Transcript for:
Political and Economic Ideologies Overview

Recording started. Morning. How's it going? Monday. Hold on. I'm clicking button still. Early morning button clicking. All right. So, we were talking about socialism last time and um I I gave you like the just the definition of justice and what the socialists were seeking. So, let's talk about what they thought would happen. So, one of the reasons why the UK is today considered a democracy is because of what happened in the 1860s. So what while the United States was slaughtering itself in the civil war in Great Britain, there was a movement by the labor what will become the labor movement by the socialists to try and take one of the houses of parliament away from the nobles because so here's how the system worked. There there was the House of Lords where the nobles represented the interests of the lords. And then there was the house of commons where the nobles represented the interests of the commons. And the thinking that the socialists had was if they could take the house of commons away from the nobles and hand it over to commoners and make it a democratic institution in the sense that you would elect the representatives. electoral republic. Then through the process of elections, the majority's will would start to move the UK in the direction of having more and more workers rights. They didn't think it would happen instantaneously. They thought this was going to be a long drawn out process. And one of the reasons why they believed this in the UK is because of what happened in 1848. So in 1848 there was a revolution in Europe and you go well can you be more pre precise where in Europe? No like all of Europe except the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and the British Empire. Those three places did not have this revolution. Everywhere else did. This revolution was taking place in Spain, in Germany, in Italy, in Scandinavia. It was all of Europe. even vassal states of the Ottoman Empire were having. There were two forces driving the 1848 revolution. One was nationalism, which we talked about. One of the things that Napoleon did when he went on his 17-year long rampage was he inspired Italians and Germans and other nationalities to start to look for ways to express their nationalist goals. for example, create a Germany and create an Italy. Italy doesn't come into being until 1860. I mean, think about that for a second. That means that the United States is 84 years older than Italy. In 1860, a group of Sardinians decide they're going to unify Italy, and they go on a a conquering spree starting in northern Italy, and they work their way down until they conquer Sicily. And when they do, they own almost all owned almost all of Italy. They still didn't have Rome. So they made Florence the capital of this brand new kingdom of Italy. And then 11 years later, they captured the city of Rome from the pope. And then they made the capital the city of Rome. That just happened, right? That was 1871 when it when Italy finally had the city of Rome. So the 1848 revolution didn't create Italy, but that was one of the goals the Italians had. It took another 12 years before they actually pulled it off. It doesn't create Germany, but it's one of the goals that people have during this time. So a lot of the nationalist movements in 1848 failed. And as a result, some of the people from those movements left. A lot of Italians ended up coming to North and South America. A lot of Germans did as well because they were disheartened by the failure of the 1848 revolution. And the Germans, a lot of them ended up in Texas. It's one of the reasons why there were so many Texans who are of German descent and why German was such a dominant language and why so many of the towns like Noi Brownfells have German names, right? Um, it's also why rancherero music uses accordians because those Germans brought accordians with and the Mexicans went, "Oh my god, I love that instrument." And the next thing you know, there's a brand new form of Mexican pula basically that pops into existence because that's the cool thing about our species is we're constantly blending cultures and making new ones in the process. So um the other piece of the 1848 revolution was a socialist revolution and socialist revolutions broke out all over Europe just at the same time as the nationalist revolutions. So when we talk about 1848 it's not a revolution taking place in one country. In fact not even one continent. Brazil and Sri Lanka also joined the revolution. So it was almost all of Europe, Brazil and Sri Lanka. And they weren't just struggling for one cause. There were multiple causes, a nationalist cause and a socialist cause. The socialists would grab the factories in cities. And then what inevitably happened was the army would go in and massacre the workers and take the factories back and hand it back over to the owning class except in Sweden. So at the time Sweden and Norway were were unified. It was called the Kingdom of Sweden Norway. And uh the king of Sweden, the king of Sweden and Norway sent negotiators instead of soldiers to resolve the factories being captured, which shocked the Swede and Norwegian working class. They they they just assumed the army was going to come massacre them like like was happening in Germany and in France and Italy. and to to not be massacred, you know, was kind of a nice relief. And so they start negotiating and the deal that gets made is the following. SC Sweden Norway will turn over its parliament to an election process to allow commoners to participate in policym by electing representatives who will then make decisions in their name. and it restricted the ability of the rich to have any meaningful influence in politics other than the ability to cast one vote one person. It's in other words, it's completely unlike the United States. In the United States, we allow the rich to basically buy elections by dumping billions of dollars literally into presidential elections. In Sweden, Norway, they went, "No, we're not going to have any of that. This is going to be one person, one vote. So, you're rich, you get one vote. you're poor, you get one vote, and we're not going to allow the moneyed portion of the population to have excess influence over the outcomes. And so in 1848, Sweden, Norway became an electoral republic. Uh I think it was 1903, don't quote me on the that year, but Norway went, "We've decided we want to be independent." And Sweden went, "No, please don't go. We're we're good friends." And Norway went, "Yeah, not that good. We're done." And they broke away. And Sweden went, "Okay." And they didn't kill each other. Isn't that nice? I think that's really sweet. Uh Sweden's probably to this day really sad about that because Norway had oil, but oh well. Oops. They didn't know at the time. They might have killed each other had they known. It's hard to say. I'm a quarter Swedish, so I'm biased for Sweden. Those loser Norwegians. What were they thinking? Anyway, um so what the English in the 1860s are thinking is we need to do something like what they just did in Scandinavia in 1848. They pulled off the dream. Here's what they hope happens. Once the House of Commons gets turned over to the commoners, the com the majority of the population will slowly start to vote to improve the working conditions for workers and eventually not right away in a century maybe two centuries workers will have some measure of justice in their lives. That was the thinking for the socialist. And I think the year is 1867, but again don't quote me on the year. uh the after a series of strikes, Queen Victoria, by the way, was considering bringing out the cavalry and massacring the the workers in the streets. They were they had captured Trfolar Square and they weren't letting go. And her husband, Prince Albert's like, "Please, you're the queen of the English people. You can't massacre them. Let let this process take place. Let them get the House of Commons." And eventually she went, "Okay, fine." and the House of Commons was turned over to commoners. It took 100 years, but 100 years later, England voted for the first time to give the majority of its members of Parliament to the Labor Party, which meant that there was the possibility that the head of the Labor Party would then become the next prime minister. I'm saying possibility because the English constitution doesn't say that's what's supposed to happen. It's actually the whim of the monarch. The monarch invites a person that the monarch thinks is fit to do the job to be the prime minister. So when the Labor Party won the election in the in 19 I don't remember the year 1966 1967 like it was literally a hundred years later when Labor Party won the election. We the world didn't know if the Labor leader was going to be the next prime minister. They waited for Queen Elizabeth II to pick the guy. She picked the the head of the Labor Party. And 100 years after getting the House of Commons, the first socialist uh prime minister of England was was elected. If you look at the period post World War II for Europe, massive socialist reforms went into effect. Japan as well, even the United States, Social Security is totally a socialist program. The idea is that the private sector can't simply can't ensure that people will have a decent retirement. There needs to be some sort of public program that serves as a safety net, as a backup plan in case the capital system fails, right? Medicare and Medicaid are that we built in all these programs, not all of them right away, right? It isn't until uh Lyndon Baines Johnson is president, but we built in these programs with the goal of making sure that capitalism wasn't the brutal force that it had been during the Great Depression. In other words, if you think about it, there's sort of like a continuum. Uh and that was the trajectory the world was on. It was heading towards socialism post World War II. So let me talk about that continuum because it'll help make all the ideologies make a little bit of sense. So the idea of this pro progress that the socialists had actually came strangely enough from Plato's the republic via a guy named Hegel. So Hegel was a philosopher who was not a socialist but he created this idea of the dialectic. Okay. In Plato's plays, Socrates will make a statement or somebody will ask Socrates a question and then Socrates will ask a question and then what ends up happening is there's a conversation that follows where there's a series of questions and the questions lead to an answer. So we already did one which was