It Could Happen Here Weekly 13

we can start the podcast. Um, I think we should just start the podcast with you asking Robert, do you want to grunt so we can start the podcast. Um? That that seems avant garde. I don't know what I'm on guard means, but this is it could happen here, a podcast about how things are falling apart and how maybe maybe they don't always need to be falling apart.

Maybe we could do better. Uh. Speaking of doing better, you know one thing that sometimes helps us do better getting getting in the face of people fucking ship up and being like, Hey, that's not that's not cool. Don't be doing that, Garrison. That's your leading take it from here. Yeah, Hi, So we I've been I've been trying to keep better a better job of like following ecological defense movements happening

both in the States and in other countries. I know there was there was a big one up in Canada recently. There was a huge one in Germany too, just the other day. Yeah, I know the one, the one in Canada. There's a uh the uh I forget, I forget what the actual indigenous group is called. Um maybe maybe someone else. So the the um house on Sauti Um. Yeah, the people who who who took back their land and blocked the road off and now there and the wet suit end.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, thank you. Um there we go, Yeah, basically taking their land back, blocking off the road and now our same piece getting call then and we'll see how that develops. And in Guatemala there's protests against Canadian mining UM in Maya indigenous community that have have have gotten pretty heavily militarized at this point.

There's fun, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff of stuff on the psychological defense side of things, UM, including including in you know, the Pacific Northwest here with all of with all of the forests and and as such, in this area and part of this kind of exploration into into ecological defense, I wanted to talk with some people who are a little a little bit more well

versed in this type of thing than I am. So I've there's the two people have agreed to talk with us, Um salmon Cat, both people who work who work on the kind of thing from like an activism standpoint. Yeah, say hi, hello, hey y'all. So very very thankful that

they are to be talking with us today. So I thought we could we could probably just start by kind of discussing what forest defense is and how it kind of has a history specifically in this area, but but kind of more broadly, like if if people listened to the Earth First episodes, you know, that kind of that covered like anti pipeline stuff. We didn't really get much into like forest defense and you know, like the traditional like tree sits and that kind of thing. UM. So,

so yeah, what's what's up with defending the forest? What's what's what's going on with that? Um? Yeah, thanks for that great intro. UM. I mean, forest defense is I think probably the most characteristic um type of direct action in this bioregion. And here we're talking from Cascadia right now.

I actually moved out here from the East Coast ten years ago specifically to get involved with forest defense, because this place has an incredibly rich history UM of people basically just throwing down, risking life and limb to stop jain saws from taking down some of the oldest and most special for rists out here. UM. And so i'd say, you know, for forest defense direct action is in a lot of ways rooted right here UM, in this bioregion. And obviously, UM, like all kinds of movements, things have

changed over the course of time. UM. Back in the eighties. UM, when in seventies, when forest defense was really really kicking up and stopping old growth logging, specifically out here, when it was kind of like rampant old growth, UM clear cutting. UM, it really took the shape of trying to focusing on ecology, focusing on the integrity of these ecosystems, and basically like doing everything possible to stop the chainsaws. And UM. Now

obviously a lot has changed. We have the Northwest Forest Plan and some policies which are doing better to kind of like protect old places and old forests. But at the same time, the same ship is happening. UM. You know, the timber industry is great at using euphemisms to kind of cover up it's clear cutting anyways, and finding policy

loopholes to get some incredible places. And now I think, um, where we're at with like the direct action movement is we're in the context of climate change, So we're not just defending forests for the stake of these like incredible ecological strongholds, but we're also defending them because we recognize that forest defense is climate defense. This is a like

environmental justice issue, it's a human issue, it's a community issue. Um. And so now direct action I think is um, you know, happening not just the name of our forests, but in the name of our communities in our future. Um. But it's just as rich um now as it has ever been, and especially right now and especially since which I know we'll get into, people have been throwing down all over

this bio region to protect what's left of our forests. Yeah, and I think it's it's good to get into kind of why how the fires have impacted this because one of the shady things that has been done is we had I think most people in the country are where Oregon had unprecedented wildfires this year, and we had unprecedented wildfires last and we we're going to have unprecedented wildfires

every year for a while. Um And whenever these fires run through, they don't like destroy every tree in their wake, but they char them. And logging companies then come in under the guise of like, well, we have to make this area safe so that like the fires don't burn here next year, So we've got to cut down all of these trees, um and and clear cut this part

of area of public forests. So like as you're driving around in forests that you used to be able to do stuff, and you'll find areas that are just like blocked off because mining companies are coming or logging companies are coming through and clear cutting all of these trees that could very easily recover from the fire um or that weren't even burned by it. But we're just like in this area that they said, Okay, well we have to clear this out in order to make it safe.

And it's kind of this way to like back door and the guise of fire protection like expand logging. Yeah, and just to add that to the logging companies love to say that the reasons we have increased wildfires because there's an overgrowth in the forest because of the Northwest Forest plant. Because there's more protections for the forest. Fires are happening worse because we're not getting there bogging the

forest and removing all the fuel. Mh. So we have like this two part thing that like Kat just mentioned, where like, on the one hand, companies are like, we need to log more to prevent wildfire, which is bullshit and we can talk about why. And on the other hand, after fires burned through an area, they're like, we need

to log because we need to help the forest recover ecologically. Also, we need to salvage all of the timber before it rots and goes bad, and like all of these reasons and so basically it's just like fire has become the excuse to just like log preemptively and log after the fact. And yeah, it's a total total ship show. Yeah, I mean the think this this kind of falls into capitalists trying to use climate change is just another way to

find things to extract and things to grow on. Right, it's there they're going to try to find their own way to sneak in when all of this, you know, ecological disaster is happening to you know, sell you whatever green safe product is going to help against the collapse, or you know, package things in a way that makes it seem like it's solving this you know problem, but it's actually it's part of it's part of the same

thing from the yeah yeah, yeah, yeah right. It's it's you see, that's in every single industry, and it's always it's it's gonna be like this because this is the only way that capitalism knows how to address this issue is abouty just turning it into another turning it into another thing to consume and another thing to sell in package.

Pretty pretty grib Yeah. And there's I mean, there's cascading effects too, because they cut down these trees under the guise of making it safe for the next fire season, but which also makes a big chunk of land a lot more vulnerable to like mud slides and the torrential raining that we're having right now. Um, and that's also going to get more common because that's how fucking climate change works. It's it's just like comprehensive factory, comprehensive fatory.

And let us be clear to that logging doesn't actually work to prevent wildfire, you know, even you know, they say that it does, but the kind of logging that they do in the name of wildfire prevention just looks like clear cuts. And we have a pretty robust body of science now showing that those kinds of activities actually make fire hazard more severe for local communities. So that's

like one of the things they're doing. And we've been calling it just gaslighting, Like they're gas lighting all of us by saying, you know, there's nothing to see here, there's nothing to see here, we're taking care of you all. You know, we're barely logging at all. And then we've got community members on the ground, um, despite the closure orders who are like, actually there's a lot to see here, and you all are like completely devastating the landscape and

further harming our communities. Um. So yeah, it's total gaslighting. Yeah, an Oregon has both in terms of like watching fires and watching logging, some like rules that are not in place in other areas, especially for like even for for press and the like. Like it's it's actually hard to get in to look at this stuff, um without you know, breaking some sort of law technically, which is not at

all shady. Um. Yeah, Yeah, I feel like that's another important thing and maybe cat can jump onto is just um basically, I mean, I think what people aren't understanding is that after the fires, the these federal forest managers closed gates and essentially are converting public land into private land by you know, using the threat of violence to kick people out if they go onto their public land.

And since and they say until at least the only folks allowed behind these gates are cops and loggers, and so this is like literally, um, you know, the enclosure of our public lands and like the privatization of our public lands so that cops and loggers can do whatever

the hell they want. Yeah, And it's the kind of thing I mean, it's the kind of thing that people if you're if you're if the if the Bundy's and that group actually meant the stuff they were saying, like the rhetoric they were putting out, it's the kind of thing they would be piste off about. Two, Because you're right, it is the enclosure of public land by the government, um and corporations without any kind of consent from the people who are supposed to be the collective owners of

that land. It's it's a again, something that a lot of people should be angry about, who aren't angry about because there's been this huge propaganda campaign in the Northwest about timber unity and the like and like supporting the timber industry, um by destroying like the single greatest gift this entire part of the world has. Uh it's it's pretty frustrating yeasting. Anyway, I have to we have to actually have a quick break so I can go watch

my soccer game at the Timber Stadium. Uh, completely unrelated. So I'm an drive out to Wheeler, Oregon myself. But we all have different things to do during the break, um. But also in the break, I guess we could probably do an AD break here, because why not? All right, Yeah, everybody loves ads. And we're back still talking about force defense. I wanted there's something that people should probably know before we go further about the way that that Oregon works.

So for a while, Oregon is a place where you can't get elected um in a lot of parts of a lot of populated parts of Oregon if you're a Republican. So the Republicans just plain ice um and and pretend and like throw out some some social justice. The language while while still doing all of the extract of stuff they were going to do anyway. And that's the story with like Ted Wheeler, um and his family. So Ted Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, comes from timber money.

His father was a major Republican dontor. Not that the Democrats don't have a lot of extractive history behind them, but like it's it's very obvious what's happening with the Wheelers where um, they were huge republic and donors and huge backers of the right, and then Oregon had this kind of switch politically, um, and so Ted Wheeler just started throwing out nice social justice e language. But the the whole you know, he's he's I'm sure going to make a run for governor at some point in the

near future. And you've got this like this dressed up very extractive logging industry and politicians that always find a way to kind of make it seem palatable to the liberal majority. Um that and they've gotten pretty good at that because it doesn't I don't know, I think maybe we're coming to the end of this period, but like I haven't, I haven't seen up until this last year a lot of widespread kind of outrage about the clear

cutting um, and they also hide it pretty well. Like if you're driving through these beautiful public forests in Oregon, the areas that are right along the road will generally be pristine and you'll see old growth and everything. But sometimes you can see, as you like turn a corner or something that like, oh, that old growth only goes back a couple of couple of dozen yards and then it's a clear cut um, and they'll they'll they'll hide it so that it's it's not as obvious because they

know what upsets people. So there's this, there's this kind of surprisingly um surprisingly thorough campaign to do as much of this as possible without upsetting people, um, which which means there's a potential to upset people, which means there's a potential to actually stop this if enough people get upset. But it's you know, you're you're you're going against folks who have thought a lot about how to do this in a way that isn't going to upset the apple cart.

So how do you upset the apple cart? I guess that is what I'm asking. Well, I think one way that we upset the apple cart is by bringing people out to these places. And you know, in the action that happened on Tuesday that looked like disrupting and disobeying a federal closure order in order to bring people out to these places. UM. You know, basically metaphorically walking behind what you were describing the beauty strip along the highway

and seeing what's behind it. Um. And you know, as we were saying earlier, unfortunately, because of all these federal closure orders after the fire, that looks like risking um, you know, repercussion, state repression, arrest even um, in order to just lay eyes on it. But that is the way that we chipped the apple cart. We get people to see these places so that it cuts through the gas lighting that the industry is doing and people can

literally viscerally feel and see the damage. Um. And there's no way to convince them that that's okay once they see it. And how do you do go about like finding people to bring into this, convincing people to come, Like what does kind of that effort look like? You want to answer this one cat, You did a ton of recruitment, Yeah, totally. UM. I think a big part

of it is getting them while they're young. UM. I think that like young people right now are already pretty radicalized, um compared to ten years or so, probably because of I think George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and social the use of social media and those movements. UM. So I I am a college student and we're seeing like so many people coming in and ready to throw down, like they just cannot wait to get involved, and we'll kind of just show up to anything. Um. So I

think that that's like a major tactic for sure. UM. And then also making sure that when you have like a an action that you're recruiting people for that it's I'm very easy to plug in. It's like very accessible, um and kind of just like having it organized very well so it's not daunting to come in. Do you want to add to that, Sam, Well, just to like share a little more about like how we did that

with this particular action that happened on Tuesday. Um. Basically, you know, we it was a Tuesday, brainy, freezing middle of the forest planning this action, did not think and behind a federal closure order. So every one on site risking arrest, um and planning this action, it felt like we would be lucky as ship if we got ten people out there UM. But I will say, UM, it was easy as ship to get fifty people out there, and that's because people care. UM. And you know, I

think we did. In terms of organizing strategy, we used the affinity group model, and so we had a core you know, there was a core group of organizers, and those organizers recruited through affinity groups and their affinity groups and UM. That helped to keep kind of information secure and UM, you know, everything tightly organized. But UM, people want. People were really desiring to get together and do something, especially the past couple of years of COVID, people are

just like eager to do something. UM. And on top of that, you know, we we promised that this isn't just an opportunity to potentially get arrested, but this is an educational opportunity and a movement building opportunities. So while the road was blocked with a slash pile and a fire truck, there were workshops going on. There were hikes going on in the forest that's supposed to be cut. UM. There was discussions about know your rights trainings and affinity groups.

We had a band um playing on top of a fire truck, and there was a dance party and basically you know, we're like building community and solidarity UM in a positive way while sucking shut up. I think that's the key. And I mean, where do you uh, how do how do you have like what is the I let me think of a way to phrase this. What is kind of the next step here? Because they haven't started logging this area yet, but they're kind of doing

like the pre prep work. Um, what do you what do you think actually can be done to to halt it? Like is it? Is it a problem? Like? Because it seems to me that it's there's got to be like a mix of tactics there to actually get them to stop. And you're dealing with a number of different UM threats include not just at the state level, but these federal closure orders Like what is I don't know what what

does the path forward look like to you? Yeah, So there's a preliminary injunction being forth by some nonprofits and so this is a really good example of different tactics coming in and so UM. The preliminary injunction is basically to state that what they're doing before a service is doing is illegal. UM. But before that that can be passed, they can come in at any point and log the area. And so that's where direct action comes in to slow them down and halp them as much as possible until

the courts can process that injunction. And that feels really huge to Like what Kat just said is like where is the place of direct action in forest defense? This is like the golden moment for direct action while there's like an open legal case that we're waiting on a judge to settle, and the timber industry is like coming in ready to moot out the case by logging before

it can even be decided. And like to just add a little bit more backstory to on, Like another reason why people are so pissed about this um is that you know, this watershed has been I think like beloved and also embattled since the eighties. Like the infamous Easter

massacre logging event happened in the same watershed. Where could you explain, Yeah, yeah, no, totally um it M. A timber company was planning to clear cut log old growth forest out there and started moving on it on Easter um in the snow, and a bunch of badass direct action activists set up a five tiered blockade on a logging road to hold off the logging and successfully did for um days and days until a bunch of them, I think over a dozen folks got arrested, thrown in

jail and the forest was clear cut. UM. So hence you know the Eastern massacre name UM. But a ton of folks who you know still work in forest defense in the spy A region. We're there and remember for that story, and we're with us UM when we were out there this week telling that story. And you know since then, between and now, people have been showing up again and again and again in this watershed because it

is so special to try and fight off flogging. And myself and Cat have been a part of efforts over the past handful of years to um fight off a number of logging projects out there. We were successful in

doing that. We actually like snacked the Forest Services grubby hands off of a bunch of oil growth because our scrappy friends spent days exploring this watershed and documenting, doing like site specific science citizen science documentation and giving it to the Four Service and we fought them and one and protected a bunch of the forest. And then the fires came through and they closed the gates and they secretly changed all of these contracts to include clear cut logging.

