, or to just accept the horrors lying down just because of the system we live under. You can develop your revolutionary consciousness through study, struggle, and organization, and you can resist the constant onslaught of capitalist conditioning.

Which also takes struggle, because it's everywhere. Capitalism's always trying to condition you. The extremely doomer-pilled claim that capitalism is human nature and you can't change human nature is completely false and contradicts history, and you don't actually have to choose between going with or against human nature.

The powers that be know this, which is why they spend billions on propaganda to get you to believe that human nature is set in stone, and that because of that, socialism is impossible to achieve. But as I just outlined, that's absolutely not true. The question isn't really what human nature actually is, because as we just discussed, it's a dialectical struggle of opposites.

The question is also not whether we can shape human nature, because obviously we can. The real question is, what kind of humans do we want our system to create? Do we want to keep living under a system that incentivizes competitive individualism and privatized consumerism, or do we want a system that creates humans who value care, cooperation, and solidarity, and who understand that we are all connected?

That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. You can record and re-record a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes. You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Zaid Tabani, Some More News, Chris Hedges, Factually with Adam Conover, Established Context, Business Insider, Motor Feed, Thought Slime, Wendover Productions, Lock Stock Finance, Literate Machine, Ben Jordan, Voidzilla, Josh Allen Dykstra, Science Fiction, Our Changing Climate, and Revolutionary Thought.

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

You'll find the link to support us in the show notes, along with links to join our Patreon and Discord communities for free, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms as I prepare to relaunch our social media strategy, because I will need to recruit you to help boost our signal to as many people as possible.

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, D.C., 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.