might makes right and Thrmicus gets asked a series of questions by Socrates and in the end Thrusmicus proves Thrusmicus wrong by answering the questions that Socrates asked. Socrates knew where the conversation was going. But that's why Thrusmicus is so mad. He's proved himself wrong and it and it hurts his pride and so he stands up and leaves. Hegel goes, "This is genius." And he calls it the dialectic. And he says there's two forces in at play. The thesis and the antithesis. He says that every thesis has contradictions. Those contradictions manifest as the antithesis. And then the two struggle against each other and they create a synthesis. It's not that one wins and the other one loses. It's that both are changed in the struggle. one will win and the other one will lose but the struggle itself alters both. So there's thesis, antithesis and then synthesis. So thesis is the dominant belief system at that moment and then antithesis are the contradictions inherent in that belief system. So for Hegel, Hegel was a nationalist. So for Hegel, this was a conflict of nations. So there there was the Roman Empire. It was a thesis and then the antithesis was the Germanic tribes who were in conflict with the Roman Empire and they struggled against each other. And little by little they actually began to merge and eventually the the Germanic tribes took over the Western Roman Empire and you know altered the Roman culture in the process. But Roman culture also altered German culture and a new culture was formed. And then you have the the Goths and the Visigothths and the Ostrogoths and then they get replaced by the Lumbards and then then there's the Franks and the Vandals. There's all these different Germanic tribes and each one is struggling to create this new synthesis and be the new thesis. Okay, so the the synthesis is the result of the struggle between the thesis and the antithesis. the it doesn't matter who wins the two sides will be changed. Here I'll give you an example because combat examples are the best. I'll give you a combat example. So at in World War I the Germans produced, I think 20 tanks all total. The Allies produced 3,500 tanks. In other words, in World War I, the Germans were catastrophically outclassed when it came to tank construction. The 20 tanks the Germans produced weren't very good. They were slow. They were twostory by the way. So they were these incredibly tall, slow, basically land battleships. The most of the German tanks were not actually the 20 they made. They were tanks that they had captured from the allies and then repaired and put back put back into battle. And in other words, the Germans were completely outclassed. The US was nervous that the Germans were eventually going to start to catch up on tanks. So, the US began trying to create a weapon that would could be used to take out tanks. They came up with this idea of having a tube that you fired a small little rocket from and it would puncture the tank armor and go inside and kill the crew. They called it a bazooka. The bazooka was invented in 1919. Germany surrendered in 1918. So the bazooka saw no combat in World War I, but it it ended up seeing combat in World War II. Once the United States entered the war in World War II, we began deploying bazookas against the German tanks. By the way, not very effectively. The bazooka wasn't the best weapon the world had ever seen. The Germans captured bazookas and went, "Oh my god, this is genius." And then made pansaf and pans shreks. the pansrek was and the pansafal were 10 times better than the bazooka and then of course the Russians got a hold of it and created RPGs. In other words, the conflict be the war conflict changed both sides strategies and they had to adapt and and and try to match each other. But as they did, they became more and more alike. That's what Hegel realized. In other words, if you're going to go to war, go to war with a country you like, that you admire, that you that you hope to gain some cultural features from. If you go to war with a group of people you hate, you're going to become like the group you go to war with, so maybe you shouldn't. Isn't that crazy? Anyway, I mean, just think about it. The United States went to war with Afghanistan, a country ruled by religious fanatics. And now look at us. Hegel, it appears, was right. Well, we should be doing well considering our current president's antagonistic stance towards literally everyone we like. So, we should be we should be doing really good here. Yeah. At at this rate, we'll go to war with like Canada and Sweden, and we'll be better off for it. Yeah, I'm I'm with you, Alec. This is very exciting times. So Markx gets a hold of this idea and he goes, "It's not about nations. Who cares?" Oh, by the way, Hegel did say history would end once the German nation realized its nationalistic aspirations. And the reason was is because he believed Germans were so close to being perfect. There were no inherent contradictions. Therefore, there would be no inherent antithesis. Uh oops. Right? Because you know, a little bit more than 100 years later, a group of idiots called Nazis are going to try and make this come true because they didn't understand Hegel. They misinterpreted him. They they they went too far. Anyway, oh well. Marx comes along and he goes, "I love Hegel's ideas, but it's not about nations. Who cares? We're all equally worthless. What this is about is it's about economic systems. So there was the ancient Roman economic system. The Germanic tribesman challenged that. It created a new economic system. That economic system is called feudalism. Now, here's the thing. In feudalism, this is going to drive some of you nuts because you're you've been Hollywoodized and Hollywood mis miseducated you. In feudalism, the kings are not in charge. The nobles are feudalism is a system where you have feuding families. The a feud means a fight between families. So the game show family feud was brought to you by the department of redundancy department. Family feud is like saying family fight. You didn't need to say family feud. You could have just said feud. Feud already means family fight. Anyway, so uh but I get but they realized the makers of the show realized Americans didn't know English and so they had to they had to spell it out right and explain that it's a family feud. In feudalism, families would fight against each other in a system that probably should be called bulliocracy. The biggest, baddest, meanest, smartest bully is the guy who's going to end up on top. And you had to be smart. You couldn't just be physically strong, but you had to be physically strong because if you weren't, you just get taken out by somebody who was strong. In other words, the noble class were made up of a bunch of brutish nerds that that were charismatic, charming, charming, brutish nerds. It's one of the reasons why the world looked up to them and called them nobles. The idea was that you you you had to be physically fit, mentally fit, or you wouldn't make it. You'd be killed. It was it was a system where the weak were just destroyed. They were pushed out of the way. The king had power in that system, but the nobles had more. So, the king spent a lot of time basically going to the nobles and begging for their help. The king hates that system. The nobles are the guys in charge of the economy. So in feudalism, you have a noble run economy, a noble run political system with a powerful king who's capable of having enormous influence but doesn't have full control over the system. As a result, the king is the antithesis in feudalism and the king is pushing back against the feudal order and trying to assert their authority. And then comes the Protestant Reformation. All of a sudden, the kings of Northern Europe break away from the Catholic Church and then seize all that Catholic church land and they now have a money source that allows them to break away from the nobles and rule on their own and they create absolute monarchies. When they do, they create a new economic system to replace feudalism called mercantalism. This is going to also drive you nuts. In mercantalism, the outsiders, the antithesis, the guys who are left out of the system are the merchant class. The reason is is because the king has a state-run economy and the king makes all the decisions for the economy. In other words, the price of sugar set by the king, the price of cotton set by the king, the price of rum set by the king, the price of a ship set by the king. So if you're a merchant, you're stuck with the king's prices. And the argument that Adam Smith makes in the Wealth of Nations is there's no one person, there's no cabinet, there's no parliament, there's no group of people smart enough to determine what the price of a good should be. We should let market forces figure that out. And then that will allow the guys in the economy to maximize profit and efficiency because the monarchy by controlling the economy effectively made an inefficient economy. The prices weren't set at the right level. That was Adam Smith's whole argument. And so the merchant class as becomes the antithesis and they're pushing back against the power of the absolute monarch. and eventually they create a new system and we call that system capitalism. At the same time that we're creating capitalism, the world is switching over from being a group of monarchies to now having electoral republics. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is written in 1776. There are no coincidences in politics. We do a revolution the same year we switch our revolution to a civil war basically the same year that Adam Smith writes the wealth of nations and the United States becomes the first capitalist state on earth because we are in part inspired by this and then instead of the king being in charge it's an electoral republic it takes Great Britain a few decades but 1867 they do it right the reason why the merchant class wants electoral republic publics is because then if a if a political leader, the president, the United States for example, does something they don't like, they can take him out in the next election. If the if the president doesn't does something they don't like, they can take out they can take Congress away from him or her. Sorry, him. What are my thinking idiot? They can take Congress away from him in the next election. you and as a result it gives the merchant class all sorts of power over the political system. They can fund the election results. That's why what happens in Scandinavia is so powerful. They take that ability away. But in the in the case of uh the United States or Great Britain, that ability is fully intact. And so the merchant class loves this system. So in capitalism now the merchant class is in charge because they can literally go back and alter things. Okay. So I'm going to invoke my dissertation just just to make my life a little bit easier. So in my dissertation I propose that all human behavior fits into one of three categories but that it's messy. So it can also fit into multiple categories at the same time. But that when you think about it, there's three categories. Economic behavior, social or normative behavior, and then political behavior. We in the United States are obsessed with having these three things separated. We even say don't talk about religion and politics in in public, right? You should you should avoid the those conversations because they're they're toxic. We're obsessed with the economy. We want things to be separate. We want the church to be here, the political system to be there, and the economy to be there. We love these separations, these divides. So, here's one of the really weird things about this. When the first government came into being, which was probably right about 6,500 years ago. So, the three things are economic behavior, normative or social behavior, and then political behavior. When when the first government was created 6,500 years ago in in ancient Egypt, prehistoric Egypt, the Egyptians created the world's first government for economic reasons. And it was this the Nile flood was pretty good at happening, right? Like 90% of the time you got the flood you needed for agricultural purposes. 95% of the time. The problem was every once in a while there was either too much flood and when you planted your your crops because the soil was wet for too long the seeds would rot instead of germinating or there wasn't enough flood and you just didn't get as much food produced. When that happened people literally starve to death. It wasn't great. So the world's first ever government was created by the prehistoric Egyptians to com to create a basically an insurance policy against a bad flood because you have to remember Egypt doesn't rely on rain for its agriculture. It relies on the Nile flooding for its agriculture. So there was if if the Nile screwed up, you were hosed. There was no way to there was no way nature could fix it for you. The way they came up with the insurance policy was they built communal graineries. The problem is is human beings have bad memories. There's no other way to explain this. We have really awful memories. Both transgenerational memories, but our own personal memories. I'll give you a classic example of this. when you go vote every two years. I know some of you think it's every four years, but it's it's actually probably every year honestly because there are elections in odd number of years as well. But let's pretend for a second that it's simplistic and you just have to vote for the federal government and the Texas legislature. And so it's every two years that you're supposed to be voting every two years. for some reason, like a bunch of idiots, you believe the promises of those jackass politicians who are lying to you. Like, what the hell? How is it you don't remember? They told you a bunch of lies two years ago and you fell for it and none of them came true. Like, oh my god. When they when a sucker is born every minute, man, that ain't that ain't wrong. You know what I mean? Like, what the hell? Talk about bad memory. Anyway, the first time there's that famine and people are thinking, "Oh man, how do we fix this?" The solution is to create a grain silo. The only way to do it was as a community. You couldn't do it as an individual. There was no there was no solution that one family could do. You had to get a group of families together to to build this grain silo. In the beginning, people will be bringing food to store in the grain silo religiously because they're like, "Man, that family was suck. I hope I never have to go through that again. I'm so glad we have this grain silo. But then after a few years, people are like, man, it it's been a while since there was a maybe there'll never be another one. And then after a while, people start to die off. And it's the next generation going, "Yeah, dad told me about bad times, but you know, I haven't seen them in my lifetime." And people slowly become lazier and lazier and lazier, and less and less food gets delivered to the grainery until it doesn't work anymore. Exactly. And and we're doing that now with m maintaining infrastructure. We've cut to cut our taxes. We've actually cut spending on infrastructure maintenance. And we're going to pay the well, you you're going to pay the price for that because it's really going to fall on your generation. My generation will be mostly retired. The boomers will be mostly dead. But boy, we sure did enjoy those tax cuts. Enjoy the fallen collapsed bridges. It'll be great. Nathan, you know something interesting about Egypt? They came around with a solution for it by creating religion and they they created religion around the grain saw says if you don't deliver to the grain cell like hails will fall upon the sky or something like that. Exactly right. You got it. So what happened was the government merged with the religion and the grain silos were the temples and when you brought the food you brought it to the priests. So when there was a famine the priests were the guys distributing the food back and then the priests of course told you a lie. They said, "I, you know, I've been talking to the god Ra or the god Ammon or the god Hasho or whatever whatever god for that region was." And they said, "As long as you bring offerings to the temple, they will protect you. And if you don't, you will be harmed." So, as long as people are bringing the offerings, then when there is a famine, the priests are handing the food back out. It's like a gift from the gods. And then if you didn't bring the food and there wasn't enough food. So when the famine happened, the priests don't have the food to give you and you're being punished by literally starving to death. It was the perfect self-fulfilling prophecy and it's how Egyp the an the ancient Egyptian state built itself. So in other words, we have these three things. Social in this case, religion, right? economics in the in this case building the grain silo and then the political system that intentionally manipulated people's economic and normative behavior by changing the way they felt about bringing food to the grain silo and and mixing it with their religion. That is the role of politics. There's there's a bunch of ways to define politics. I'm going to give you one definition right here right now. Politics is the intentional a manipulation of social and economic behavior for some goal to create some outcome. 25 years ago, if you told me people were going to pick up their dog's poop with a little stupid bag they carried around with them when they w took their dog for a walk, I would have said, "You're an idiot." And yet today, everybody's walking around picking their dog's poop up. It It is easy to change people's behavior if you're willing to put the money and the energy and the propaganda into it and and create the the the fervor around. In other words, we could have easily started working on fixing the environment 40 years ago when we 50 years ago when we first discovered there was an issue. Exxon, Exxon was the the lead researcher in the 1960s and 70s looking at global warming and then they panicked and they went this is going to cut into our profit margins and then they began spending money suppressing the research that they themselves had started and by 1987 there was no doubt in anybody's mind who was a researcher who had any brains that we were in trouble. 87, 38 years ago, and there was testimony in front of our Congress saying, "Oh my god, we have to start doing something in 1987." And nothing. Nothing. They did nothing. They refused. But they could have. They got us to pick up our dog Why couldn't they get us to turn off light switches? Like, this isn't rocket science. It's just it would have cut into people's profit margins. Nobody wanted that. They would inconven inconvenienced boomers and they they were they were too busy enjoying their grade. So, um, hold on, I lost track of where I was going with this. Okay, so I got it. So, in capitalism, the merchant class is in charge. And here's how. Instead of the political system manipulating the economic and social or normative realms, it's the economic system that manipulates the political and normative realms. One way that the economic system does this is campaign financing. The economic system literally chooses who the president and the members of Congress are going to be by financing or also known as bribery, also known as graft and corruption by literally handing out huge wads of money to these politicians. Now, it's true we regulate how those politicians can spend that money. One of the reasons for that was there was this rogue Democrat from Indiana who was just the dirtiest, most corrupt politician ever. He's buying himself homes and cars with that campaign finance money in such an over-the-top way that Congress was forced to actually pass a law in the Bush ad Bush Jr. administration regulating how politicians could spend that money because it had become embarrassing. And that's shortly afterwards is when Mike Pence became a Republican. you know, Trump's first vice president. That's the guy that's the guy who forced Congress to actually start regulating the money because he was so dirty and corrupt. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And because Nathaniel's right, like what they're doing is they're doing insider trading, right? They have information that the the other people don't necessarily have. Whatever happened to Mike Pence? Oh, he every once in a while he speaks. Nobody pays any attention to him, but he's still out there. It's exciting in a very unexciting way. All right. The economic system also alters the normative realm. My favorite example of this, Santa Claus. Okay. So about 130 years ago, Coca-Cola was lamenting the fact that it was a summertime drink. So they only had good sales for like four months of the year. And so they went to a group of advertisers and they said, "Dude, how can we increase sales in winter?" And the advertising firm, I have talked about this before. the advertising firm. Okay. The advertising firm comes in and does Santa Claus and changes our religion to increase Coca-Cola sales. That's what you call power. And that's one of the glories of capitalism is it allows the merchant class to completely alter political and normative behavior. Whereas prior to capitalism, it was the political class that was altering economic and normative behavior. In other words, we've sort of switched it around. When you think about it, political behavior should be the brain. If if if our civilization is the body, normative behavior is your heart, and economic behavior is your stomach. Which of those three do you want in charge? I would pick the heart or the brain before I would pick the stomach. But that's just me. Seems to me if you pick the stomach to be in charge, you're going to end up obese. As a person who's constantly struggling with his weight, I am ready to admit that is a problem I personally have. Uh I got I got up to uh 230 pounds. I I think I'm down to like 112 or 212 now. So, I'm feeling a lot better, but I'd like to get down to 200, something like that. It's It sucks, but food tastes so good. I love it. Oh, all right. So, that's what ends up happening. We end up with capitalism. But in capitalism, the workers are screwed. So, the workers become the antithesis. And the workers then are in constant struggle against the merchant class because the merchant class, think about what they're trying to do. They're trying to maximize profit always. So they're trying to screw their customers by overcharging them and then selling them poor quality material because their hope is it'll break and they'll be forced to buy it again. And then they're trying to screw their suppliers and they're trying to screw their workers. So, as a result, the workers are in this constant state of struggle because they're buying garbage that breaks too quickly that they made and were paid too little money for, right? They if if a worker produces $1,000 worth of good goods a day, they'd be lucky if they're paid 30 $40 a day for it. And that I think most people would recognize is not fair. And that's the problem. So what the socialists believe then would happen is there would be this constant struggle between capitalism and and the workers until you created a new economic system. They called it socialism. And the idea with this new economic system wasn't that everybody would be equal. It wasn't that the world would be fair. It would just be that there would be better protections for the working class and the world would be more fair. Then what they believed would happen was everybody in socialism is a worker. So there's no there's no class of people who are left out. So as a result there's no contradiction and as a result history will end. So they did the same thing that Hegel did but instead of doing it for the Germans they did it for socialism. But what they then thought would happen was our society would slowly evolve and it would take like a thousand years maybe longer and then eventually we would we would become so evolved, so enlightened, so wellestablished we would create a utopia of pure economic, social and political democracy where truly everybody was equal regardless of their gender, their place there would be no class there and as a result in this pure utopia that would happen in say a thousand years they they called it communism in other words communism was the goal it that that was beyond everybody's imagination for me it sounds like hell because I don't understand if everybody's equal what's the struggle why why why why wake up in the morning I need there to be a struggle to fight for uh but you know what I'm saying like what most people envision heaven perfect sounds horrible if I were to give like an example of what would probably be what uh they would focus on is mostly scientific endeavors such as you know health care you know bettering lives of people that that kind of thing yeah we could make it interesting I'm just stuck in the 21st century mindset. That's my problem. It's my my lack of imagination. But you're right, Alec. Okay. So when you think of it like this, no, with this continuum, yeah, probably uh when you think of it as this continuum that heads towards socialism and then ultimately maybe communism even then what you realize is no place on planet earth has ever been socialist. The closest anybody has ever gotten to it is Sweden. And Sweden has a capitalist hybrid, a capitalist socialist hybrid e economic system. It does have socialist institutions, but it's still capitalist. It still produces cars that it sells in the marketplace. It still produces weapon systems it sells in the marketplace. They're not even like pretending to be pacifists. Um they they still have class inequality. It's just their class inequality is squished. It's not like ours. Ours is insane. Ours looks like a third world country. One of the ways you can tell the difference between a first world country and a third world country is the the extent to which you have class inequality. So when we look at Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, uh Germany, France, Sweden, there's very little class inequality. Like it's squished. The richest person is richer than the poorest person. Definitely. It's just the distance isn't that great. In countries like Brazil, the United States, Zimbabwe, uh the Sudan, North Korea, those countries, the distance between the top and the bottom is catastrophic. Like it's it's unimaginable almost. Isn't that cool that the United States got lumped with those other places? Venezuela. One of the crazy things about us is we were heading towards becoming a more egalitarian society right up until Nixon. And Nixon's mandate was to turn us back the other direction and head us back towards being a classist sexist racist society. And you know, here we are uh 56 years later after he became president. And it's hard to think Nixon failed. In 1973, we had reached such a level of equality that the top 1% made 8% of the income that year. Now, the top 1% makes more than 40% of the income. You want me to say that again? The top 1% makes more than 40% of all the income. The next 15% makes the another 40 plus percent. So by the time you've done the top 16% of the US population, you're talking about over 80% of all the wealth generated. And then the next 24%, so that we're talking about the top 40% make something like 92% of all the income. And as a result, the bottom 60% make like 8% of all the wealth. The bottom 60%. the bottom 20% make so little wealth there's no point in even talking about them. It's 0 point something 0.1 or 0.2. But that wasn't the case in 1973. In 1973 the top 1% was only making 8% of the wealth. There was ser we we had a society from 1948 to 1973 that 25 years there was this French economist named Pikidi who like 22 years ago I think it was wrote a book called wealth in the 21st century and his idea was to look at every moment in history where he we had good economic data and try to determine when we actually had a world where you could work and become rich. And he said it really only occurred one time and Nathaniel's right and it was from 1948 to 1973 and it was mostly in the United States although there was some opportunity in Europe and there was some opportunity actually in Latin America and there was even some opportunity in Japan but um mo when I say some opportunity I mean that 90% of the opportunity took place in the United States and Canada and that in that 25 year span man, you could get a job and become rich by working. Pikid said, "If you're not from that 25 year span of time and weren't in the United States, your best bet is to marry a wealthy person or be born to to a wealthy family. Other than that, you're kind of screwed. The United States today is where Great Britain was in 1973 for class mobility. We are 52 years behind Great Britain, a country with a hereditary nobility and a hereditary monarchy. That's how little class mobility there is in the United States. In other words, if you're born lowerass, odds are you will die lower class. That's another feature of third world countries. In first world countries, there's some class mobility, which means that in first world countries, there's expectation that if you have enough talent, you can dig your way out of a class. For the record, I've been on a roller coaster for my uh No, we're third world. We're just a really rich third world country. Maybe maybe that classifies as second wall. I don't know. But I really, we're just a super rich third world country. I've I've been on a class roller coaster myself. So, I was born upper middle class. We crashed all the way down to lower middle class and then I dug my way back up to upper middle class. I'm not saying there's no such thing as class mobility. That it's definitely it's definitely possible. Um I'm just saying that statistically the United States is doing an awful job of avoiding opportunity for class mobility. with all that so far. All right. So when the Great Depression happened and then World War II subsequent to that, almost every rich state including the United States decided they needed to implement some measure of socialism. In fact, that's what the FDR election was in 1932. So now I'm going to actually start segueing us into into liberalism. H you know what? Before I do though, I just realized there's a there's there's kind of a cool thing we can do with communism and fascism. Let me do that real quick and then I'll we'll come back to liberalism because liberalism is going to be another intense uh conversation, but communism and fascism won't be. So, we can just knock those out. So, here's what communists believe. So, socialists, we've already described socialists. Socialists believe that society is going to slowly evolve. It'll take decades if not centuries to create the kind of policies that make uh for a better workingclass environment. Sweden has been working on this now for you knowund uh what is it 177 years right so this is a almost two century long project in Sweden and I and I've just gotten through telling you that they're at best a capitalist socialist hybrid state they haven't achieved the the socialism in any way shape or form still on that path in fact right now they're they're going backwards they're repealing a bunch of their socialist uh policies and seem to be heading in the wrong direction if you're a socialist. Um, communists don't believe it needs to be slow. Communists believe you can do it right here, right now. Why are we waiting? So what communists believe we should do is we should have a violent revolution. Overthrow the the capitalist state, create