And so that is why there's an open lawsuit because we believe it's illegal what they're doing. It's sketchy and illegal. Yeah, but it does. It does illustrate like kind of the depth of the fight necessary, not just in forest defense, but at all efforts of kind of resisting the extract of industries that are driving a lot of climate change. It's it's not enough, it's never enough to win the first victory. They're going to find some way to to to swoop around to the flanks and try to take

it away from you like they're doing right now. Um, which is exhausting. Um, it seems exhausting, but it doesn't mean you can ignore it. It's fucking exhausting. Yeah. I always say it is like our forests, our federal management agencies, they suffer from this powerful amnesia where they just like keep coming back with the same bullshit proposals. But like our movement does not suffer from that, and we are just like building power and getting stronger and getting more successful.

So like when people left on Tuesday, um, there was a promise that people will be back if logging happens and we're very sure that that will be the case. And if if people are in the Cascadian bioregion and are like, well this sounds pretty sweet, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna keep keep some trees where they are as opposed to putting them on the back of a truck to drive somewhere else. How could they get involved? Where

where might they reach out to? Well, there's a few different groups who were a part of this UM definitely UM, the Portland Rising Tide, Cascadia Forest Defenders, UM CAT can talk about Climate Justice League and UM maybe the action that you all put on yesterday as a follow up and like how folks can get involved with that UM But basically, yeah, you can follow us on Twitter, UM and Instagram and and please, UM, you know, keep a lookout because we will be we'll be getting it out

far and wide if there is a call for folks to get out there again. Yeah. And Climate Justice League is an organ UM at the University of Oregon and people are free to just join the organization. Community members are also involved. UM. But we did put on an event it yesterday where Tyler Ferris of Ferris Logging or First Timber UM who is actually the company that bought the rights to Brighten Bush, which was the area where

we did UM the action. On Tuesday, he was giving a speech at the University of Oregon UM to talk about post fire logging, which was just like crazy timing. They kind of just like put it in our lap. And so we recruited from that action or like, let's just dropt the hell out of this UM talk. And so we like showed up and kind of tried to sneak in. They were having zoom issues, which like luckily distracted them from the fact that there was like forty

or fifty like pretty punk anarchy looking kids in the room. Um. But we like let him go on for a little bit, and then we started to ask him questions that he obviously didn't know the answer to. Um. We kept like asking questions about, you know, the science says this, but you're stating this where you getting your science from? And you kept saying things like, well, that's more of a political question and the statistics don't really back up what

you're saying. Um. And then yeah, we just chanted and made him really nervous. Yeah, and as a heads up, if you're if you're looking to win an argument on a zoom call. You can just say, uh, the statistics don't back you up without citing statistics. It's it's it's really the easiest way to do that. I guess I am kind of curious for like you guys said, you've you've prevented you know, some of the stuff in the

past by doing stuff like documentation. Um, and you know when when when that kind of thing becomes not enough. You know that this this area does have a rich history of kind of direct action stuff to protect forests with a get also like a mixed success, like by no means does direct action always always work to do anything? Right now, we still have the line three pipeline, We still have all of these things that direct action has

tried to prevent. But it turns out a lot of the kind of direct action that's associated with these types of like ecological things is kind of more performative than anything else, you know, Like it it's kind of like a tree set is about gaining media media like publicity, because they're gonna get you down right like eventually, and it's and it's and it's gonna be painful because like you're not going to be sitting up there for years to to to to to to prevent the treat from

being logged. So how close do you think we are into too, like reaching that kind of territory like it was in like the nineties and eighties where it is like a lot of a lot of people like blocking off roads and doing and and doing that kind of thing. You know, more like you know what what it crosses into that it's more like autonomous. It's not it's not like led by a single organization by any means. See, it's more it's more decentralized. But did you see that

kind of happening soon? And you know, how, how how do you think we can balance out direct action with like other like thoughtful means of trying to draw attention to these things and maybe actually and and other things like actually physically physically preventing the logging of certain areas.

That's such a good question. And um, I'm really thankful that we're talking about strategy because um, kind of, like I mentioned, I moved out here like ten years ago to do force defense work and have seen so many instances in where people are trying to do direct action in a in a time and space where it doesn't make sense. Um, where it's like basically slated too, it's

gonna lose because um, it's just impossible too. As you said, you know, hold this blockade for weeks and weeks and weeks and the snow um indefinitely, you know, as we you know, as they continue to try to log indefinitely. So there's definitely a sweet spot for where um the sort of kind of the sort of direct action that we're talking about, like blockading, where that is most useful.

And that sweet spot is definitely when there is another decisive move, like another like legal victory that's waiting in the wings or um, you know, we won one in Washington without a legal victory because we shamed the ship out of the Department of Natural Resources in the Seattle Times and they were like, whoa, We're sorry. Um. And so direct action held off something until we are able

to sufficiently shame them and deter them. But typically they don't shame well um and so typically, um, you know, we need illegal there needs to be a legal element um backing it up. So direct action is a time buyer.

But that said, like obviously block hating things is not the only type of direct action, and part of the rich history of force events in the Spyer region is other kinds of more um necessarily you know, discrete kinds of direct action that obviously you know I'm um not a part of speaking on this radio show, but UM would would publicly, um, you know, say like those things probably need to happen, and I hope they fucking ha what what What I could say is that I've I've

seen these things happening in other places, like in like in the Atlanta Defending Forest movement right now, I have I I have seen evidence that individuals not associated with any group are putting spikes and trees and that is that is, that is something that is happening, right, And all that takes is one person, right, It's that's not like a group of twenty people going into the forest to do that. That's the one person in an afternoon, right.

So those are the types of like single person direct actions, which again, yeah, any type of direct action is going to be scary, right You're you're once you start doing that, that is you know, that introduces certain things that will is is kind of is kind of more frightening to you as a person, um, but but it's it is something that is happening in other places. Um, and it has showed to at the very least upset the people

who are wanting logging to happen. Generally, they're not thrilled when they when they find when they find these things.

Um yeah, yeah, because like it's like it's I mean, I think like when it comes down to it, it's like about knowing what your goal is with this tactic, like on you know, in in the action that happened this past week, there was an understanding that the goal was to you know, shine a light on this thing that's happening in secrecy, shame the Forest Service, and build movement move mint buildings so that we're ready when people need to throw down for real and in that might

happen soon. We weren't trying to hold the space for weeks and weeks and weeks. Um, that wasn't the goal. So like going in being like what kind of an action are we trying to do? What are we trying to complish? Are we trying to be decisive? Are we trying to like shape the conditions necessary for success and like culture build or were trying like what are we actually trying to do? And then like coming away with that. Having having that, having a clear sense of that beforehand,

I think really really is crucial. Bec I've definitely observed direct actions where that is not the case, that people have not thought those things through, and it becomes the kind of un fun version of chaos, um where you know, things, things don't really get done and you're just kind of sitting around and everyone's kind of slightly miserable because again you're in a freezing forest of and no one really

knows what the hell they're doing. Um. So definitely having those kind of things thought through beforehand is extremely useful when you're deciding to trudge your way into some cold, dark woods. Yeah, we're going for chaotic good, not chaotic evil. Yeah,

well a little bit of chaotic. Well, it depends, it depends what it depends what we mean by evil evil evil to some people, we we yeah anyway, Um, and any other kind of historical notes on forest defense or any other kind of random random tidbits like to mention before before we close out. The one thing that I feel like it's super important to say to people is that forest defense is not just about protecting forests. It's about protecting all of us. We know now like forest defenses,

climate defense. Our forests are our best natural tool for fighting climate change. And also like we need them here. Most of Oregonian get their drinking water from forests with watersheds,

like they literally are sustaining all of us. And so yeah, we hope folks join, like not just for the sake of like being you know, hippie tree huggers, even though you know some of us are, but also because like we need to survive as a people and as a planet, and sorry, best way to do that it's it's the cheapest most advanced form of carbon capture we have yet. So yeah, it seems seems kind of asinine to chop that all down to build some shitty sheds. Mm hmm.

All right, well that's a sude. It's it could happen here. The podcast that occasionally has ads from Washington State Highway Patrol. On a completely unrelated note, Garrison, you want to talk about the Washington State Highway Patrol today, I sure would love to talk about our our good friends at the Washington State Patrol um because yeah, they just uh they've've they've come up on my radar. And in an unrelated matter, and now we're gonna talking about So now we're talking

about them. Yeah. So this is the show about things falling apart and kind of part of societal and political stuff kind of crumbling. Usually that gets related to some type of law enforcement agency more often than not. And uh, in terms of like tensions rising in stuff, there's a lot of you know, force gets force gets exerted via law enforcement, and uh, one such law enforcement Yeah. Well, and one such agency that does this is called the Washington State Patrol. UM. So they were I I don't know,

I I just discovered them recently. UM. So they were founded exactly one hundred years ago. UM. And they were originally called the Washington State Highway Patrol. UM. Now they're just the Washington State Patrol. They removed highway, but they still do the same thing. They're basically glorified traffic cops, um who operate all around all around Washington State. UM. And we're gonna talk about some of the ways that

they've been making things worse within the past decade. UM. I'm since they have a one hundred year history, I'm sure we can find lots of historical examples. UM. But we're we're gonna we're gonna do stuff that's more that is more recent, because this is you know, generally trying

to keep things around the current, the current crumbling. Um. And because we're gonna talk about police, the first the first thing we're gonna be discussing, oddly enough, is a racism um because I know, um, when you think of Washington State Patrol, that's you know, it's it's kind of

shocking that they might have a race issue. Um. So, Anyway, twelve years ago, researchers working with working with Washington State Patrol found that troopers were searching drivers from minority communities, particularly um local Native American tribes, at a much higher rate than than white people. And they recommend an additional study, which the Washington State Patrol declined to UH to investigate further.

They they're like, no, um, no, no more studies. So meanwhile, since then, the troopers have continued to continue to search Native Americans at a at a rate much higher, more than five times than that of of of white people in the area. Yeah, so, but there are five times

as the popular there. There's five times as many Indigenous people in Washington as white people right there, there's not oh yeah, so An analysis by Investigate West showed that the Patrol continued to do searches at a much elevated rates for for black people, Latino, Pacific Islanders, and natives within Washington State. UM. And yet when when troopers did decide to search white motorists, they were more likely to

find drugs in contraband. UM. Which is something to Washington State Patrol actually acknowledges is that when when they search people of minority communities, they are less likely to find to find illegal things. Yeah, I mean that's yeah nationwide

and very very robust data. So UM, government records obtained via like information requests and various other you know of public records searches UM also show that there there there is a state law that Washington State Patrol is supposed to collect and report semi annually to the Criminal Justice Training Commission in Washington. UM about you know, race and

ethnicity data of motorists is stopped by troopers. But uh so this is supposed supposed to happen semi annually, but the agency report of those findings only three times in the past fifteen years, which isn't sounds kind of like the Portland Police not doing the things that federally they're supposed to do because they're so violent. Yeah, being out of compliance with a bunch of federal three three times,

three times in fifteen years is not semi annually. Based on what I know, the term semi annually to semi decade. So yeah, UM based on responses for over thirty public records requests UM from from three different agencies looking looking at Washington State Patrol and more than like fifty interviews with current and formal law enforcement officials and people with experience interacting with Washington State Patrol UM and also data

from millions of traffic stops. All this was looked at in total, examined about eight million traffic stops from two US and nine to US in fifteen. This is what Investigate West was doing UM. Which was which was the most recent data available, and the analysis found that UH it focused on twenty incidents of what researchers called like high discretion searches. That's when troopers had the most like personal leeway to decide whether or not to pull over

and search a vehicle. UM. Black drivers were twice as likely to be searched as white drivers, and Latino specific calenders were eight percent more likely to be searched of of these incidents where officers had discretion and like they could choose whether or not to pull someone over. Um, so it wasn't like it wasn't like they were like obviously speeding or doing you know, like like you know, like like regular like actually observable traffic violations. This is

when like people can choose when they investigate. West thing got published, they contact Washington State Patrol and the spokesperson said that, uh, here's here's here's the quote. The race. Race was not the only factor when troopers decided whom to search, and that's partially because blacks, Native Americans and Latinos are more like more more likely to be searched regardless of how much discretion troopers have, which that doesn't

really make very much sense. Um, I don't know what the person, I don't know what they mean is they're more likely to be searching regardless what the who was that bad a checking the copy? Which is weird because later on the spokesperson said that, um, in, same guy, we're in the basically we're agrees that we're in a basic agreement that minorities are searched at higher rates, but

we find less contraband so um. And he also he also noted that complaints about like a racial bias encounted for little more than ten percent of all complaints of the state patrol filed last year. So I guess he thinks that's a good He thinks that's a good stat that yeah. Um. And another kind of not great thing is that the analysis found that not only are Native Americans more likely to be searched, but all of the most of those searches happen always that like the edges

of reservations UM. The analysis found that the two highest concentration of searches in Native Americans by state troopers are on the US nineties seven, where it encounters um a reservation at OLC about about a mile from its intersection at a state road to one and more than one thirty miles south of the same when the same highway enters another reservation. So nearly one third of high discretions

of high discretion searches. So when troopers can decide whether or not to pull someone over like like they they they have more discretion whether they can. So one third of those happened on these two stretches of highway right on the edges of these reservations, Like they're patrolling outside

these reservations to specifically do this. Um there was I I saw an interview on this topic that we talked that talked to to Native Americans in this area and they're like, yeah, every time we leave the reservation, we get pulled over. But then we watched tons of white motorists go by and no one cares, like and like and they're like you're doing like they're just speeding by,

it doesn't matter. Um So, yeah, that is. That is the first first you know, unsurprising tidbit about uh, some an organization who started as a highway patrol is, yeah, they're gonna pull people over who are not white more often. That is that's pretty not not super shocking. Yeah, and then make a public statement like l o O yeah, yeah that that does. That does sound a lot like with the Washington State Patrol. Uh sounds like, um so we're gonna So that that was that was the first

obvious thing. Uh. This next part is a little bit more fun. Um. So in in in two thousand nine, the Washington State Patrol made made the decision to fire eight troopers, which is you know, pretty pretty rare um And the reason why they got fired is because they used fake diplomas to claim pay raises. Yeah, so there was there was this whole scheme about getting fake diplomas to get the troopers more money, like like like individual people that there's this whole, this whole operation going on.

It resulted in the in in eight in eight people getting fired. So troopers can can boost their pay about two percent by earning two a two year degree or four percent with a four year degree. And there was this group of of a troopers who just uh started just forging diplomas see Garrison. This is a separate conversation.

But they didn't need to forge diplomas. They could have just become doctors of of of of of magic, like that's what I've tried to do religious PhD. Yeah, so there's all sorts of fake diploma mills come on Washington State Highway Patrol. This this is pretty funny. So so the investigation began after federal agents shut down a diploma mill in the Spokane. Criminal charges were not filed, but

the patrol to decide to fire these eight troopers. Yeah, so that is one of the more funny things we'll be talking about today, and I think it's time for an ad break. So yeah, speaking of funny, here's these ads that may or may not be the people we're talking about. Rob No unrelated, unrelated. Uh We're back, which is also unrelated. Yeah. Another thing that's putting pretty common around police is that the past few years, they generally don't think COVID is really real or I think that

it is the past few years. Now that Robert, we're less than a month away from two. Yeah, I hate that. It's like, I mean, fun it's it's like, it's almost two. Almost ten percent of your entire life has been COVID. I'm not going to think about math um yea. So generally they don't think COVID is real. And also they

think vaccines are the mark of Satan or something. Well obviously they are, but yeah, so in in in mid October this this past October, Washingtons Tate Patrol announced that one twenty seven of its employee is at lost their job after the state's COVID nineteen vaccine mandate deadline of October eighteenth. So unlike the Portland Police Bureau who WHO, the port who port and many other cities where city officials caved to the demands of the police that vaccine

mandates not be not be extended towards police. Uh, this did not happen in Washington, and they actually got it enforced. So over a hundred uh patrol employees quit quit their job, including a sixty four commissioned officers. It was like six sixty seven troopers, six sergeants, and one captain. Um. Yeah, So you know, Washingtonate Patrol has about two thousand personnel within like between like eight districts. UM. So losing like a hundred and twenty seven of them is not a

is not an insignificant loss. Um And it's it's been a it's it has been been trying to hire a lot more people in the in the past. In the past like a few months speak. Because of this, they've been they've been trying to do a lot more recruitment, which is why they're UM. I've heard from other people that they are putting uh advertisements out on the internet to become a Washington State trooper. That makes sense. This

is something I've I've heard from from people online. When I've been doing all of this uh deep deep, extensive research so yeah, they are, they are, they are recruiting. Uh So, if you uh want to be uh Washington Patrol officer, don't don't. Actually that's a bad idea. Um, don't do that. Yeah. I means as you want to like really funk with people who live on a reservation. If that's if that's your goal. It seems like Washington State Highway Patrol is your your dream career, or have

another option for you. You You could also just get COVID and die. Well, yeah, that is an option. That's an option to thing I think might be freedom is what makes this nation great. Uh so I think you know of the choice. Anyway, continue, I'm going to send a picture inside our group chat first because we're gonna we're talking about one one specific evil dude. Next, I'm setting a picture in the group chat that I want you to look at first, just so you get a sense

of who we're talking about. Oh based, okay, I'm I'm excited. Yeah alright? Oh no, oh no, the bow tie really brings it all together. Oh no, you said bow tie, which does not make me optimistic? And Robert, oh no, what is wrong with it? Who? Yeah? Who puts a bow tie on a uniform. Like, guys, I found a better quality image. Um, good god, there we go, same image better he looks like Tucker Carlson and the Starship Troopers universe when he gets drafted. So this is the

next guy we're talking about. Um, somehow feels like I hate crime towards the Weasley family. So yeah, it feels like a hate crime towards the guy based off Tucker Carlson in Starship Troopers. So this would be a big fan of ron Ron Weasley's family. This this is This is Sean carr Um, a former Washington State Patrol a sergeant um who resigned for reasons. We will discuss fun.

That's exciting. Yeah yeah anyway. Um So in two US and fifteen and associated press investigation uncovered about a thousand officers in the United States who lost their badges over a six year period for sex crimes or misconduct such as like, uh, this is this is a quote here, which I disagree with framing here, But this is this is a quote propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on duty intercourse, which is, uh, a pretty bullshit way

to frame that because basically you're it's it's police raping people. Um and police officers being accused of like using their power over people to rape them is extremely common. Yeah, and it's often just like yeah, well the person said okay, And it's like, well they said okay to a person with a gun in the legal power to murder anyone

they want or put them in jail. Like, like there's a lot of Yeah, you know, I would argue, you can't consent uh to sex with a police officer who's on duty in an uniform because it's they have the power to murder anybody they want or or who just

arrest you. Like, like, it's a lot of stuff. So, like there's a studied at least a few years ago that an analyzed data of like a five hundred and fifty arrest cases from the years of two US and five to two US and seven just two years and uh a four hundred officers employed by like three D twenty non non federal law enforcement agencies located throughout a

forty three states. Um and findings indicated that a police sexual misconduct includes a serious forms of sex related crimes, and the victims of sex related crimes by police are typically younger than eighteen years old. Um So it's it happens a lot with miners. So there's a lot like like more like a ridiculously common like if you if you google is, which I honestly don't recommend, but you can find like dozens of stories coming out like basically every like not you'll find at least one new story

every month of a kid getting raped by police. It

happens pretty commonly. So over the past ten years in the Washington State Patrol, they've investigated and confirmed four cases of what they call sex on duty UM, according to the agency, and this is including including Shan Karr now Sean Car's cases particularly sensitive for the agency because he was married to the uh the daughter of the Washington State Patrol Chief UM and and Shaun Carr was also himself a sergeant, so he was connected to like the

big leagues at the Washington State Patrol. So Carr met a civilian woman who also works at Washington State Patrol but as like you know, like has like an office job, so they isn't isn't a trooper um. They met in twelve and struck up an online friendship, and a few months later they both of them told investigators that the

relationship did turn sexual. Um Car admitted to six sexual encounters for the next like five years with the woman, of five of which happened when he was on duty and like on state property or driving a vehicle or while in uniform. UM. But the woman recalled as many as as twenty and all but one of them were

when he was on duty and well. And so the woman said that most of their encounters were were what she would describe as consensual, but she described three incidents where Carr did uh pushed the boundary, and she she she has described being raped by him multiple times. UM, so there was there was an incident. I think the first one happened in the beginning of UH with inside his patrol car in a church parking lot. UH. The woman had recently started dating another man, and Carr wanted

to know who it was. When she wouldn't say so, he UH he grabbed her arm hard enough to leave bruises, and the woman said that Car made her pick from two options, give up the name of the man or give car oral sex. Um Car later told investigators that he said this in a quote joking context. Oh that's you know, I was thinking, because that's almost exactly my

my tight five for my stand up set. I mean some some comedians for some reason do like making jokes like that and not not not great usually not great to normalize that kind of thing. So um. The woman said that she did like like sea his his like commands and she's which she said, we're like very much not done. Yeah, and she said it's very much not consensual. Um. She she told investigators that he raped me on the side of the road. Um and if and if it was any and else besides car, she she she she

said she would have called nine one one. Um. So the second time happened when a car backed her into a corner of a highway away station and forced her to have sex with him. Um. She called it a coerced Car said that consent was mutual. So despite the sexual assaults, uh and and and like and you know and and like assaults you know, like you know, grapping

someone's arm hard to leave a bruise, she said. The woman said she kept in touch with Car because she was going through a difficult time in her life and she needed somebody to talk to. Complicated. That's yeah, that this is even as not like people who are imbutive can also be emotionally supportive sometimes like that's one of the things about abuse, that said, a real, real motherfucker. It's not simple. So yeah, Car, Car may not have gotten in trouble had the woman not confided in another

patrol employee after she left her job. UM. Then the other other patrol employee mentioned the situation to someone higher up, triggering in investigation UM. And then in nineteen the woman formally reported Car to uh TO to like the Patrol Office of Professional Standards. SO records story that the patrol of pretty quickly confiscated cars, badge, and gun and placed him on home assignment, where he remained until he and

he resigned voluntarily. UM. The patrol gave gave the case to the Sheriff's office to investigate because of the criminal nature of the allegations. SO. Car's personal file includes other on job violations, including using a taser on a drunk driving suspect. He was handcuffed, and records show that in February, Car was accused of a frequenting a coffee stand and making unwanted advances on an employee by waiting near her car until her shift ended, and making derogatory comments about

her boyfriend. Um, so he was also stalking this barista, is what it sounds like. Um? Yeah, yeah, that's that is what that sounds like. Pretty terrifying. So yeah, so car after the woman told investigators that she was raped. After UM, the the county sheriffs recommended hard to be filed. But she wasn't willing to. Um. She wasn't willing to testify. She did not want to. She did not want to

do that. Um. But but she she didn't tell prosecutors that she didn't have one wish that that car again, the son in law of the state patrol chief be be not not allowed to police again. UM. Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable request. Car of obviously denied all the accusations of non consensual sex and assault. But you know, I did admit to a to a consensual sexual relationship on duty um, as well as other you know, like patrol regulation violations. Um. He he resigned in July before

the patrol could decide whether or not to fire him. Um. And then the state went about trying to strip him of his law enforcement cert of occasion requirement to carry a gun and badge and be hired as law enforcement in Washington, getting de certified for misconduct by the Criminal Justice Training Center in Washington is very hard. Very few

people have actually been decertified. Yeah, and to to be certified, the panel must be a panel must be convinced that on duty behavior rose to the level of official misconduct and constituted a crime committed under the color of authority as a peace officer. That's the that's the color of authorities an interesting way to phrase that. Cars attorneys argued that the state failed to make to meet this high bar and there was quote no legal basis to de

certify car. Meanwhile, the c j a t C, the Criminal Justice Training Center alleged his behavior did constitute official misconduct and failure of duty, but without actually they didn't act actually include the sexual assault allegations. Instead, it contended that he used state resources for his own benefit or neglected to do his duties when he was engaged in sexual activity on duty. So they didn't actually include sexual

assault or anything in this. They just said you were basically like you were because you were doing because you were having like sexual activity on duty, you weren't doing your job, and that's the reason that we want to decertify you. Um. So the date of Washington has about eleven thousand certified officers at any given time UM, and since to us in three they've decertified like two hundred and thirty and at least four of them for on duty sex and one of those cases was overturned on

appeal UM. But in one around mid May, the c j TC in its final order said that Cars constituted UH crimes of of failure of duty and official misconduct by, among other things, quote, intentionally choosing to to his own sexual gratification rather than using his on duty time to perform his lawful responsibilities as a peace officer. So he he did get de certified, but again not actually discussing

the actual like assaults and rapes. Um. Yeah. So the the the Sheriff County Prosecutor's office designed declined to pursue charges on the case last year when the woman was unwilling to testify, but the the deputy prosecuting attorney UM did say that she she believed they just happened, like

like she she believes this that the stuff happened. But because of the lack of evidence due to time passing and the woman not wanting to testify, there it's hard to prove guilt in court, So they're not going to pursue these charges at the moment. Yeah, So that that is UH, that is Shawn Karr. So that yeah, he is not not not allowed to police as of That

is a cursory glance at off in the Washington State Patrol. Oh, I guess one of one other thing I found out today is that so Washington State Patrol has a has a psychologist for recruitings basically for if you want to join the patrol, you have to go like through like a psychological screening. Sure, that makes sense. And he just just resigned because he was he was he was probably

going to get fired. Um. This was after Seattle Times and Public Radio Northwest News Network UH published a piece show showing that since UH the psychological screenings rejected where is it? UH rejected of white candidates over the past four years. Um, but the psychologists that they hired, UH rejected of black candidates, of Hispanic candidates, and forty one

percent of Asian candidates. So again, I'm not pro people being police in general, but there is a clear disparity on who they are wanting to become police, like who like who are they they're letting in a lot more white candidates than they are letting in candidates of color. Uh so this this uh, this psychologist screener is is no longer on the job as of like a few days ago. Um. Yeah, so just another another level of stuff because yeah, you know, there's they want there to

be more white officers than anything else. Um so yeah, that is that is the Washington State Patrol. I guess the one other thing I want to do is I'm gonna again send in the group chat. Their their current logo, their current logo current You're I hate it when you do this. I'm afraid. I don't know, Sophie. Maybe it'll be fine. I mean, it's actually it's it's it's kind of fun. That's their logo. That is their current logo. They design it in like paint. Yes, they probably. They

probably did design it an m S paint. Oh man, Yeah, that that looks like it belongs in an angel Fire website. Gar So do you know what angel Fire was? Oh my god, you fucking teenagers. Um yeah, that looks like it belongs in an angel I will I will let all of the other people who feel very old right now know that it looks like something you'd see in an angel Fire website, like shittlely animated blinking across the screen. Yeah, you know, like it looks like something from a ninet

nineties website. All right, well now I'm both angry about the police and I feel a thousand years old. So this is good? What a good? What a good? What a good feeling? Well that that wraps that. That wraps it up for today. Um and hey again I have heard that they are recruiting and they should have a new psychological screener soon. So great, there we go. I'm imagining the primary psychological screening is you're white, right, that's

that's that is what it used to be. I mean, I'm imagining that's what it's going to be still, but probably Garrison maybe not. All right, well this has been a great time. I'm sure everybody's feeling good. Uh goodbye, get out of my house. Welcome to the hug Cast. This is a crypto podcast where we talk about the best n f T investments and how you can get rich to bro if you just accept the wave of the future and decentralize your finance and invest in a

bank that can take all of your money overnight. And disappeared because it was really just being run by a guy in Macedonia and he it was just a rug pole the entire time. And you lose your life savings and you have no recourse. And that's the fucking future of investments. Bro. Hey, bro, you're fired. Yeah, that's fair. This is it could happen here podcast about how things are bad, sometimes a podcast about how to make them

less bad. Today we're talking about the former how things are bad, and we're talking about financialization, um, and specifically the financialization of like human beings and the endeavor to create art. Uh and so well, art art is a broad broad term. I mean, I said the endeavor to I'm sure they all want to be creating art. Well, this won't make any sense to people yet, so I'm gonna I'm gonna give a brief overview. There's an article in the Atlantic that dropped down November twenty nine called

what Happens when You're the Investment. It's by Rex Wouldbury, um, who I hate. UM. So as a note, okay, let let me just get the the the nut of the article is, and that there's been a couple of other articles on this guy. Um. His name is Alex mass mesh Um and he is a French kid I think,

who decided to token ize himself. And what that means is so like, you've got the ethereum blockchain, right, he basically he's he's putting he's carving up aspects of his like potential future earnings, and he's putting those on the Ethereum blockchain as like tokens that people can buy. And the idea is that this kid had wanted to like start a business and be an entrepreneur, but he didn't

have any money. So using like on the ether blockchain, he turned himself into tokens basically like his potential future earnings and his time. And basically people are able to buy up coins effectively, I mean not coins, but tokens shares. Yeah yeah, dollar sign Alex is like the name of the token, which basically shares they're buying. He's turned himself

essentially into a publicly traded company kind of um. And holders of his coins are like, he's splitting up fifteen percent of his income for the next three years basically among people who like hold his coins. And he raised like twenty grand this way um. And it's not just like it's not just his future earnings that are being kind of tokenized. You can also use tokens to like buy retweets from him, or one on one conversations or and here's a line I love and introduction to someone

in his network. And and it's the overall idea. Because there's you can find some other good articles. Good as an interesting word to use. You can find other interesting, fascinating articles about this, this idea, which is like human beings token izing their future earning potential um in order to uh raise money um and and it's uh the

way this is usually sold as a good thing. In fact, I should probably just read a quote from this Atlantic article to give you an idea of how uh mass measure is or of how um um the the author of the article, Rex good would Bury is is trying to sell this ship. We all have the slightly annoying friend who insists that she knew about so and so before they were even famous. When it comes to Taylor Swift, I'm that friend, and I'm more than slightly annoying about it.

I was a Taylor fan in her pre fearless full on Country days, years before Conway interrupted her on stage at the v m as, But in our current constructive fandom, I'm treated no differently than a fan who discovered Swift on SNL a few weeks back. This would be different, though, if Taylor had done what mass Measure did and turned herself into an investment, she could have issued a social token. Whereas non fungible tokens or n f t s are so called because of the uniqueness of a digital asset,

social tokens are fungible. In other words, each Alex token is interchangeable with every other Alex token, just like a dollar bill can be traded for any other dollar bill. Say Taylor issued had issued her own token, Let's call it a dollar signs swift, and say she had sold dollar signed Swift to her biggest fans. Yeah, say I was one such fan. Over time, as Taylor's popularity grew, the value of the Swift token would have appreciated. As an early believer, I would have shared in the financial

upside of her growing fame. The Swift token I had brought for a hundred dollars in two thousand seven might be worth a hundred thousand dollars today. The Taylor Swift mini economy would serve both the singer and early fans like me. As an artist, Taylor could have funded her work by selling dollar signs or swift tokens. She might not have needed to sell ownership of her master's and she might not have been forced to re record her

albums to take back control over her art. Taylor's fans, for their part, would have been rewarded for a decade of patronage. Were all evangelists for our favorite artists, Yet we capture little of the value that we helped create. And then there's a lot that, like I find unsettling there.