a dictatorship of the proletariat, the vanguard, have a group of leaders who through a authoritarian measures force the world into socialism and then we just do it. So that's the difference between a communist and a socialist. Socialist believes you should have an electoral republic and then through the slow cumbersome process of creating consensus evolve towards a socialist state. Communists believe you can just do a violent revolution, take over the state apparatus and force socialism down everybody's throats. That's what the Soviet Union did uh attempted to do. But here's here's a fun little test. Socialists believe that you have to go through the step. Skip capitalism. Capitalism is a necessarily evil step that you must take. That's what a socialist believes. A communist believes screw capitalism. It's evil. Let's not do it. Let's just move on. So when the Soviet Union has its revolution, when the Russian Empire has its revolution, it first actually ended up with a socialist liberal government. It was the socialist liberal hybrid government. And then they have a second revolution. So there's the uh February revolution which took place in March. That's when the socialist liberal hybrid government came into being. And then there's the October revolution which took place in November and that's when the communists took over. So there were two revolutions in 1970. Um what was their problem with dates? Why are they calling it the February revolution? It took place in March and the October Revolution, it took place in November. By the way, the answer is the same answer for why if you want to go to October Fest in Germany, you go in November. One of the hilarious things is how many Americans go to Germany in October to experience Oktoberfest and then they don't get to because it's in November. those evil Germans. They got like it's obviously a conspiracy to trick people having to spend extra time in Germany and spend more money there. It's because of the switch between the Gregorian calendar, the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar. Russia refused to do the switch and I think it ended up 17 days behind. So when you travel to Russia, you didn't just change time zone, you changed day of the year and you got you went back 17 days. So when they were in February, we were in March. Yeah, that's the Julian calendar. And it was Julius Caesar. Well, his real name is Gas Julius Kaiser, though, just for the record. Not Julius Caesar. There's no guy named Julius, but there was a guy named Gas Julius Kaiser that whose name we refuse to say correctly. Uh he created the Julian calendar. He didn't actually add two months. Uh his nephew Augustus is the guy that added the two months. But what what he did was what uh Julius Caesar did was he created the system that we use now with all the leap years. Um but he we needed to get rid of some of the leap years. Anyway, it's complicated. And so that's why the Gagorian calendar had to be updated. It made it it made a better, more accurate calendar. So, all right, the Russians then the Soviet Union is then created, not initially, right? It's the RSFSR, the Russian Soviet Federated Federative Socialist Republic, and then that eventually becomes a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. When they get to that point, describe the economic system. Who's in charge? The workers, the merchants, the government? The government. The government. We already defined a system where the government's in charge of the economy. What's that system called? It's called merchantilism. Mercantalism. That's exactly right. Okay. So, here's the thing. When the Russians had their communist revolution in 1917, they weren't mercantalist. They weren't capitalist. They were feudalist. The United States was capitalist. Germany was capitalist. Great Britain was capitalist. The Russians were so backwards. They weren't only in the wrong day of the year. They were also two entire economic systems behind. They were feudalist. But when the Soviet Union takes over and they have this new government, it this this new government is in charge of the economy, they became mercantalist. When the Soviet Union collapsed, what did they become? What is this? What is Russia today? It's not mercantalist. It's it's capitalist. In other words, the communists said, "All we have to do to get out of the economic system we're in and get to socialism is a violent revolution." They do the violent revolution and go to mercantalism and then they fail and they became capitalist. In other words, it turns out the socialists who believe you can't skip the steps might be right. You'll hear people from time to time say the fallen Soviet Union proved. That's not true. It actually proved Mark's right. Mark said you can't skip steps. It proved Lenin wrong. Lenin said you could skip steps. In actuality, it looks like it proved and you can't skip steps. Now, I'm not convinced you can't skip steps. And the reason I'm saying that is because it is clear when we look at some features of our civilization that you can, for example, how many countries skipped the landline telephone step and went straight to cell phones, right? There are lots of countries that were so poor they just didn't have a landline system and then all of a sudden everybody has a cell phone now and they basically skipped a step. So I'm not convinced you have to always go through all the steps just because somebody else did. But right as of right now that's what the evidence is pointing to. That's one of the reasons why I think communism has taken such a step back and isn't a very as isn't as popular of an ideology as it was say 40 years ago is people went oh it looks like you this is a much more complicated process and skipping steps is difficult. Um okay let's do fascism real quick. So fascism was born after World War I. It was born in the horrific cauldron that is World War I. The brutality and cruelty of World War I radicalized the soldiers so that by the time the soldiers came back from the war, they came back with a new set of expectations for what life had in store for them. One of the reasons for this was World War I wasn't a typical war in the sense that usually in a war I'm a soldier. I have a weapon and I'm trying to kill you. In World War I, you were a soldier in a trench incapable of killing the other guy and people were dropping artillery shells on you endlessly trying to kill you and there was nothing you could do except try to somehow survive. And the only way you survived was to be lucky enough not to have a bomb on your head. And so the so the result was that the soldiers came out of the war feeling like they were victims. It didn't matter if you won or lost because they felt like they had just been used as to trenches like they there was no sense of achievement even for the winning side. And the the morale of Europe just imploded. people became extremely cynical. Plays became really dark like three penny opera for example or uh Dr. Ca Kagliari's monster. The the the the movies that were being generated, the plays that were being generated, you know, the villains were the heroes. Everything was upside down. The artwork became cynical. In the midst of all of this, Benito Mussolini, a socialist who was thrown out of the Socialist Party for saying that he liked World War I, ended up creating a new ideology. By the way, he's named after Bonito Warez. His parents were socialists. They were diehard socialists who loved Bonito Wades, the the the Mexican president. And uh they named their son Bonito and ruined the name. Anyway, um, Benito Mussolini decides that the problem isn't capitalism. The problem isn't the owner class. The problem isn't rich people. Mussolini decided the problem was modernity itself. The problem was factories. The problem was electricity. The problem was internal combustion engines. The problem was that women were workers and not in the home popping out babies and taking care of the family. And so what Mussolini did was he created an an ideology that we call a reactionary ideology because it's say it's rejecting it's reacting against modernity. And he said what we need to do is go back to when things were good when the world was right when there was a Roman Empire and we killed each other with spears and bows. and swords. And he said, "If you rally around me, my goal will be to re rebuild the Roman Empire and then de-industrialize and and reject modernity and let's all become really good Christians in the process." And that that became the rhetoric that took over Italy and brought Mussolini to power. And then of course Hitler is like, "Oh my god, that's amazing." But he added a feature to it, nationalism. He took fascism and nationalism and stuck them together and created this incredibly insane toxic ideology that we call Nazism. Its core belief is that modernity is the problem and we need it's not rich people and powerful people. It's not fact it's not the the fact that there are people who own factories. It's that there are factories and we need to get rid of them. We need to go back. For Germany, it wasn't to create a Roman Empire. It was to go back a thousand years and create a feudalist society with knights and men running around with lances trying to lance each other. Talk about homoerotic. Have you noticed that all the weapons are kind of homoerotic? Spears and swords and bows and arrows and even rifles. They're long and they try to put little lead sperm in you. It's like a kind of weird insemination, death insemination. No, you're not with me on this. Don't get me wrong, if you're going to do violence, you might as well do the homoerotic kind because it's very effective. It's just I want to point out how weird it is. I'm watch. like try to stab at me with the 10- foot long spear, whatever. Fascism. Okay. Fascism is the belief that the enemy of humanity is modernity. So, the goal is to roll modernity back and replace it with an ancient or a feudal system. You know what? Since we're on the topic, let's do fundamentalism. So, fundamentalism is great because it's fun and mental. I mean, come on. fundamental. Like, of course, it's the best ideology ever. Fundamentalism is to religion what nationalism is to nation. It is the belief that your religion is the only path to salvation and everybody else on earth will burn in hell for all eternity because they don't have the correct formula. Now, I know some of you are thinking, doesn't every religion believe that? No. Almost every religion on earth believes there are multiple pathways to salvation. Fundamentalists believe they have the only answer and everybody else is doomed to spend an eternity burning in hell because God is ruthless. And you go, okay, what are those religions that believe this that you can have multiple? Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism. They all believe there are multiple pathways to salvation. Notice the one religion I didn't mention that doesn't believe that. Isn't that crazy? So, fundamentalism is premised on the idea that your religion is the only answer. And the reason that's really amazing is it means that the other person's soul has no value. Right? Because if let's say you let's say there was a fundamentalist Jupiter worshipper from the Roman period and he that guy was like anybody who doesn't worship Jupiter is hosed. Well, what's the point in them living another day if the whole reason for living is it's an exercise to get you into paradise? If they're going to die in hell anyway, what difference does it make if they die at age six or die at age 60? They still go to hell. So, you might as well kill them now and get it over with and make and do God's work and make the world a better place. Got it? Isn't that cool? But when you think about it then, what does every fundamentalist say? There was a time once a long time ago probably when our religion was doing it correctly. In other words, most fundamentalists are also fascists because they believe that there's some really amazing moment in the past where we were good. So for American fundamentalists or American fascists, that's the 19th century when we had slavery were actively genociding Native Americans and women couldn't vote. Right? For the Rome, for an Italian, it's the Roman Empire. or if you're if you're Swedish, it's when the Vikings were were raping and pillaging and plundering Europe, which I just admitted I was a quarter Swedish. So yeah, that's that's me. Um when you know, right, it just if you're a German, it's when they were fighting the Vikings trying to defend themselves, right? It's you pick your time and it's always imaginary because I have awful freaking news for you as a person who studies history up, down, backwards, and sideways. Every time in the human experience has been absolute The reality is you're living in the best time ever. And I'll tell you, there's one reason for this. If you get a scratch and you get an infection and the infection becomes bad, you just take some antibiotics and you're going to be fine. A 100 years ago, you just have died. A scratch could have killed you. Just just the fact that we have antibiotics makes this a better time period than all other time periods anyway. But that's okay. Reminisce some stupid imaginary past that you have in your mind that you think is somehow better even though it's completely insane to believe that. And by the way, it's always wrong, right? Like I'll pick on Muslim fundamentalists for a moment. Muslim fundamentalists believe that there was some glorious moment in their past where they were doing Islam correctly. But the way they've defined Islam has never been practiced in the entire history of Islam. They've created their own modern version of Islam and then they pretend that there's some ancient or medieval there was never an ancient Islam. There was a medieval that there was some medieval moment that never happened. It's all imaginary. It's all It's all in your head. I I thought of a couple other examples, but I'm going to hold off on those. But you get the idea, right? That there's this there's this sort of weird uh obsession with some glorious moment that that's not true at all. It's just a modern concept that you've created and superimposed. All right. So, uh any questions about communism, fascism, or fundamentalism? Knock those three right out of the park. Can you imagine how horrible it would be if you took nationalism, fundamentalism, and fascism and merged them together. By the way, Hitler did do that. He regularly got up and and and gave speeches about how he was going to make Europe Christian again and that he was a crusader for Jesus and that he loved the German nation and he would fight and die for the German nation and bring Germany back to the year 1000 AD. So just so in case you were confused, that's one of the reasons why Hitler was so effective. He did he merged those three toxic ideologies together and made one. And uh because you think about it, name the greatest minds on earth for the last 250 years. Hegel, Kant, Bronze, Bach, Beethoven, Vagner, uh Greta, Heisenberg, Haidiger, Hurl, uh Schopenau, Strauss, the other Strauss, uh Freud, Marx, Einstein. Are you seeing the pattern? Are you seeing the freaking pattern? 90% of the greatest minds in the last 250 years are German. How the hell did Germany get sucked into that Nazi It just goes to show you have to be really careful. Even if you think you're hot you could still get torn brought into it. Anyway, it's scary to think about him. I mean, I I intentionally left Neil's Boore out on my list because he was Danish and Stephven Hawking because he was English and Serbas ramen because he was Indian. But that's the end of my non-German list. So, oh, Enrico Fairmy because he was Italian. Okay, there. Now I'm done with my non-German list. Vickenstein. I forgot Vickinstein when I was doing my German list. I'm sure I missed somebody else. All right, so Hana, another German. Herbert Marcusa, another German. Uh, Horheimer, another German. Anyway, I guess Adorno, he was Italian. So, there's an ital two Italians. Grahamshi, another Italian. Okay, there were three Italians. Fine. Geez. Oh, and then uh Fuko. How can So, there's another French guy or I think that's the first French guy I mentioned. Da. Okay, there's two French guys. But you see, I'm struggling to get the non-Germans into my list. All right, so let's go back to liberalism. And I was going to segue in by talking about FDR. But actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold off on FDR and go back even further. When the socialists got their ideology up and running, people who love capitalism panicked and they realized they needed an ideology to rally their people around to push back against socialism. So they created a new ideology called liberalism. So socialism came first. Liberalism is the response to socialism. Liberalism is divided into four sub ideologies. All four sub ideologies believe the following. Capitalism is the best economic system available. It may not be the best system ever. There may be something greater to come along down the road. As of right now, capitalism is it and that anything else is bad. Mercantalism is bad. Socialism is bad. Feudalism is bad. Capitalism is it. where they disagree is how much government regulation you should have over the economy and how much government regulation you should have over normative issues or social issues if you'd rather use that word. So if you made a chart and you had an x- axis and a y- axis, let's make the x- axis be economic issues and the y- axis be normative issues. on the right hand side it'll it's a binary on the economic ones on so you I should have made the chart before class I didn't think about it so you have two two options either you have government interference in the economy or you don't and then on the normative side the top category is you you have government interference in social behavior and the bottom category is you don't so you have four quadrants quadrant the quadrant in the top right is government interference in the economic, right? Because you're in the right hand column. And the top uh row is government interference in social. And then the the category below that is government interference in the e economic but no government interference in social. The bottom left is no government interference in economic or social. And then the top left is government interference in social but not in economic. So, which one of those would we label as liberal or conservative? Whichever one you you want to do. Do liberals like government interference in both in one and not the other or in neither, for example? Right. Where would liberals land? Or conservatives? Whichever one you find easier to to place. Liberals would be both, right? Nope. Yeah. Don't I could be so wrong, but don't li uh liberals don't want like anyone? Oh, so you want the the one which is neither. Yes. No, that's wrong, too. Okay. Who's neither? You guys should know this. It's It does start with an L. Libertarians. Libertarians. Libertarians believe we shouldn't have government regulation of the economy or social life. Who what what's the ideology that wants government regulation of the economy and social life? It starts with a P and people misuse it regularly because they don't know what it means. The PO DP populist populist populists believe that you should regulate both the most famous American who was a populist was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He believed we should have laws that discourage sinful behavior and we should take care of the poor. He came at the decision to be a populist from his Christian belief system. He thought Jesus would take care of the poor and he thought that we should regulate sin. By the way, he died a Republican. He never converted and became a Democrat. Meanwhile, one of the funniest No, that's not funny, is it? No, I I don't Maybe I shouldn't even say it. It's so horrible. Uh, you have to say it now. Yeah, I have to say it now. One of the worst things I've ever seen was James Earl Jones was asked by Republican party to give a speech about Dr. Martin Luther King. I don't know I don't remember where but some it was some small town and when he showed up instead of it saying thank you doc thank you James Earl Jones it said thank you James Earl Ray the signs James Earl Ray is the guy who murdered Dr. Martin Luther King and you're like, "Oh man, Jesus Christ, that's what Google is for." Or was that on purpose? Anyway, things that make you go, "I just so painful." So um which one then is the one where liberals go in? You have two options left. Government regulation the economy but not social or government regulation of social but not the economy. Um they generally want uh more regulation on uh social right. No, no. I mean, I don't know. Given modern day liberals, they tend not to do Well, okay. So, here's here's how here's how it works in their mind because you might be right. Like, there's a little bit of it's a little bit contradictory. What a liberal will say is we need to have a minimum wage, we need to have uh reduced working hours, we need to have