One of them is the idea that like, yeah, the fact that I was a fan of someone earlier means I should get some sort of reward for it, Like I should be treated differently because I liked it earlier, which you might recognize like the thing that everybody has been shipping on for like fandoms for years now, Like it's been a it's been a huge thing where like, yeah, you're being an asshole if you're if you're talking about like if you think you have some additional ownership of

Star Wars because you watched it ten years before the fans today, and so you like different stuff in it, Like that's we all recognize that is like toxic um. But the the whole argument of this article is that like, no, this is how the entire future of creativity should work. We find unsettling. And it also it also ties into like a really concerning development in paras social relationships of like able to invest in someone to buy a conversation

with them in like this really weird way. Um And the fact that young artists are going to be pressured into this kind of thing is really scary. Yeah, because there's like one of the things mass Measure did as like um uh as an experiment, was like allow people who had bought his tokens to make life decisions for him, like tell him when to wake up in the morning and whether or not to eat red meat and stuff

like that. And he stated that like, well, none of this is binding, right, Like I'll I might do what they say, but like I'm not going to do anything crazy or whatever. But also this is like the first iteration of this um. And I like this Atlantic article, which I think is unhinged for reasons we'll get into, but it's purely talking about like look at this incredibly successful person I imagine if they've gotten to be incredibly successful using this method instead, and it might have like

spared them this thing. But what I keep thinking about is like, Okay, well, the vast majority of people, like there's no reason to invest in them, Like yeah, maybe if you come out with a great song or a great video, like, yeah, you could get investments, and I'm sure that could work out. I'm sure, like Taylor Swift is a successful enough person, I'm sure she could have

found a way to succeed under that system too. But what I think will be much more common because there's no real reason to anticipate that the average person will have an earnings potential. If you give them twenty grand, that's greater than twenty grand. Um. The most likely thing is that like people just buy shares and poor people to make them do fucked up ship. Yeah, it's gonna be How would you not how would that not be

where it goes? Yeah, that's that. That's the only way that this is going to get like used on a large scale. People just selling themselves. People are people are gonna use the ether blockchain to like crowdfund and crowd h cast a new jackass basically like it's going it's not going to be like a thousand Taylor Swift's all token izing themselves. It's going to be like millions of people in the global self issuing tokens to like vote on whether they roll down the hill in a barrel

or in like a fucking porta potti. Like it's just it's a nightmare to be to contemplate people actually adopting this. You know, there's there's a lot of Really the thing I think is the most incredible part about this is that like, okay, so like it basically doesn't matter what

like economic theory you used to look at it. It's like every single one of them tells you something, just like absolutely talked about it, and like, you know, because because I mean, there there there's there's there's some extent to which I look at this and it's like, this isn't that much different than the fact, you know, it's like, okay, so you're paying someone to do whatever you want, but like, okay, like that's not that much different than just a job, right,

Like it's it's not it's not inherently that much different than the fact that everyone is forced to just do wage labor. But also like there's one was interesting things to me that I thought about this when I was what I was reading this was so, do you just know what capitalization is? Yeah? So this is this is just capitalizing a person, right, Like it's literally taking a person public effect putting turning them into like a tradeable

share and it's like an investment. Yeah, I mean, this is all one of the things that like a Forbes article I found point is that this is another kind

of unregulated securities training. Yeah yeah, yeah. But what's what's interesting to me about it is that like, okay, so you know this is also already how accounting wise, every corporation sees a person, right like every every every every person in the asset book is you know, yeah, you know, like a wage is just capitalization, right, It's like how much will you pay now for this much money later? You could, but it's like people are doing it to

themselves now, which just like this. Yeah, you could argue that like elements of this or how like banks treat you when you get a mortgage, right, um, like, but but also that's much more rigorous and limited, like it has like regulations and has rules for how those things work.

It's not some like twelve year old getting of like like going on to coin base and buying part of you as a joke with your with like his dad's money, right, Like because it's like yeah, because what if it's like there's no law against a seventeen year old I guess if maybe their parents may need to consent, but there's no law against the seventeen year old getting a facial tattoo of like the doors of a concentration camp on

their face. But what if some kid tokenizes himself for forty grands so he can drop an EP and that's what like a bunch of four channers who buy up his his shares want him to do um. And maybe the fucking kid does that because he knows it's going to get him, because his brain is not done and he knows it's going to get him. A bunch of fucking social media uh clouds and like it's there's a lot of and there's no way to regulate that. Like it's just an inherently toxic proposition that I don't think

the government would. I don't know what side of this the government would even step in on, Like what is the regulation of people deciding I'm letting random strangers who pay me money vote on what I do with my life. What do you ever think it reminds me of a lot is like the micro lending stuff from the nineties, where it was like, oh, well, we'll like empower these people by we'll go in and uh, We're going to give them like a small amount of money and have

to pay back. And it was like, you know, and and all of the same stuff that you're reading, all the arguments about why this is a good thing or actually the name as the micro lending ones and that stuff. You know. There there were two ways it turned out. One was basically you get the scenario where both sides are scamming each other where you know, all the people who are getting these micro loans are just they're just taking the money and walking right like that's you know,

the their their their things. Oh this is what I can just get money like this and we can just keep I just keep not paying it back, and so

this I'm scamming them. But then on the other side you have these people who are like, oh cool, I can give this person this loan and turn them into a debt peon and it and you know, and and the the the really depressing side about it is so that the people who couldn't get away, Like I mean, we're literally reduced the debt pions and you know, I mean there's a huge wave of suicides in India probably don't say examples, wave of suicides, people drinking past a

side because they couldn't pay off these loans and so and and the thing that's different about this is that like I mean, ay, you're doing it to yourself. But then be again, there's no regulation. But that also means there isn't any way to force someone to do what you're going It's unclear how it's going to be enforced. And the other thing that is clear it is like

what does losses look like? Like what what happens when someone like you cannot make back on like an investment, But if the investment is a person, how does that work? And if someone's contractually obligated to give a certain share of their income, what happens when there's not enough income

for that? Like like you know, so those types of things. Yeah, I mean there's no answer to that, uh, And there's nobody like the money that's going to be whatever made in this is going to be made before anyone steps into to try to answer that if anyone ever does, like, um, it's it's gonna be the next because I think we're I think we're heading for a crash with with n f t s. Like there was just an article today about how what of nfc T trading is done by

like ten percent of people, which further back because the allegations of n f t S is that most of what's happen opening isn't people actually buying them. It's people like the same person using multiple wallets basically trying to jack up the perceived value by throwing a bunch of

other Internet money that they already have. So these these whales who have like a bunch of crypto gaming the system, and we've seen some of it, and the biggest n f t S sale it was like half a billion dollars and it was a guy selling it to himself and then transferring it back into another wallet to try to make it look like it was worth half a billion dollars even though no one had actually really paid that for it. Um so I and I think you

know that. And kind of what we've seen with the regulations the governments announced for n f t s. I think that's a problem for them in the near future. And I wouldn't be surprised to see this takeoff next, especially given like the creator economy that we're seeing on like the kind of that yeah TikTok, Like, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw a rash of big TikTok

stars tokenizing themselves. And like I'm not even sure, I'm I'm sure it would be a mix of the person making the tokens being the one doing the scam and the person receiving or the people buying the tokens being the one doing. Like I'm sure it would be a

mix of different kinds of exploitation. But it's not gonna be good, I mean, and and just like it's gonna make like I don't know, fifty people super rich when they when they first start trying it, right like that that is that is like when this happens, like when a TikTok star with five million followers, when they do this, they will make boatloads of money. It's just unclear what happens after that. Yeah, well, Fleet of Mexico, Yeah, I mean, that would be the smart thing. That would be the

smart thing to do. Yeah, In this Forbes article I found, which is a thousand times better than the Atlantic article, Like, even though it's written by someone I think who's also into crypto, it's just it Actually it asks some of these questions we've been talking about UM, and it cites David Hoffman, who's the CEO of a of a token ized real estate platform UM on what he sees as

some of the problems. Like he, as a guy who's supports aspects of this kind of thing, sees is the problems with this and uh, it's yeah, let sec um Hoffman re returning to his core problem with the personal token model model, Hoffman re emphasized that the assurances and utility that come with some of these tokens don't exist, for with with certain kinds of tokens don't exist for like these personal tokens. How risky this investment is is

completely defined by the individual. In his disclaimer, he's and he's talking about one of the guys who's token himself, this guy named Kerman. In his disclaimer, he says this is a highly risky investment and that you could lose all your money, which is a terrible thing to say because with personal tokens. The issuer is in complete control

over exactly how risky the investment actually is. It's largely up to them whether there are risks or not, which is like a kind of illegal securities trading that I

don't think we've ever anyone's ever done. Um Like, it's this, It's this fascinating new con where you're literally the you're you're doing securities trading, but instead of it being over a company, it's just you and technically there's no consequences if you just take the money and run, Like I don't know what kind of contract, Like, you couldn't have a contract that says that you could say, they're that you're obligated to pay out your future earnings, but you

couldn't have to work Like that's not enforceable. You can't like contractually obligate someone two to like work, like you're allowed to quit a job. I mean, I guess you could put penalties in it, but I don't, like none of the current ones have anything, I mean, or they could go to The other option is is that they could go to jail for fraud if they try to if they try to not follow through on the investment.

If you say like, yeah, I I invested in you and you said that you would do these things, you didn't do them. Now you can go to prison. That is the other Yeah, and I think that will at some point, like will be scams and some of that will come in. But like none of these current ones, none of them are saying, here's my specific I'm going to make this special. It's not like if you like like with a Patreon, right, You're you're paying a little bit at a time on an ongoing basis for a

very clear product. Generally, this is so far. These aren't that. They're just like, I'm gonna try to do something that makes money and if it does, you get a cut of it. And that's it's so much like there's nothing that's stopping mass Metch from saying like, hey, my my and my attempt didn't work. Uh so we're done. No no money for anybody like that, and I you're not.

There's no accounting requirements, there's no there's a bunch of ways in which it's sucked up from a financial except it's not it's not his, it's not it's not you're not investing in his business. You're nesting in him. So even if even if even if he takes another job, there's still it seems to be contractually obligated to still

get that of his income. Yes, And I think that's that's the area in which I think it would be abusive for the person being to ganized because most people aren't gonna like most people don't make that much money. So they raise someone manages to like raise five or ten grand and then just winds up for years giving a cut of their income that winds up being more than they got initially to a bunch of like it's almost like a like a payday loan that you've blockchain.

Yeah you know, Okay, so this is this is what I'm thinking about because so there's I don't know if I talked about this on the show, but there's a thing in China where they've been kind of cracking down it now for stunning nineteen Like literally every single app like had a like had a pet a loan thing in it, so like like your flashlight app would have would offer you a pet a loan, and it was basically it was yeah, they were there was originally tied

in with like people who buy um. You know, I was originally tied in with like like the the the services that, like their version of Amazon, for example, would like, oh hey, we'll give you a loan so you can buy this, you can order fried chicken. And I was always wondering when it has become to the US, and I think it might never hope, I mean hopefully it never does. And I think it might not just because of how like powerful our paid a loan industry is.

But it's like we've we've now invented. It seems like it's gonna happen, but like dumber, like our our version of it is like this thing, which is just you know, it's what what if? What if paid a loans but on the blockchain? Except you know when I guess this is the everything you know that that we've've been getting at, is that the difference between this being a paid a loan and this being you scammed a bunch of people

is what the enforcement mechanism looks like. And you know this this this comes back to some other things I think you're interesting about. This one is that you know, so the whole the huntline n f T drift right is based on convincing people that there's value in ownership

right there, Like ownership itself has inherently has value. And yeah, but but this this is not that this is this is you know, this is going back to know your value value is built on labor, right well, yeah, it's like labor and like like personhood, like like you as a personal brand is the thing that they're trying to

get at. But the thing, the thing that's missing here though, is that in order for like you know, in order for like labor to produce value right in this way, there has to be like there has to be a way for you to force them to pay you like you need you need coercion for it. And if there's no coercion, then you know, you just take a bunch

of money and leave. And and that that I think is like this, this is going to be the battle over like if this becomes a thing, it's gonna be you know, the people who buy these things are gonna wind up like trying to you know, I think they're gonna be the ones you try to put your regulation because they're gonna you know, they're gonna go in. They're gonna be I want to get my money back, and that could end really, really really badly if you know,

I mean it probably will. I like, I don't know how popular I think this will be because I think that I hope this is a maybe if there'd never been like a Patreon or something, But the actual use case of this seems to already be well served by the existing capitalist infrastructure. Like people, I think more people wanted back a creator's Patreon than they want to like own pieces of a person's time and earning potential like that.

That seems like a more niche and weird desire to people than just like, oh, yeah, these guys make a video I like every week, so I'll throw them three dollars. Well, I think. I think the difference though, is that Patreon money gets you money for normal people. This gets you

money from like tech bros. And that. Yeah, that's always yeah, it's it's a griff designed to And I want to dive back into this Atlantic article because it's so bad in such a comprehensive way that I think it deserves analysis. That's what what put a pin in what you said. But I want to start with, like how the person writing this, this Rerex motherfucker, like his his concept of the the history of the Internet. Um, because it's completely wrong. Quote.

We're on the precipice of the third era of the Web. The web's first era was about information flowing freely. Think Google giving you access to the world's knowledge. Most of us were passive consumers in this era. The second era was the social web Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. People began to create their own content, and that content became the lifeblood of the big platforms. We became active participants, but the platforms devoured all the profits. The promise of the Internet

and the Internet was to erase the gatekeepers. Instead of waiting for a record label to sign you, you could share your music on Spotify, instead of asking a publication to share your words. You could tweet, instead of being tapped by a studio execut You could become a YouTuber. What happened is that these platforms became the new gatekeepers. The third era of the web is about writing the ship. Social capital becomes economic capital. Value no longer accumulates to

brokers and intermediaries. That's number one, completely wrong, But one thing. Yeah. The first era of the Internet, I would say, was about the idea that information should flow freely, and Google came in like a decade or more into that period, Like I had been on the Internet five years before Google hopped into that ship, and Google was actually the start of of the end of that period. Um. And it's it's the idea that, like the social web was

people creating their own content. Most of the social web's initial capital and like all of its initial money, came from taking content that people were being paid to make on legacy platforms that had existed before social media, taking that content, putting it on social media, and then monetizing that without paying money back to the people had made the content. The money in social media did not initially

come from people making their own content. And the way that they mean it, like yeah, you at college humor or whatever, we're making your own content and sharing on social media, but you've been doing that before social media. Social media just actually made it less profitable eventually, Like the way he summarizes this is so wrong because what

the social web actually did. And the other thing I'd argue is that the first era of the Internet, the like early days when things are happening on like forums and and weird little angel fire websites and like even my space, um, which I think is kind of my Space kind of straddles the first in second eras uh that was fundamentally much more an era of people creating their own content, because the the lifeblood of uh social media today isn't people really making their own content, it's

people reacting to content that other people made. Um. And again it just shows the fact that he's he's summarizing it this way in a way that I think is so wrong and inaccurate to how things actually developed. Uh. Is characteristic of his attitude towards this stuff, where he's kind of seeing the only real meaningful evolutions in in in the Internet through the corporation that monetized it, um. Which is just telling of like how this guy actually

sees the way the Internet has developed. And you will not be surprised to know, Uh, this motherfucker is an investor at Index Ventures. UM. Yeah, like he's he's he's a guy whose business is capitalizing things, um. And so that's the only way he sees the development of the Internet, even though that's not the accurate way of looking at

how the Internet evolved. And I think I think that there's one more really important thing that he leaves out here, which is that because you know, like we're talking oh, this is the third age the Internet. Like, no, the third day of the Internet started, like I don't know, the mid early tends. When I would say when gamer Gate hit is when I would I would I mean, it's gonna be a little offend. It depends which it

depends what you mean by age. So one of my friends worst in advertising, and he was talking about this where you know, we can we can talk about like gammer gating the sort of fascist males, but there was something else happening back end, which was the Internet of things stuff and the Internet things stuff off like you know, like nobody, it's kind of a I don't know, like I think we mostly think about it's like it's kind

of a joke or like it just sucks. But really what it was was that that that was the period in which people figured out that the thing that the actual money and be made on the Internet was from selling people's personal information. And that and the and and the Internet things like just dramatic, like just indescribably increased the amount of data that you could extract from people.

And that that was that's the actual that was the actual change of like like that that that's that's that's the thirty of the Internet, and that the earth of the Internet will last basically for every until we destroy it, which is that you know, the commodity is just all of all of the information about who you are, where you go, like what you buy, who you talk to.

That just being sold off to two advertisers is you know, the thing that he's very very carefully not talking about and instead focusing on, Oh, it was using was creating content. And it's like, no, they the Internet, that the just they they sold spying on the entire world. Yeah, And I think there's there's two good ways to to divide the Internet into ages, and the ages would be slightly different each way. One is kind of how you're doing it is the way in which it was monetized, Right,

That's that's that's one way too. And and then if that's the case, it's going to start with it was not at all. It was an entirely public project and everybody on it was on it through like a university, and like people did not pay to access it. Other than that you had to be at an institution or

a university. And then like we get to the kind of the dot the era before for the dot com boom and of the dot com boom, and then like the early pre social internet stuff like something awful and like having stumbled upon and and whatnot, and like those sending traffic to sites like where I used to work,

cracked and um. And then kind of the social media, which is the start of as you said, like the data being monitored monetize, like individuals data being the thing either that's being directly monetized or it's being used to deliver like targeted adds to you. Um. And then there's like if you think about it in terms of content, it's it starts like for the first era wouldn't even involve Google because it would be like the start of usenet up to eternal September in nine and then you

know on from there. Um. But either way, this guy doesn't like everything he says about the history of the Internet is dumb. It's just a very simplified version and you don't actually look at like the interocking systems um. Because I mean, yeah, I don't know why he describes it this way, because it is it is, like it's accurate if you squint and don't think about it. Um. But it's weird because like this article is like it's

four tech Bros. So I don't know why he describes it this way, because I feel like he could describe it a lot more accurately. Um if you if you wanted to. Well, it's something i'm gonna get into. I'm gonna say this point like twice eveisode. I'm gonna get into the neo liberalism episodes. And I'm writing but one of one of the key features of neoliberalisms that they lie is that the neo liberals have to have two

versions of what they believe. They have the version that they tell everyone else, which is completely a lie and is not what they believe at all. And then it has they have the version that they tell to each other, which is what they actually believe, and they completely they contradict each other completely. They mostly believe things. Everything that

they say in public is just a complete lie. And that I think that's what he's doing here, which is that this that like that history of the Internet is the one you sell the public consumption, because yeah, that that's that's that's the lie you tell people to take money from them. And then he has the thing that he believes, which he will not ever tell you because you know if if if he tells you what like he actually wanted to do, you would run screaming from

the room. And you can read between what he wants you to believe. I think is made very clear by how he divides, by the fact that when he starts like dividing up the ages of the Internet, he says, the first one is the time in which people wanted information to be free. And what he's kind of saying by doing that is thing like that was an infant stage of the Internet. And obviously the natural evolution of the Internet is for every single thing on it to

become monetized. And because I also believe the Internet should be every aspect of our lives, like this is megaverse guy or a metaverse guy, like I think the Internet should should be involved in every aspect of life. That means every aspect of life should be financialized. Um, and that's extremely radical, but it does not sound that way. When you describe it that way, people's heads go over it.

But like, what he's saying is deeply radical. And I think also like again, you want to talk about like the first and not just the early age, because the first people who kind of built the backbone of the Internet were mostly like very radically anti uh capitalizing on like there was this idea that like it absolutely should

be as free as possible. Like Steve Wozniak, the guy who functionally invented the personal computer, had a background like as a phone freaker, like literally literally robbing phone companies to get like free phone calls and stuff like these, Like most of the early Internet pioneers were like some kind of criminal um And the early ages of like Internet content being monetized mostly started with people doing ship for free. Like that was how the people who made

money on it. That's how all of my bosses and that's how fucking I got started. Was like you would just start making ship and you would put it out for free, and eventually like that would get enough traffic that you you you you draw ads to you and whatnot, and you'd make money. But it was always like all of the content that that made the Internet, and all of the content creators who were huge now mostly started um doing something like even it was just like throwing

up videos on YouTube, right or like going on. And that's that's less the case with the zoomers now because a lot of them got started on at things like like twitch, where the idea is to from the beginning be trying to monetize yourself and while you're like building

a brand, you're constantly monetized. But that's a really recent change, and I actually I find it kind of unsettling because that was I don't know, it's a mix because I'm certainly not of the I'm not of the of the mind that like, if someone is asking you to do work, you should be getting paid for it. But if you are trying to if you are trying to like build a life as a creator, the best way to do that creatively is to just make the things that you think are cool and then make like if if other

people like it, you make money. Like better things get made than that that like that that is the way the best art gets made. I think it's a few things going on here because like the way I think, like I think. Actually, the reason why he frames it this way is because he's trying to get back to his idea of freedom. Right. He describes like the golden age of the Internet being information flowing freely. He thinks that the blockchain is a new version of that. So

that's why he's framing it in this way. The second thing is in terms of artists and creators. Um, if you think about like, yeah, like when like the when the early age of what he calls like the of what we we kind of all been refrained to it. Like the second area when like era of like when social media and like content creation like sites are a thing. That's like just use YouTube as an example. Um. Because there was a low saturation and content, it was easier

for someone to rise up and gain a platform. Let's say someone like Bo Burnham right, who started as just a kid and now is like a very popular comedian. Um. But then YouTube instead of backing creators like that, um, which they did a little bit, but they did not as much. They instead started, uh. Like the thing that happened was like, uh, YouTube really incentivizing sharing like late night content and sharing like like TV clips of TV shows and like using like doing using legacy media on

their platform. And that's the things they really backed. That's the things they really pushed into your feet. It's like tonight show clips. UM. So a lot of those original original content creators kind of got left behind and hour are now like just their own are running on their own personal brands, some of them use Patreon for example. But it's also it's impossible to do this now because

there's an oversaturation of content. The only thing that's done this recently is TikTok because it was a brand new platform. There was again a new opportunity for a lot of kids to gain to gain a lot of audiences really quickly. I mean, I just I to based on what you're saying, I think that like TikTok is the closest to how couch it happened on the Internet before everything, because because it is like, you're not starting from like everyone starts.

I guess knowing you could make money, but that was the same way you start because you're like you're doing a thing, and if that thing takes off, then there's ways to monetize and like that. Yeah, I think that's why probably white bar white is so popular. Generally, growth on TikTok is pretty Uh, it's pretty organic. It's not it's not it's not boosted by big brands, uh, the same way you know, stuff like YouTube is, and now it's probably gonna be edging in that direction. But it's

it's it's it's not, it's it's not there yet. So and his argument in this is to get back to just being like a small content creator getting your stuff seen. His solution to this problem of like YouTube and stuff backing like these large like light night shows and back in these large like corporately funded things. His solution is that if you're a small if you're a small content creator, you should sell yourself as an asset to other people

on the internet. Right, So, because like his his idea is that he wants to get rid of the gatekeepers of the Internet and go back to how the Internet was. But his solution for doing that is just by selling you as a person brand to other people on the Internet who are like tech bro investors. So that that's

why it's framed this specific way. So I think when we're all are like talking about like, why does he describe it this way, what's all this weird stuff going on, It's because that's how he's rationalized in his brain, is for how what he thinks being a free artist is, and he thinks this is going to be the new

method to get there. There's another important sort of macro thing to think about this year, which is that the underlying basis of all of this right is the assumption that everyone is an entrepreneur, is that you know, like every everyone is doing all of their stuff at all times because they want, you know, in order to be

a business owner. And this has been like you know this, this has been the great ideological victory of the right in the last fifty years, is that they convinced everyone that like every single person is you know, like you're stime temporary embarrassed Millonariy syndrome. It's like even people who are working jobs, right, like working wage labor jobs, think of themselves as you know, content creators. And a content creator,

you know, is a small business owner. And this has an immensely coercive while I'll a coerse or two, but corrosive effect on you know, anyone working together to do something because you know, oh, you're not you're not you're not a worker, You're just like you're a content creator,

You're you know, you're a small business owner. You're like you know, you what and and and that's you know this, This is a very long running thing that once of incredibly powerical people have been trying to do really since like i mean arguably like the thirties, but the complete success of that and the way that you know, they're they're they're selling exactly the same thing that they were selling in like the eighties, but now it's this like, you know, you're trying to get people to do it

to themselves. And also they throw all of this like sort of nonsense tech jargon at you to get you to sort of like stop looking at the fact that this is just sort of you know, this is this is this is just the the new, even worse version of everyone being a worker who thinks that they're like, you know, also going to be a SMO this owner someday. Yeah. I don't know, I don't have anything else really to say about it other than this, but like, I mean,

this was a good amount to say. I just think this is so I think it's such an example of kind of the way in which the worst people in the world are trying to steer the internet, um, and by steering the Internet, steer the soul of like the human race. Um. Like this is a vision of the future this guy is sharing. And this article that I isn't isn't positioning itself as radical, but includes some like

deeply radical ideas about how the world should go. And by the way, I should also note that he's also just like blatantly wrong every time he brings up a number UM like he taught he he points out in this article that forty six million Americans own cryptocurrency. The real number is more likely about one million kind of it at most, like by every credible I have no idea where he's getting forty six milli in Americans own cryptocurrency.

And again, the stat just came out, and that's part of his argument is that like, obviously people love the blockchain and these tokens, and like this is this is inevitably going to get more and more popular um and when again, the reality is that every real thing that's happening on the on the blockchain is pretty much versions of a security scam that the government has just announced

they're going to finally start regulating. But yeah, I wanna so that the stat the study that just came out today was that analysis of six point one million trades of like four point seven million n f t s. It shows that the top ten percent of traders were responsible for of trading UM, which again is more evidence that all that's happening is people boosting prices also the average, the vast majority, like more of an FT sales are for less than two hundred dollars. Some of them are

for just pennies. Like what the stuff that you're hearing about is all ridiculous outliers, and its outliers specifically because people are pumping stuff up in order to try to

call on someone um. And that's the whole basis of this guy's the structural argument, the reason that he's attempting to argue that like there's actually desire here and that this is in fact the future of the Internet is based entirely upon like numbers that are either bad or he's or he's deliberately using he's deliberately lying about the numbers because there is no credible number evidence I've ever heard that forty six million Americans currently owned cryptocurrency or

even have ever owned cryptocurrency. Yeah, and I think the other kind of nail on the coffin for this idea and why I don't think it's going to catch on the same way these guys think it think it does. And this is something he acknowledges in the article, is like not a lot of people know how the stockic change works, Like very like he he says, I think it's like I don't know, like he I forget that what number he says, but um, but he says like not not tons of people actually use or know what

the stockic stockic changes. Um. And the reason why Patreon was so successful and why it's so useful for content it is because it's a very intuitive system. It's very clear how it works, it's clear what you're doing. There's no really questions about where your money is going or

what's happening this. I don't think this is ever I don't think this whole personal investment thing is ever going to actually go off because people don't understand what the blockchain is and it's too much work to explain it to them. Um. And just because of how much work it is to wrap your mind around, like so where is my money going? What do I have to set up? How does that work? That's way too much of a headache.

Because in order for this to actually work, you need this to break out of the tech bro bubble or else this is just gonna be this small tech brow thing of people handing over the same one dollars to all their friends in a circle. Um, which is what it is currently, and I in order to break out of that circle, they need to get you know, your grandmother to learn what crypto is and how blockchains work.

And that's not gonna happen. Um. So I think that is the one other nail in the coffin for this type of idea is like Patreon is easy, Patreon makes sense. This thing it is not nearly as intuitive for supporting a YouTuber you like, yeah, oh, okay, cool. I actually found evidence on where that forty six million Americans number

comes from. Yeah, so basically number one. I found like a fucking crypto news source pointing out that, like when people started tweeting that forty six million Americans is based on a study we'll talk about a second, but like when people started tweeting about this, like the immediate response in the bitcoin subredit was like, well, that's not fucking possible. Uh. Like one of the people in the bitcoin subred it said, sounds very high. I don't know a single person who

owns it. And this says woman, six or seven people own it. Yeah, And and it comes from a study conducted in January by the New York Digital Investment Group servying a thousand participants with incomes over fifty dollars, so that that seems valid. Wait, they just said it's over fifty This is okay, this method, Yeah, this this method. You will get a few like Pew released to studies suggesting that like six of Americans have used cryptocurrency at some point, and like all of what's coming out as

kind of sketchy, all of the data. There's like reasons to be kind of unsettled about it. But also like one of the things that you studies showed is that the vast majority of Americans have heard of cryptocurrency, uh, and most haven't used it, Like the vast majority have not chosen to get involved. Like, however accurate you think this is? Like there's another article coming out that says that came out and I guess May of this year.