weekends, we need to have uh universal health care. Right? Those are all regulation of the economy. When it comes to social issues, they they literally will say, "We don't want you to define what a what what a woman is, what a man is, what gender is. We don't want you to regulate abortion. We don't want you to regulate birth control. We don't want you to regulate our sexual behavior." So, they're against social regulation, but they're definitely for economic regulation. They want safety in the workplace. Uh they're they tend to be pro- union. the the people who vote liberal, the liberals who run for office tend to be anti-UN, but that's because they're they're a little hypocrites and I hate them. Um, so I have I actually have friends who are in government and if they ever see this, they'll be so mad at me, but they know it's true. Um, so I I have friends in the US government and the Texas legislature. Um just just full disclosure this is because I feel like sometimes when I say these things I there's like this element of dishonesty if I don't tell you. Um anyway so conservatives then don't want minimum wage. They don't want to be taxed. They don't want the government e econom uh interfering in reg with regulation on stuff like the environment or job safety. They they don't like unions. They do want there to be strict restrictions on sexual behavior. They you know in Oklahoma City they banned tattoos. Uh they want to get rid of abortion. There there's a movement to get rid of birth control etc etc. So that's that's where those four sub ideologies of liberalism divide themselves. Having said that, um, in the United States, because there's no meaningful populist movement and there's no meaningful libertarian movement, right, the libertarians are lucky when they get 1% of the vote, the most libertarians just simply pick whether they're going to vote for the lesser of the two evil, Democrat or Republican. And so they they tend to flip back and forth. than the populist tend to do the same thing. Right now, most libertarians and most populists have been voting Republican. They've decided, right, the populists have decided that abortion is more important to them than feeding the poor. And the libertarians have decided that having low taxes is more important to them than having abortion. And obviously, this isn't everybody. It's just that's what the majority is leaning towards. Now, if you were to jump into a time machine and go back and I'll get let's do a year just so we can ground this. So, we'll make it 1955. So, 70 years ago, and you were going to look at the Democratic Party, what you would have seen was something really bizarre. The Democratic Party actually h you know what I ha I have made this chart. I think it's better that I show you. So, let me see if I can find it. And the reason I g I'm saying it like I don't know if I can is because I hired somebody to redo my uh website and I don't know if they've taking this down yet or not. So just a sec. Let me try. Okay, I think I found it. And they haven't. Yay. This is crazy. Uh, okay. I made this chart a while back. So, I uh when I did I I called it 1950 instead of 1955. All right, let me share my screen. Share screen. Is it doing it? No. Hold on. Okay. So, if you were to jump back and look at Congress in uh 1950 or 1955, this is actually what it looked like. There were three distinct voting blocks. Now, this isn't by population density. So, this this area is actually very relatively dense. this area is less dense and this area is less dense. So, so I don't want you thinking that groups A and C are bigger than B. Uh B in terms of number of people, B is bigger than either A or C. Combined, A and C would be bigger than B, but separately B is bigger than either of those. So, here's the thing. We had three very distinct voting blocks. And then I've labeled the X-axis conservative versus liberal. So there here that, you know, these two leaned conservative. This one is very conservative. This one leans conservative, but you know, it's right in the middle. It's just slightly more conservative than liberal. And then this one's obviously liberal, right? You can see my cursor as I move it. Correct. I'm not just spinning my conservative my my li cursor and you guys aren't seeing it. I can't tell if you're answering me. All right. So, um, which of these three is the Democratic Party and which of these three is the Republican party? Because we only have two political parties. Um, I would say the Democratic Party is currently in B. Generally, no, I don't want you to do currently. I want you to tell me 1950. 1950. Uh, well, I'd still say B, but Okay. You think this is Democrats? That that'd be my opinion. Yeah. Okay. Anybody else want to jump in if you're typing it? I can't see it because I'm sharing my screen. Would it be C C? Democrats. Okay. Okay. Well, let me ask another one question. Which is which one is the Republican party? The Republican party's B, right? B. Didn't they go through a switch at one time? Wasn't it that the rep it was one the Republicans were one way, Democrats were one way and then there was a switch. Is that when this happened or is this something different? Well, so hold on to that idea for a bit. Um that could be true, but in 1950, which of these would be the Republican party and which would be the Democratic? I have a vote for B being both parties and C being the Democratic party. Does anybody else want to throw in Okay. What's A? A. You want to say A is Democrat or Republican? Democrat. There we go. Okay. I'm gonna go that way. You're going to go that way. But I have a problem, right? I have three parties or three voting blocks, but only two parties. So, if A is Democrat, then what are the other two? If you would like my two cents, I believe A is A is the Democratic base, uh, you know, the voter block, while B is the Democratic party. Uhhuh. Okay. Then what's C? The Republicans. Oh, naturally, yes. Okay. Anybody else want to throw in? I'm going to take your silences. No. Okay. So, ready for the answer? B was the Republican party in 1950. A and C were the Democratic Party. Isn't that wild? In other words, the most conservative people in the United States were Democrats. The most liberal people in the United States were were Democrats. And then the the Republicans were actually the moderates. They were right here in the middle. Obviously leaning conservative, but when compared to A or C, they were clearly much more moderate. Is that a mind screw or what? So now I have a question for you. Why didn't you guys ask me what the heck is the Y axis? Um, I mean, I just thought it to be not particularly relevant to the conversation, but Okay. Well, do you want to go ahead and ask it now then? My guess um given the time would be um probably um antagonism toward like I I uh opinions on the civil rights movement that was kind of happening around then. But okay, that that's just a guess. That's a fantastic guess. Uh take it one step further. H how did that argument about civil rights roll out? Like what did it look like? Um the rights for specifically um African-Americans. Correct. And and then if you were if you were to look at the United States like you were going to get into a satellite and look down, would there what would you see as you look down? Well, do you mean like geographically? Because Yes. Well, I mean there's the the northern and southern voting blocks generally. Ah, so that's what the y- axis is. So the top as you go up, you head to the south, and as you go down, you head to the west or the north. So in other words, if you split this chart right in half, C is entirely in the south, and A and B are entirely in the north and west. In other words, this is southern Democrats and they were conservative. This is Yankee Democrats and they were liberal. And then this is the Republican party. There were Republicans in the South in 1950. They just didn't get elected to Congress. The rep the only only place you found Republicans in Congress from were the North and the West. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that makes sense considering uh from the time Martin Luther King Jr.'s 's remarks on the white liberal um being one of the most oppositional forces to the black men's liberation as opposed to the Republicans. Yeah. I mean, there there was a serious problem because the white liberals in the north had to constantly compromise with their white conservative southerners because that was the only way the Democratic party won was that you had this coalition. And so if if white s if liberals in the north angered southern conservatives too much, they'd lose their coalition. And so they were they were constantly walking on eggshells trying to to please them. And that's part of the frustration that Dr. Martin Luther King had. The other part of the frustration he had was, let's just be honest, those white liberals were still racist. They just were less racist than the than the the white conservatives. Um, so he was he was pointing out both problems. One the need for the Democrats to compromise and the other one being just the fact that well they're still racist. They're just not as nasty. Um, any any other questions about this chart before I move on because I'm going to I want to switch back to not sharing screen and then we can come back to this if we need to. Okay. So, here's what happened. There was a choice that needed to be made in the 1920s and ended up manifesting itself in 1932 in the election. And the choice is the following. So, first of all, the the Great Depression was not our first depression. It was our third depression. We had an economic downturn in the 1950s. It's usually referred to as the depression of the sorry 1850s. It's usually referred to as the depression of the 1850s. Then we had a really bad economic downturn, much worse than the one in the 1850s. In in 1890, we call that the depression. Then we ended up with 1930 being the Great Depression. So there was the depression of the 1850s, the depression of 1890s, and then the great depression of the 1930s. Is there a pattern, 50s, 90s,30s? Um, yeah. I I think it's one generation goes through hardship, they they change their ways, but then the next one kind of forgets. Yeah, because a generation is 20 years. So 2 * 20 is 40. Every 40 years we went into a depression. It was like clockwork. You could you could set your clock to it. You knew 1970 was going to be our next depression, right? That was done deal. And then 2010 would be the next depression. Then 2050 will be the next depression. That that's what the