That's said that's based on a Gemini study, which is Gemini is a crypto exchange that over fifty million Americans are likely to buy crypto in the next year, um, which doesn't seem to have happened. Uh, Like I I just don't see. There's all sorts of like weird little studies commissioned to buy weird little groups. But it really doesn't. It seems like it's it's again kind of part of the grift. Like I'm not seeing a lot of rigor in any of this um anyway, whatever, We've talked enough

about this ship. I just I think we all as soon as we read the article, well we're so like appalled by it that what we should probably we talk about this for forty five minutes. Yeah, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how society is following apart and about how to put it back together again. I'm your host, Christopher Long and Today and for the next few days, we're doing something a bit different. We're going to take a deep dive too some of the

people who got us into the mess we're in today. Now. When we've talked about our enemies and it could Happen here, we've mostly focused on fascism, and for good reason. But for the next few days we're focusing on a different enemy. Don't worry, the Nazis will show up. That enemy is neoliberalism. New liberalism is the single most successful political movement of the twenty centuries. No other political movement in human history

has directly controlled so much of the globe. It is outmaneuvered, outlasted, or simply destroyed every ideology that sought to oppose it, and has reigned virtually unchallenged for fifty years. After exploded on the political scene in Chili, their victory has been so total that even the earthWhile opponents have adopted its

core principles. Margaret Thatcher famously bragged that her proudest accomplishment was creating Tony Blair, basking in the irony that neoliberalism would be implemented across the globe, in large part by

labor and socialist parties. Today, even erstwhile communist countries maintained so called special economic zones with the laws of neoliberalism are allowed to run rampant in exchange for GDP increases, and their communist supporters in the West have come to belief that capitalism is a far more powerful engine of economic development and the state planning advocated by their forebearers, thus internalizing the greatest principle of neoliberalism even as they

clan to oppose it. All of this, of course, raises two questions, what actually is neoliberalism and how did it come to rule the world today. We're going to try to answer the first question by looking back at the original neoliberals and examining what they believed, because it's not what you think. There are many places you can begin the story of neoliberalism. I'm choosing to start in France ninety. Now, the nineteen thirties are a bad time to be a

free trade market liberal. And just to clear this up, early liberal in the European context, which is where a lot of the beginning of the story takes place, does not mean the same thing as it does in the American context. European liberalism up to this point is about free trade markets, individual liberty and rights, etcetera, etcetera. But it's anti state interference. To be somewhat reductive, It's kind of closer to what conservatism is in the US, but

it's not identical. So here that in mind. As the story goes on, dirties saw the rise of fascism and social democracy and communism, each with his own form of government spending and economic planning, which liberals absolutely detested. Now the thirties have been full of liberals gathered you try

to figure out what to do next. In in in seven, Walter Lippmann, an American writer who would become most famous for inventing the term cold war, wrote a book called an Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, which argued that totalitarianism is a product of not having individual private property at the state needs to be limited to a ministering justice and not you know, giving people things

that they need. And so a lot of liberals read this and go, oh cool, we should organize a conference to talk about this book and our ideas. And the

product is in et Litman colloquium. Now, a bunch of extremely important near liberals show up at this conference, including one Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm rope Ki, and Alexander Rusto, and they start talking about the need for a new kind of liberalism to oppose communism, Kanadianism, fascism, and what they call Manchester or Las Fair liberalism, in which the state didn't do defeat it all in political

life and let the economy run an autopilot. Now, the German sociologist Alexander Rousteau, who we're going to talk about more in a second comes up with the term neo liberalism to define the new set of principles that they're trying to develop, and they think the new liberalism should prioritize the price mechanism, free enterprise, the system of competition, and importantly, a strong and impartial state. Now this is

the origin of new liberalism as a term. And it's important to understand two things from the outset, because the new liberals are going to spend the next fifty years lying about this. One. Near liberalism favors a strong state to make the market work. And to new liberalism is not the same thing as classical liberalism. Now, new liberals essentially invented the whole I make classical liberal thing in

the fifties. But if you read the original stuff that they wrote, if you if you go back to nineties, if you go back to nineteen thirties, and you read what they write, the new liberals are extremely clear that they are not classical liberals and that in fact their political project is different from the twentieth century nineteenth entree liberal project, in which the state is supposed to be a night watchman and not actually interfere in the markets

at all. The neoliberals, originally before they you know, start lying about their actual origins, reject this principle and come to believe that, in fact, a strong state is necessary to ensure that markets work. So now you have Lenar liberalism as a thing, but nothing really happens much until after World War two because world were to almost everyone

is just doing state economic planning. And so, you know, all of these people rambling off to the side about how, oh, the market is the most efficient way to plan a system. Nobody listens to them because they're fighting a war, and

the way you fight wars is doing state planning. And after a world war to the situation for new liberals is even worse because having you know, gone through the experience of entire society is turning their entire economies and systems into planning agencies in order to you know, mobilize the total war effort. People will after the war come back and go, oh, hey, we can do this to other parts of the economy. So this means that everyone, and this is not just the communist states, this is

you know, this is Britain is doing Kanesianism. They're doing planning, they're doing state welfare programs, and the New Deal is spreading also across the globe. Now in response to all of this, Hiak and his allies do two things. The first is found in the Chicago School of Economics, and the second is to assemble the avengers of taking food

from children. The mont Pelion Society. The mont Pellion Society is the central neoliberal institution, which is a weird thing because in a lot of ways it's essentially just a closeted debate society intended to allow Neiler both to work

out their political principles behind closed doors. Now, at this first meeting in n a lot of the people from the Littman Colloquium are there, but unfortunately some of the French members of the Colloquium and some of the people from Germany had collaborated with the Nazis, so they were out. And this meant that High I get defined new people

to bring in. And the mont Peleion Society's first meeting is the first time you actually have all three major schools of neoliberal thought in the same place at the same time, arguing with each other. And they can't agree on shit. The only thing they can actually agree on is to look into more stuff and to get a sense of how far away from moderate neoliberalism. The arguments that are being had at the Montpellion Society are The Montpellion Society has only ever once actually released a single

statement stating its principles. And this statement was the only thing that could be agreed on at the first meeting of the Montpellion Society. And I'm just gonna read it. This is what they agreed to research. One the analysis and explanation of the present crisis so as to reflect its essential moral and economic origins. Two the redefinition of the state's functions so as to distinguish more clearly between

the totalitarian and liberal order. Three methods of re establishing the rule of law and assuring its developments that individuals and groups are not in a position to encroach upon the freedom of others and private property rights are not allowed to become a basis of predatory power. Four the possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market. Five Methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance of creeds,

hostiles liberty. Six The problem of creating an international order conductive to safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of harmonious international economic relations. You know, just by looking at this you can immediately see signs of how far things are going to move. I mean, you know what, one of one of the things that they're talking about is again they're trying to research whether or not it's

possible to just give people things without the markets. And it's it's it's not just the sort of left quote unquote wing of the neoliberals who are arguing about this. Hyek in In will be his most famous book, The Road to Serve Them, I mean explicitly says, yeah, you should just give people food and housing and stuff outside of the market. And you know, like today, if literally anyone who says this will be accused of socialism. This is the neoliberal This is, you know, a large part

of the neoliberal position in now. I've mentioned briefly that there are three schools of neoliberalism, and we're going to spend some time looking at them because people have a tendency to look at neoliberalism and assume that, oh, it's it's it's just the Chicago School of Economics, you know, which is the the neo classical schools most famous members Melton Friedman and It's true that that's Chicago School are neoliberals, but and and this is critical, there's other intellectual schools

involved in here. And it's not just it's not just economists. Neoliberalism from the beginning is a multi disciplinary international project. You have lawyers, you have political scientists, you have journalists, you have philosophers, you have anthropologists. And the product of this is something is an ideology and a philosophy that is much deeper, much richer, and much more dangerous than

just Chicago School alone. The second of the major schools is the Austrian School, which is led by Ludokfung Mesas and Hyak and maybe most importantly but least well known, the third school that we're actually going to be talking about today is the German Ordo Liberals, led by Alexander Rousteau, who again invented determina liberalism, and Wilheim Ropek, who almost no one has ever heard of, but are incredibly important. And I'm gonna I'm gonna insert a disclaimer here before

I get yelled at by by nerds. Yes, I'm aware of the public choice theories at the Virginia School. I am also aware of at a group of the deal lierbals is called the Geneva School, even though they're just regular or the liberals. And there's also the rump of the neo institutionalists. Um, I don't care about them because they're not irrelevant to this story. Please do not you yell at me on Twitter. Now, these people have wildly divergent beliefs, and so I'm gonna do my best to

do once sentence summaries of what these people believe. So the Chicago School of Neoclassical economics, humans are all knowing, calculating gods, rationally optimizing their behavior to get the most out of every single human interaction they engage in to maximize the utility the product of this infinite freedom to

choose economic equilibrium. The Austrian school, humans are pig ignorant foxx, you know literally nothing and therefore mostly made to bow down to the ever changing disequilibrium of the market, which is the only thing that can actually process information order liberalism. The markets won't create or balance itself because these uncultured proletarian swine keep asking for raises instead of focusing on

the magic of the families. So we have to use the state and laws to force people and companies to do competition. And these are obviously some what comical summaries of it, but these are very very different conceptions of what it is to be a human, of whether the market occurs naturally or not, of what the market actually is. Is it a product, is it an object in and of itself? Is it a product? Is it just an

inevitable product of humans doing whatever humans do? And this is part of the reason why it's always almost impossible to get the original neal liberal sugree into anything. But this is actually one of the strength of the neo libal project. The project only works because it uses the products of all three branches. You have neo classical attacks on the welfare state, Austrian attacks in sexual planning and order, liberal theories of the state, and sort of cultural on

the non economic nature of markets. And you know, when one school essentially fails as an explanation for something, they can show to another school, and this gives them a very wide range of ability to move between crises and move between people attacking any of the individual schools because

they can simply pull out another set of theories. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about each of the schools, and we're gonna start with the Chicago School because is against the most famous, and because I think there's a there's another very interesting story here into how the Chicago School change from which origins. So one of the people who are supposed to be a founding member of the Chicago School was a manner in Henry Simmons, and Simmons is unlike the rest of the Chicago School

because he actually believes in things. So I'm going to read a couple of quotes from him. Thus, the great enemy of democracy is monopoly in all its forms, gigantic corporate trade associations and other agencies of price control, trade unions, or in general organization and concentration of power within functional classes. Here's another one. A monopolist is an implicit thief because this possession of market power leads the exchange of commodities

at prices that do not reflect underlying social scarcities. And you know, you can see this sort of one of one of the classic neliberal arguments, which is that okay, so you have you have, you have the market. The market is efficient, and trade unions get in the way

of the market because their monopoly. But Simmons has what kind of looks like from from our prospective of left wink critique of monopolies, which is, yeah, okay, giant corps monopolies are thieves because they use their market power to rob people by charging higher prices, and it's it's I genuinely can't say how differently things would have gone if Simmons had actually been around to see the Chicago's go through, because he commits suicide in neteen forty six, and unlike

every single other person who was going to be involved with the Chicago School from the beginning until now, Simmons had a genuine and commitment to democracy and anti monopoly principles. But unfortunately he's he dies in nete forty six, and by the by, the Chago School is really up and running in the fifties, almost everyone involved in it is overtly pro monopoly pro cooperation, and are you know that

they set up an anti trust school. But the thing that the anti trust School is arguing is that monopolies are actually essentially impossible because competition will just take care of everything, and if you try to stop monopolies from happening,

that will interfere in the economy. Now, this is this is the line that Milton Friedman takes, and it's also the line of the Vulcar Fund, who are a sort of I guess you could call them a charitable organization, but it's basically a billionaire slush funds that funds the school. And they've had real fights with Simmons Becauseimmons is like, well, okay, monopolies are bad. At Vulcars like, well, we're a monopoly,

so you guys need to actually work for us. And by the time Freedman essentially takes over the Chicago School and uh night take it over. They're not just intellectual mercenaries. They're extremely proud of the fact that they are, in fact, pure intellectual mercenary hacks with absolutely dogshit economics. If you've ever read just a or you know, if you've ever been forced to take an economics class, you took microeconomics. That's basically just what Chicago School believes. It's everyone's a

rational actor. Every every human being spends all of their time trying to calculate the maximum utility of anything that they do. Everything is a market. Everything functions by supply and demand. Markets are perfectly efficient if you just let them alone and don't interfere with them. Everything the state does interfered with the markets, et cetera, excepted. This is this is the thing that is sort of classically understood

to be neoliberalisms core content. But it's extremely important to understand that these are not the only neoliberals, and in fact, not only are these not the only neoliberals, this set of political principles, to a large extent, is not what the neoliberals actually believe. This kind of stuff is essentially what they feed the roots. Small states, tax is bad, regulation bad. Everything is a market and has always been a market, and all human interactions will nevitably produce markets.

But to understand what neo liberals actually believe, we need to talk about the order liberals. Now, the two most important order liberals are Wilheim rope K and W. W. Roustau, who were both exilis during the Nazi regime. Now, a lot of the other order liberals who stay in Nazi Germany collaborated with the Nazi regime, which is something that's kind of just overlooked and brush to the side when

people are right about them. But grope Key and Rousseau's status as people who you know, fled the Nazis gives them a kind of social cache that their colleagues don't have, and they become extremely important. Now. In some ways, the Order Liberals could be considered the left wing of of

the neoliberals. They are significantly less harsh on the welfare state than other forms of neoliberalism, and this is in large part because the Order Liberals are the first new liberals to ever actually hold any power, and I think people most people tend to think that the first time the liberalism was ever implemented was Chile, but that's not really true. The Order Liberals are actually very powerful in

in nineteen fifties Germany. Now, the problem they face is that the left is powerful enough in Germany that they cannot actually just completely eliminate the welfare state. So their solution is to create this thing called the social markets. And the Order Liberals get accused of like being crypto socialists by a lot of the other Neil liberals, but that's not really what's going on. The very important thing about the Order Liberals is that, unlike the Chicago School,

they're not economists. Both Rockey and Rousto or social scientists. Russo's a sociologist, and they argue that the state and the market alone cannot maintain market society because market society produces dislocation, you know, produces atomization, It destroys social cohesion. And this means that you need a social, political, and

sort of cultural framework to maintain it. And their major focus is on providing stability and security for the working class and a new sense of sort of identity and cultural caohiation, because I think if the working class is essentially left to itself, it will create massification, cultural decay, and eventually the working class return into the proletariat, and that will give these either communism or fascism. The order liberals believe that there's the there's a kind of natural

hierarchical order that they're trying to preserve. That this is essentially what order means. It means literally order which accords with the essence of humans. This means an order in which proportioned measure and balance exists. Now they have a few ways that they're going to do this rope case

obsessed with something called structural policy. And structural policy is basically the argument that the conditions from markets have to be specifically created, and again they're not just economic positions of social conditions. And this is fused with Risteau's vital politique, which is essentially about that the power of anthropological and human aspects of culture and politics beyond the forces of production that they think are vital sort of the functioning

of society. And part of what they're doing here is that they want to give something people a cultural thing to focus on, so they stop talking about like wages and welfare and who owns production. But the combination of

vital politic and structural policy gets you order liberalism. So nominally they focus on individuals, but really what they're focusing on as the family, as this quote unquote decentralized engine of economic capitalism with small businesses and hopefully small family farms as a sort of a political social support base for capitalism, which they're they're they're going to promote and set against the radicalism of the sort of industrial proletariat.

And this this sort of middle class that they're aspiring to build is extremely important for a number of reasons. Partially is a way to diffuse working class tension. Partially as a way to sort of offers work or something to inspired to, and partly as a way to fuse

the sort of traditional natural hierarchy with conceptions and britocracy. Now, Roka in particular also begins to look for systems outside of just the democratic state to sort of create this legal apparatus that the neoliberals want to use to impose markets. And this is extremely important because a lot of where neo liberalism winds are coming from is not from national governments.

It's from the sort of international bureaucracy. It's from the I m F. It's from the World Bank, it's from the World Trade Organization, and those groups are controlled by by neoliberal lawyers. And Rock is the person who essentially first has this idea. Now, the goal of using these international legal institutions as a way of creating law, the laws to sort of enforce new liberalism is using it

as a way to sort of get around democracy. And I'm going to read this quote from Roque because oh boy, does he absolutely not believe in freedom and democracy in the way that he and everyone else talks about publicly. It is possible that in my opinion of the strong state, I am even more fascist, fascististure than you yourself, because I would indeed like to see all economic policy decisions concentrated in the hand of a fully independent and vigorous state,

weakened by no pluralist authorities of a corporative kind. I see the strength of the state in the intensity, not extensiveness, of its economic policies. How the constitutional legal structure of such a state should be designed as a question in and of itself, for which I have no patent receipt to offer. I share your opinion that the old formulas of parliamentary democracy have proven themselves useless. People must get used to the fact that there is also a presidential

authoritarian even yes, horrible thing to say, dictatorial democracy. So what he's saying there is that's he's he's he's he's sending a letter to one of you his friends, and he's going, yeah, I'm I'm even more fascist than you are.

I think that democracy is actually a threat to the market, and that in order to avoid authoritarian democracy, we should, in fact concentrate all economic decision making power in a in the hands of a narrow elite in a strong state, which is, you know, the opposite of everything that near liberals opened the claim to be supporting, but behind closed doors. And we will get into more of this in a second.

This is what they actually believe. Now. Rok is somewhat unique among Neni liberals in that he is racist by neoliberal standards. He's just enormously incredibly racist. So for example, he he's a massive apartheid dude. And again I want I need to point this out. Roku is one of the things, is one of the most important neoliberals. He's one of the founding members of the Montpellion Society, although he gets kicked out for well, he eventually leaves because

of some disputes he as with Hyak. But you know, I'm gonna read some of the things that he says about South Africa because they're horrible. Quote, the South African negro is not only a man of an utterly different race, but at the same time stems from a completely different type and level of civilization. He also calls ending apartheid quote national suicide. And you know, so she starts saying this stuff and the other neoliberals are like, dude, what

the fuck? So that the oliberal he needs newspaper like he wrote for for thirty years, which is like what's and published a bunch of students going stop this. This is you cannot seriously be supporting a part tied like this. And his response in the newspaper is called the n z Z and his response is quote these n z Z near intellectuals will not be satisfied until they let a real cannibals speak now. Rope is one of his friends, another MPs member named Hundled. So Hyak looks at ropek

support for apartheid and is like what the fuck? Like no, absolutely not, Like this is horrible. Why why are you doing this? You know? To too high X credit that this This is the extent of the credit I will give Hik in this episode is that he looks at just the open overt racism of rocaine is like no. And when when he does this Ropek's friends, Hundled says that Hyatt quote now advocates one man, one vote in race mixing. Now, you can see a lot of things

here about Okay that are extremely scary. And one of those things is that the language that she's speaking this uh, the West is committing national suicide. UH, clash of civilizations, race war stuff. You know, this is this is Essentially the the I mean literally, the national suicide thing is what white nationalists say today. And Ropek is in a lot of ways of right nationalist. He's just sort of

a German one. But what's what's really scary about rope K is that he's not sort of bound by by the sort of strictures of of of a neo class

cogo new classical economists. For example, he won't propose that like the dating market, like like dating should be a market, and that rich like men should be able to like I go on an app and like like every every every single time a person gets into a relationship, it should just be entirely based on market exchange and stuff like that, because you know, he doesn't think like an economist. He thinks about cultural factors, he thinks about sort of

social factors. But he also he's cracked the code for how new liberalism is going to be implemented the way you do neoliberalism is near liberalism plus racism, and he realizes that you need you know, neoliberalisms actual sort of policies right will cause atomization. What causuals with dislocation will cause that the existing social structures to society sort of implode.

And he realizes that in order to get this to work, you need you need a spiritual base, You need some kind of new thing that you can use to to to sort of bring all these people together. And he ficks Catholicism, which doesn't work because I mean, there's never reason for this. But you know, partially it's too early.

Partially it's because he picks a Catholicism, not evangelicalism. But this is how the neoliberals are eventually going to take power by you know, aligning themselves with the evangelicals who promised to solve the atomization. They're creating with you know, religion and family and the patriarchy. And he figures this out in like the sixties, but it's just you know, like twenty years before the rest of the levels figured out.

Now there's you know, he also, Okay, has like a bunch of very similar stuff that he thinks about this about Rhodesia. But interestingly, he has more support for his positions on Rhodesia than he does for his positions in South Africa. And now I'm gonna we're gonna jump back

to Chicago School. We're gonna read some Milton Friedman stuff about Rhodesia because dear God, quote, majority rule for Rhodesia today is a euphemism for a black minority government, which would almost surely mean both the eviction or exodus of most of the whites and also a drastically lower living

level and opportunity for the black masses of Rhodesia. Here's another one where he's describing the system of one person, one vote, quote, a system of highly weighted voting in which special interests of far greater role to play than does the general interest. You know. So that's the decryption of what democracy is. In contrast, he thinks the market

economy is quote a system of effective proportional representation. Now Friedman also thinks that, you know, so, so there's there's a blockade, like an economic blockade of Rhodesia going on because their Rhodesia and they are maybe the worst people ever. That's only only in by ald exaggeration. Yeah, it's just you know, absolutely fanatical, like what was you promises government. And Freedman also calls the isolation of Rhodesia quote the

suicide of the West. And you know he's doing this on racial lines, but he's also doing this along the lines of this argument that democracy itself is actually bad, and this is the place that he can express it because you know, he can leverage racism to get away with it. And I'm going to read another Freedman quote because I think it's it's important to understand what the

neoliberals actually think about democracy. Quote. This was sometimes admitted by members of Mount Pelion in public, but only when they felt that their program was in the sense, let's be clear, I don't believe in democracy in one sense.

You don't believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy. You will find it hard to find anybody who will say that if democracy is interpreted as a majority rule, you will find it hard to find anybody who will say that of the people believe the other percent of people should be shot, that's an appropriate exercise of democracy. But I believe is not a democracy but an individual freedom in a society in which individuals corroperate with one another.

So he's he's making a sort of what's in some ways a kind of anarchist argument against democracy, which is that like, yeah, okay, so if if you interpret democracy as premajority rule, that a majority can just do a terrible thing the minority. But you know what the new lipperals actually mean by this is that of the population could, for example, I don't know, take money from the rich small part of the of the population and distributed around.

And they think that is totalitarianism. And in order to stop that from happening, they are in fact, absolutely imperfectly willing to just back dictatorships. And you know that's in us. It's what they what they what they actually want is a state, the sole function of which essentially is to ensure that nobody ever does this. And you know, if you can do this is out of a democratic framework, fine, but if you can't, well, I don't know, it's time

for a coup. We're gonna turn to the two Hyak in the Austrians, because Hyak also is known as this sort of like as a libertarian, as a person who sort of believes in spontaneous order and like thinks that I you should you should only have sort of small decentralized political institutions. Uh. And so we're gonna watch Hyak quote a bunch of stuff from and agree with a bunch of stuff from Carl Schmidt, which is again incredible because Hyak elsewhere describes Schmidt as quote, uh, the Nazis

chief jurist, which is true. But here here are some other things that Hiak has said about Karl Schmidt. Quote. The weakness of the governments of an omnipotent democracy was very clearly seen by the extraordinary German student of politics, Carl Schmidt, who in the nine twenties probably understood the character of the developing form of government better than most people. And you know, Hyak believes a lot of the same

things that Schmick does. So you know, one of them things that Schmidt is like big on is that liberalism and democracy are opposite things. And Hyak also believes this. And okay, so so I'm gonna read I'm gonna read some Schmitt, and then we're gonna read some Hyak, and they're gonna be saying the same thing. So here, Schmidt, only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free markets. Only a strong state can generate, generate genuine decentralization and

bring about free and autonomous domains. Here's Hyak. If we proceed on the assumption that only the exercise this is of freedom that the majority will are important, we would be certain to create a stadiant society with all the characteristics of one freedom. So what hi Yak, Yeah, Schmidt is saying that only a strong state can support a free market and the decentralization. Hyak is saying, if you let a democracy exist that has majority rule, it will

create un freedom. Now we will get into this more when we talk about like Chile, because oh boy, is there some other ship that Hia cassidy with that. But most neoliberals hate democracy, know about it what they say in public, and and this is the other important thing here. Neo liberals lie, they like constantly. They lie to the point where sorting out their actual beliefs becomes almost impossible,

and even their intellectual enemies believe the lies that they tell. Well, most people think the neoliberals believe is that, you know, they want a small government and liberty and an unregulated market that will occur to actually through spontaneous order, because it's human nature to want the truck and barter and rationally calculate things. And the neoliberals don't believe any of this.

This is just what they tell to the roots. What they actually want is a large and powerful surveillance in legal state in a massive bureaucracy to enforce essentially pro corporate policies at gunpoints. Um, I'm I'm gonna read close up this episode by by reading a list of things that Philip Morowski is an economical story you studies neliberalism. His work I've used a lot for for these episodes. Wrote about the the sort of, the the sort of

eleven principles of what newliberals actually believe. One. Free markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through political organizing. To the market is an information processor and the most efficient one possible, more efficient than any government or any single human being could be. Truth can only be validated by the market. Three. Market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of human kind.

The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy this day, but to take control of it and to redefine its structure and function in order to create and maintain the market friendly culture. Five. There is no contradiction between public politics citizen and private market entrepreneur consumer, because the latter

does and should eclipse the former. Six. The most important virtue, more important then justice or anything else, is freedom defined negatively as freedom to choose, most importantly defined as the freedom to acquiesce to the imperatives of the market. Seven. Capital has a natural right to flow freely across national borders. Eight. Inequality of resources, income, wealth, and even political rights is a good thing. It promotes productivity because people envy the

rich and emulate them. People who complain about inequality are either sore looters or old foggies. You need to get hip to the way things work nowadays. Nine. Corporations could do no wrong. By definition, competition will take care of all problems, including any tendency monopoly. Ten. The markets engineered and promoted by neoliberal experts can always provide a solution to the problems seemingly endlessly caused by the market in

the first place. There's always an app for that. Eleven there's no difference between is and should be free markets. Both should be normatively and are positively the most efficient economic system and the most just way of doing politics, and the most sympirically true description of human beha off your and the most ethical and moral way to live, which in turn explains, justifies and justifies why there are versions of free markets. Should be and as neoliberals build

more and more power increasingly are universal. Yeah, we we we We've read a long list of things. But essentially the point of this is that the liberals want to transform everything into the market because they think the market is a more efficient way of doing things, in a better and more moral and more just way of doing things than anything else you can possibly imagine, including you know, things like democracy and you know, and any problem the

system like produces will be solved by the system. Now, this is this is an incredibly radical political program in a lot of ways in that it will you know, you can you can you can argue whether it's a radical or reactionary program. I mean I think I think it's a it's a deeply reactionary one in some ways, but it is a is a program that is vastly

different than anything else that has come before it. Now, the challenge, of course, was getting anyone else to agree to this, and the answer is that it's really hard to It is extremely hard to convince people that, you know, everyone should bow down to the market, etcetera, etcetera. And so the only way they can actually do this is

by lying. Now, as as Morowski describes, the neoliberals operate an incredibly sophisticated intellectual and political network that forms the sort of a choice Goodell with mort Peller own Siety at its center, and an ever expanding group of more and less specialized think tanks the shell layers. So it is where that they mirror the vanguard structure and sort of frink group networks of their communist opponents, but they

have significantly better financial backing. And this means that you know, they can run the American Enterprise Institute and uh, you know, with with with copious amounts of coke money, they can run this entire enormous network of think tanks that allow them to sort of act as a government in waiting. And the other thing that they're going to attempt to do is take over the global regulatory bureaucracy, the I m F, the World Bank, eventually welk trade organizations and

for people to do this at gunpoints by using those organizations. Now, all they needed was a crisis that they could use to implement their policies. And next week we're going to look at the crisis that gave them exactly what they wanted. This has been nick. It happen here find us on Instagram and on Twitter at Happened Here Pod. Find the rest of our stuff at cools Up and goodbye. M What's I mean? That's that's all I got today. Who's Who's taken over? Come on? It's me? I guess it's me?

All right? Well then what what show is this? And what do we do? This is it could happen here? We talked about things being bad and also what you can do about them, but this is a this is a things are bad episode and not at what you can do about them episode? Specifically, this is part two of what I guess you could call our mini series on neoliberalism. And so you know, yesterday we talked a

lot about who the originally liberals are. They have a bit of power in Germany in the fifties, but for the fifties and sixties up to the seventies, they're kind of nobody's there. You know, they're they're there. They have a couple of think tanks, but they're kind of they're kind of just siloed off in the corner and they yell at people and people kind of ignore them. And what they're waiting for, essentially is the right crisis and

in the nineteen seventies, they finally find that crisis. Now, I think it's kind of hard to remember in a lot of ways because of how the eighties went, But in the early nineteen seventies, things are not looking good for capitalism. I mean, you have so you know, I end I end A wins this election nineteen seventy. We'll

talk about what happened there in another episode. But you know, it's it's not just that in nineteen nineteen seventy four, well, so to the whole early nineteen seventies, ambl called Carbrial is just absolutely annihilating the Portuguese army. And he, you know, he he wins. He fights one of like one of history's greatest guerrilla wars, and this basically destroys the entire

Portuguese state and causes the Carnathan Carnation Revolution. The Portuguese colonies get free, the Dirt takes part in Ethiopia and the net seventy five, the North Vietnam wins the like the war in Vietnam. And now you know the product of this is that Cambodia falls, Laos falls. There's now there's five social estates in Eastern East Asia, in Southeast Asia and ye also Mongolea, but nobody really cares about them.

And as as all of this is happening, as these sort of as the anti colonial armies are sort of marching their way through the world, there's an enormous economic crisis. And yeah, I mean there's a lot of things happening at the same time. One of the ones I think is probably the thing, the thing that people remember the most is there's just unbelievable inflation, and you know, and

and economic growth starts to slowed down. Although something I think that we do need to keep in mind is that when I say economic growth slows, so economic growth from like sixty seven nine is um from two thousand to two thousand and seven, it was two point three percent in the US, And so you know, when when when when I say there's an economic crisis going on here, like economic growth in the seventies is better than any decades since, but it's still considered the crisis decade because

there's much of inflation. And you know, everyone has their own theory as to why this is happening. Because the sort of Keynesians who who have been in power, whose thing is, oh, well, we can you know, if if there's every economic crisis, we can sort of we can spend money in that field, then the government spending money

will drag everyone out of the crisis. But in Keynsian theory, like there's not supposed to be inflation, if like if if unemployment is increasing and there's an economic crisis, there's not supposed to be inflation, and suddenly there's both. So the Cansians have nothing, and they're sort of running around like just with basically like chickens to their head cut off and going, oh god, we have no idea what's happening. We don't know what's happening. And so into this gap

steps a bunch of weirdos. And so I'm just gonna I'm gonna go through a few of the theories as to why this crisis happened, because I don't know, and I think there's elements of truth in most of the stories ish kind of, but you know, it's this is extremely complicated and there's still no consensus on it. So I'm gonna start with the most crank, which is so

so the Ron Paul people. The whole thing is, yeah, every everything went to ship has been shipped ever since because the usband and the gold standard and like they're right into the extent that this happens. So basically Nixon has been trying to pay for the Vietnam War and

he can't. And you know, the the U. S Dollar has been pegged to a certain amount of gold, right, and you can do this thing where if you get it, you have an American dollar, you can exchange it for them out of gold, and so travels the goal just's like, Okay, we're just gonna we're gonna take all of this gold. And so if he does in the US starts running out of gold and so bye bye by. In the early seventies, Nixon is like, fun, this you can't actually

exchange dollars for gold anymore. And now every single libertarian starts every rant with fiat currency. But you know this, this this does have an effect on the economy, which we'll talk about more in the bit um. There's you know, there's there's there's a lot of other explanations for this um the modern monetary three people if you listen to them,

and also Peter Thiel. Weirdly, I will argue, oh, it's all because of the oil shock, because oil prices increased, neoliberals will spend Neo liberal Essentially, they blame too much government spending welfare programs and then wages being too high, and also bad monetary policy. There's like an entire there's there's like seventeen different Marxist explanations for it, some of which are I'll talk about like one and a half

of them, um that are more plausible. One of the explanations has to do with how essentially, so the other thing that's happening in the sixty seventies is that minorities and women are entering the workplace and are you know, actually demanding to be paid the wages that white men have been being paid. And corporations essentially just can't afford this. And so you know that they have two choices. It's either we pay these people actual wages or we just

murder everyone, and they took the second one. So it's something that that has also been happening through this whole period is that profit rates and manufacturing just keep collapsing. And there there's there's a whole thing here about some Marxist theory stuff, But the thing that's important is that that and this this has also happened in the seventies. Eventually you hit a point where manufacturing growth becomes zero sum.

And you know, so you can have manufacturing growth in one country, but you can't have it in another because at a certain point you're producing too much stuff and people start getting kicked out of the labor process. And this has a bunch of effects. One is that it means you get a bunch of people who are employed and too. It means that there's just a bunch of money floating around that nobody can actually invest in places.

And this is you know, like all of the weird stuff the Saudis do, it is just basically from this this money. There's a wholes these whole piles of oil money that are just sitting around that nobody convest in anything. And that's going to cause you know, that that that that that that that's going to cause a lot of stuff down the road. But for now, yeah, we'll talk about the dead crisis and causes sort of next episode.

But for now, I'm going to try to pull all of these together and like have something, have a coherent thing that makes sense, which is essentially, by by the end of the seventies, profit rate or declining, and then Nixon pulls you know, Nick and pulls the dollar off the gold standard, and this causes the value the dollars is plunge. And this this is the thing that sets off the nine oil crisis. So the any thing the oil crisis is weird because it's not an oil crisis.

Every everyone looks at the groil crisis and it goes, oh, it's an oil crisis. The crisis because there wasn't enough oil, and it's it's not it's nothing to do with that is literally nothing to do a supply of oil at all. What actually happens is that so you have OPEC, right.

OPEC is this sort of is the Alliance of Oil Producing Cartels UM and they have this extremely complicated system where they they sell oil to oil companies and then the oil companies sell that oil, did they refine it and sell it to you, and they have this incredibly

convoluted tax structured on it. And eventually, so the oil companies are having to, like the price of oil starts to rise, and the oil companies are basically just taking it all off the profit from this, and so OPEC goes, Okay, you guys are gon to pay taxes, and the oil companies just refuse, and so OPEC just unilaterally, just you know, OPEC just unilaterally is like, Okay, you guys are gonna pay taxes, and we're gonna make you pay taxes by by just increasing the price that we sell you oil at.

And this gets remembered as like OPEC increasing the price of oil, even though it was literally just them saying you're gonna pay taxes. Now, this is the part that's very weird, which is that, Okay, so if you do heard, you too, heard of the oil crisis, like the story yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I are the way it's always gone in textbooks, as you talk about like the stagflation of the seventies and the fucking you know, lines of cars at gas

stations going back blocks because OPEC factory. And yeah, that's how it's always framed, is that, like there's this big political crisis over OPEC that led the gas supply getting throttled, and it came at a time when the economy had already slowed down and everything got terrible. And then a few years later we got RoboCop. Yeah, well we did get a pop. But the important thing about the story is that every single thing about that story is wrong,

every part of it. Well, I mean there were lines at gas station, Yeah, I mean there there are lines of gas stations, but the lines at the gas stations have literally nothing to do with OPEC. Wh's just nothing. So on October six, the Arab members of of OPEC are like, fuck it, We're gonna make the oil companies pay more for oil. And then the rest of the rest of OPE follows them. Now two days later, is it? Yeah?

The next day there is a completely unrelated thing to all of this, which is that while while this is going on, the Yankapoor War starts, and so Egypt and Syria attack Israel um basical attack the Israel occupation forces in their country, and the war is going really badly for them there, I mean it's it's I mean, it's not going it's not going as badly as like the previous wars had gone for the air powers, but it's

not going great. And so on October seven and teeth six, Arab oil producing countries declare if they're they're cutting the amount of oil they exported by five percent per month until Israel returns his territories it occupies St. Seven and they have an embargo on the US. But and this is the very important part. This has nothing to do with OPEC. This is not opaque at all. It's not this, this is this is this is just a couple of random Arab countries are like, we're going to do this.

And you know, and I think when I think is interesting about Robert, what you're talking about is OPEC factory. You know, is how this gets remembered and this this is one of the things that neoliberals used to sort of push their model of the world, right, which is that everything functions off the supply and demands and oh look, hey the Arabs cut the supply of oil and that's why the prices rose. But it's just it's just wrong.

It's empirically wrong. The price cut happens, I mean, the price increases happened the day before the oil the price increases the day before the embargo, and the embargo and the oil price. People are different groups, they have nothing

to do with each other. But you know, this, this gets sort of systemed like this, this is this is how it's it's remembered and and you know, it's not even just how to remember like the Encyclopedia Britannica has the dates and which all of this stuff happens wrong, they have the sequence of events wrong, like all of the most of the people who write about this remember

this whole thing wrong. And and this is this is part of the sort of an enormous propaganda effort death and Deal liberals are able to do at this moment, which is they convince everyone that, oh, yeah, the price increases and the gag. Typically the gas shortages are are are about opeque. But again also like the US only imports like seven percent of its oil from from the countries who are doing the embargo at this point. So the actual thing that's going on has to do with prices.

It's a weird thing as do with price controls and gas companies are hoarding gas because they don't want to sell at price control levels and stuff like that. But you know, the oil price increases, you know, the yeah, like it it is bad, Like the price of oil does go up and there are shortages, but it has nothing to do with like there's nothing to do with the embargo has nothing to do with you know, like

the supply of oil going down. It's just companies didn't want to pay taxes, and so they started holding the oil instead of selling it, and they passed the price the tax increase onto the consumers instead of paying it. And as we talked about before, once this sort of like tax increase goes in that OPEC that well some of the open countries want to do goes into place, like the price of oil does increase, and this does

fund the economy even more. But the economy and really even sort of a mess before this, and it has one other very important effect, and you know this is you know, I guess, I guess. The theme of this episode is that the oil embargo matters. But the oil embargo matters because people think it matters, not because they

did anything and the other. So it matters in the US because everyone thinks that, oh, the scary Arab nations are coming for us, But it matters in the rest of the world because everyone else looks at this and goes, wait,

hold on. You can actually use commodities, essincially use commodity prices are like countries that like have raw you know, commodities can use this control to actually go fight, you know, to like to go fight the West and go fight the capitalists and go like, you know, get money for themselves. And this leads us into something Robert Harrison to have you there, you ever heard of the G seventy seven. Uh that like the seventies seven countries that have the

most money. Well that that's the that's the G seven. Well yeah, but I was, I was seven might be just a longer list. So yeah. So so this is this is the other thing from this period that just is completely lost as almost completely lost to history. And

the seventy seven is actually still around. But what what they are was so in the sixties, you know, you have all of these countries that have recently gained independence, and all these countries have gatting deependence um from their sort of colonial overlords, and they start to band together into basically a voting block in the u N. And also this is the other the other weird part about the story is that so in the seventies and sixties

seventies particularly, the un actually matters like it's it's a it's a it's a thing that people. There was that like twenties years after World War Two, where people were maybe I mean a good example of the degree to which the u N actually used to be meaningful. Is watched the first Street Fighter movie. Um, because the good guys and that are clearly based off the u N and nobody thinks it's ridiculous that the United Nations are

actually doing something. Um, it's fine to have Jean Claude van dam And be the leader of the United Nations fist fighting a guy that that makes total sense in the nineteen nineties and you know, and so in part of talk about this war next episode. But basically, so, the reason the UN is a joke right now is because of what the US was doing to stop the G seventy seven from doing anything. I mean, I would argue that massive failures in ruwan To and uh Bosnia

had a huge impact on that too. Yeah, I think the genocides go down and people are like, well, what are these guys doing? But yeah, yeah, yeah, well this is this is this is how they got dysfunctional to the point where you can get that yeah, which is so so okay. So you have, you know, and a bunch of countries that call themselves, you know, the term they used for themselves is the Third World, and they come together the form this group and it's it's it's

a really weird ideological mixed bag. Like I mean, you have you know, you have you have like actual socialists

like Tanzaniyears and Michael Boley and Jamaica. You've also got like Gadaffi and the Bathists and like both was a socialist come on Paradise, Kadafi Libya you know, okay, my, my, my, my, My most contrarian hot take is that Salat Jaded was like actually kind of an m l who was that he was He was briefly the Bathist in charge of Syria and then he got overthrown by Sad But both of them, there's there's definite like actual like Marxist, you know, Linen,

there's something like especially in the old school Bathists, like there were aspects of that, there was socialism kind of within it. It just it would be nonsense like for example, called Saddam Hussein's boss. Yeah yeah, and you know, and you can already see like that this is this is this is this is a real grab back. And you have there's also just a bunch of random Latin American countries like none of whom you can call socialists. And

then there's also Saudi Arabia and Thailand or in this group. Okay, to get a sense of how fractus this is, India and Pakistan are also both part of this and they fight too full scale wars while they're both in the G seventy seven. Actually that's not true. There's two full scale wars and then there's like another half war they fight in the nineties. This yeah, like all all the people in this thing are fighting, are literally fighting wars against each other. It's kind of a mess, and you know,

it's fun. It's fun. In in in the mid sixties and until nineteen seventy four, it's kind of their Their whole thing is we have moral authority like where yeah, like where you know where we're like we we we we have the authority of all of these nations have colonizings for a long time, and we're going to use that.

But in the seventies, you know that the oil embargo happens, and a lot like most I think all most of the OPEC states are are are are in um Are, are are in the G seventy seven, and they look at they look at the oil embargo and they look at OPEC raising prices and they go, wait, we can do this too. In the OPEC states are like, oh, hey, we can use this to push the hood, you know, we can use to like push the whole power of

like of the Third World. And they they they're planned to do this is something called the New International Economic Order, which is also something that no one has ever heard of that is extremely important. That has just the spoilerer is that this this movement gets crushed so thoroughly that nobody knows what the New Economic Order is and the

Third World is now a slur. But you know, the thing that they're trying to do is create a it calls the New International Economic Order a trade union of the poor, and so it's it's this thing they're trying to get passed through the u N that would you know, just designed to sort of ensure the economic sovereignty of these developing nations. Um and I'm going to read a

list of the stuff that's in here. Um So A an absolute right of states to control the extraction and marketing of their domestic natural resources be the establishment and recognition of state manage managed resource cartels to stabilize and

raise commodity prices. See the Regulation of Transnational Corporations D no strings attached, technology transfers from north to south, e the granting of preferential trade preferences to countries in the south, and f forgiveness for for certain debts that states in

the south ode to the north. So this is like at this thing, if the international economical Order had ever been implemented at all, it would have completely reversed the basically completely reverse the balance of economic power, shifting it basically from countries like the US, like you know, Western Europe, like Japan that are these giant manufacturing powerhouses, two countries that produce you know, raw materials, and there would have you know, and the everything that would have happened from

this is you have these the no streams, you have a debt relief for the global South, and also these technology transfers. And the plan is basically to create a bunch of mini opex for just not even many opus.

Create opex basically for every commodity. So you know, you have like an opaque, but it's for like box site or like copper, and you know they would use they would you know, you have all these opex and each one of them uses their power and they all cooperate to to to make sure that there's a stable price for for all these commodities. And another part of this is that it's supposed to basically enshrine the right of countries to be able to just like nationalized resource companies.

So you know, you have like a British oil company. I was like, well, we just take it out now it's ours. And the threat of this is great enough that if you read conservatives in the era, they will say things like the Soviet Union is no longer a threat. The greatest danger to the West today is the Yeah, yeah, this is this, Yeah, it's it's these these people are enormal. Yeah, no, no one even rivers this anymore. And and it's it's because largely it's because of how just unbelievably badly these

guys got stopped. Um, you know. And one of the other things that happens out the product of this is this is where the G seven comes from. And it's originally and I think there's another thing, Yeah, the other fun part about this, So the G seven is originally a secret alliance, Like through this whole through the whole seventies, nobody knows G seven exists. It's basically it starts as this like secret meeting of a bunch of finance ministers. Eventually they add UH, Canada and I think Japan too,

and it goes up to seven members. And you know, they have a couple of things they're trying to deal with.

They're trying to deal with the economic collapse. But one of the big things, like one of the biggest things they're dealing with, is the G seventy seven and OPEQ And this this the result of this is this, these enormous series of fights in UH implausibly the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which is I think this this is this is the last time ever that the fate of the entire world would be decided in a battle in like a subcommittee of the U N And

there's there's years and years and years of negotiations between well, the G seven hasn't like openly declared itself to G seven is sort of just it's basically the rich European countries. So it's Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the US and Japan like for form this alliance and are like locked in together in order to stop the G seven

from seventy seven from doing anything. And this is this is the This is the other the other crisis that the neoliberals are responding to is it's it's not just and in many ways, this is the one that scares them more because you know, it's not just that there's an economic crisis. It's not just that like capitalists are

afraid because of losing money. It's if this stuff goes through, the entire balance of power in the entire global economy is going to change, and it's going to swing into the favor of a bunch of non Western countries and probably more most importantly, from the new Liberals. They're going to enshrine the right of states to take things away

from corporations and regulate them. And this is just absolutely completely unacceptable to both the neoliberals and just every single other organization that's even tangentially involved with sort of the Western nations. So the neoliberals, I talked about this a bit in in the last episode, which is that they've been working on a strategy in order to take power

that doesn't rely on states. And so what they've been doing for about twenty years is essentially infiltrating and working their way up through it like takes basically basically taking over, uh, the International Monetary Fund in the World Bank who in this period and this is everything I think is very weird and hard to remember, which is that the i m F and the World Bank, like there was a time when they weren't completely evil, Like like the i m F was basically set up to make sure that

countries wouldn't just run out of money, right, I was supposed to give people like yeah, and the World Bank and it's it's turned into sort of this like international debt system for moorer countries where they're always and being forced into austerity measures in the like yeah, yeah, and that.

But that that didn't used to be true. It used to be you know, the the i m F had a bunch of Kandians in it and sit same with the World Bank, and both both the i m F and the World Bank's leadership for a lot of this period wanted to negotiate and you and I think this is this, this is this is this is where We're gonna leave it here with basically, the the the entire

world is an imp apocal crisis. There is the all the economies are collapsing, the the the armies of of the anti colonial like world or are moving and the G seventy seven looks like it's it's literally on the verge of of you know, completely restructuring the economic system in a way that actually would have been slightly more fair and justest than but the system that existed then, which was also infinitely more just and fair and the

system that exist now. And next episode we're going to talk about how this all fell apart and how there was a choice in the seventies between either corporations can make money or people can have things. And the product of what the new Liberals are going to do in the next episode is that they're going to their solution to this problem is to tell the entire retched of the earth to each it and die. And yeah, that's that's that's the episode. It's yeah, yeah, history. Yeah, it's

it's a fine. Um okay, uh, well we got any we got any any plugables? What do we what do we do at the end of episodes? Sophie, where are we? Thank you? Are we? Thank you for listening. We'll be back on a day at a time. Maybe we're not hearing you, Sophie, I think you're muted. I'm not muted. I'm not muted. Oh, there we go. I'm not muted. I haven't remuted the whole time. We didn't hear you. That's so weird. I said, we'll be back on a day or a time, and yeah, at some point we'll

be back. Find us then, uh, and find us tomorrow unless this comes out on Friday, in which case is Friday with your family the ones this is dropping on. Adopt a cat, Adopt two cats, maybe four cats. Adopt four cats. Yeah, get a number of cats greater than the number you have and put them in your house. We'll see you one Monday. Hey, We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a

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