pattern appeared to be. So the United States got into this really interesting conversation in the Great Depression, which was, is this sustainable? How can we go on like this? Are we really going to do this? Every 40 years, we're going to get hammered by these really catastrophic depressions. Uh, Americans are confused about the definition of a depression. So, let me just clarify. A depression is when the economy tanks and we can't get out of it. we're stuck in this rut. A recession is when the economy has a temporary setback that usually lasts about six months and we do come out of it and it's not that big of a deal. So, in other words, if if you walked into the doctor's office because you had a bad cut and you needed a few stitches, that's a recession. If your arm is cut off, that's a depression. And a recession can actually be a good time because it it offers opportunity for you to go in there and buy goods for cheap. Usually housing prices come down. I I have taken advantage of this myself. Car prices will come down. In other words, there's there there's it's mostly negative in a recession, but there are some positives. In a depression, there's very little positive. It's mostly just, oh god, I can't believe we're going through this. This is horrible. So people get confused about this in part because the government likes to blur these terms and that's why like idiots we talk about our most recent depression as the great recession. It was not a rec. It would be like walking into the doctor's office with your arm severed and the doctor going, "That's a scratch." And you're like, "Dude, my arm is chopped off." And you go, "Yeah, that's a great scratch." No, no, it's not a great scratch. I had my arm severed. Oh, bad. You got a bad cut there, son. That's That's how stupid calling the Great Recession the Great Recession is. Yeah, just tough it out, Moore. Why are you upset? I don't understand. It's just a cut. I've had a cut before. That's fine. Why do we call the the the our most recent depression the Great Recession instead of calling it like the second worst depression, which is what it was? Uh PR essentially. Exactly. People were worried that if you labeled it a depression, people would believe it was a depression and everybody get depressed. And uh sometimes that's not the right approach. You know what I mean? Like imagine you go to a doctor's office and you have cancer and the doctor's like, "Oh yeah, you're just a little sick. Maybe you should tell your patient they have cancer so that they can deal with the cancer instead of, I don't know, uh, taking Tylenol. Maybe Tylenol isn't the response, right? Then they need to be doing, right? Maybe chemo and radiation and a surgery is actually what they should be doing. So, I'm not sure lying to the public is exactly the right path forward, but anyway, that's what we did. Thank you, George Bush Jr. Um, all right. So, here's how this rolled out. The Yankee liberals became convinced that if we didn't do something radical in the United States, we were going to end up going socialist. And they had reason to believe this. Uh, socialists were winning elections. Oklahoma state legislature was heading socialist. Oklahoma was going socialist. Milwaukee elected a socialist mayor. There were socialists winning elections across the United States in in 1930 and people were beginning to think by 1932 there'd be even more. By 1936 the United States might go socialist. So what the liberals believed was the only way to fight socialism was with socialism. What's a vaccine? It's like a small dose of disease, right? Yeah. You introduce the disease to the body with the hope that the body builds an immunity to it. So the those Yankee liberals went, "What if we introduce just enough socialism that we effectively vaccinate the American public against socialism and we'll save capitalism that way?" That was FDR's argument. will come in, we'll build in these socialist institutions, we'll we'll defend capitalism using socialism. And in fact, FDR hired a socialist to manage this. Canes Kanes was a socialist. And Kanes was thinking, "Oh my god, I can finally inject into the United States some socialist institutions." He thought he was making the United States more socialist with the hope that as time went by, it would slowly become more and more socialist. FDR was thinking, I'm gonna bring Kanees in and because he's a dupe and I'll manipulate him and he'll build in these socialist institutions and then we'll block the United States from ever becoming socialist. The Republican party lost its mind. It went no, capitalism is perfect in every way. One way to think of the x- axis, the argument between liberals and conservatives, between populists and liberals on the right side and or left ideologically, but on our chart, it's on the right side. Maybe I need to flip that. And then on the left column, right, it's the conservatives and the popul conservatives and the libertarians. If you're in that side, the the conservative libertarian side, you believe capitalism is great as it is. It's pure form. It's good. You you may even have mixed religious beliefs with it and believe that the invisible hand that that go uh Adam Smith talks about in the wealth of nations is Jesus Christ himself. That in in effect we we took the power from the king to set the price of sugar and cotton and ships and we handed it over to Jesus and he sets the price of sugar and cotton and ships. There are some Americans who believe this just for the record. On the other side, populists and liberals believe capitalism is the best system, but it's a profoundly flawed system and that's why it needs regulation. And that's the argument of the 1932 election between Hoover and FDR, whether or not we we would survive as a capitalist system through regulation or it was better to stay pure and perfect capitalist and take the risk of a socialist revolution. And of course, FDR won the election. And then he brings in Canes and Keanes begins doing these socialist policies with the goal of vaccinating the United States. That wasn't Kane's goal. That was FDR's goal. And it worked. We're We're definitely not socialist. It did not It did not go the way Kanes had hoped. It went the way FDR had hoped. And here we are. Now, having said that, that created the liberal period, which goes from 1932 until 1980. The liberal period gets upended by Ronald Reagan. Reagan comes in and he goes, "Oh my god, all this socialism is corrupting the United States and it's making Americans go away from Jesus. It's making Americans lazy. Americans aren't good workers anymore. They're not efficient workers. What we need to do is we need to reestablish the old cap classic capitalist system. get rid of all this regulation and stop coddling the worker class and make them compete against each other and perform and produce more and we'll pay them less and the rich will become richer and the poor will become poor and we'll be back to 19th century America. We won't have slavery and women will still have the right to vote unfortunately but the rest of it will be in place. That's what Reagan's argument was. It was actually Nixon's argument that Nixon failed and in the end we took him out, right? He didn't get to serve his full eight years. He only ended up serving a little bit less than six. So Nixon was taken out. But Reagan comes in and he picks up Nixon's argument and he wins. He wins the day. He pulls it off. And the next thing you know, we end up in a situation where in fact uh he starts rolling back the liberal era's regimes. He's not actually that successful, but he's trying. George Bush Senior comes in, he gets rid of some of it, but he's not that successful either. Bill Clinton comes in and he gets rid of a bunch of it. He's the guy who kills social welfare as we know it. So earlier Alec said the voters are in A but the Democratic politicians are B. He's not wrong. That was definitely the case with Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was a conservative Democrat from the South who came in and did a bunch of stuff including Aida, including killing social welfare policy. Apa, let me see if I can remember what it stands for. Anti-terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act, I think is what it stands for. Um, what what happens what Abe did was, you're gonna love this. This is why I love Bill Clinton so much. Love might been sarcastic. So, let's say you get convicted wrongfully of a crime. So, uh, let's say a person is murdered. you get convicted of that murder, but you know you're innocent because you didn't do it. It's a wrongful conviction. You can appeal at the state level and you go right all the way to the state supreme court. If you get to the state supreme court and they still find you guilty, you are done. You cannot appeal to the federal level. That's what APA did. Before ADPA, you could appeal to a federal court and the federal court could conceivably find you innocent. After a state supreme court was the end of the road for you. The only way you could appeal to a federal court is in the event one of your rights was violated because that would be a violation of due process 14th amendment, the thing Donald Trump is trying to get rid of. um if if your first amendment or your fourth amendment or your fifth amendment rights were violated at some point and in the state process then you can appeal to the federal level. Otherwise being innocent is not grounds for a federal appeal. Mindboggling. That's what Bill Clinton did. That guy was great. He also got rid of GlassSteagall, which was the thing that kept banks from giving out bad loans. And of course, what panked the economy in 2008? The banks began giving out bad loans like there was no tomorrow, like it was candy. And so, 10 years after idiot Clinton got rid of Glass Deagle, the economy tanked and we went into a depression. Our second worst ever depression. Anyway, that so you can tell I don't like Bill Clinton. I would have impeached him not for the oral sex. I would have impeached him for being a But uh I not not a fan. Then George Bush Jr. comes along and he destroyed whatever was left of all those institutions that FDR not all of them but a huge portion of those regulatory institutions. So I'll give you the example of examples. So there's such a thing as uh derivatives in in economics. So, a derivative is a fancy way of saying Las Vegas style gambling. Let's say you think that pork prices are going to go up in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years. You think that currently pork prices are undervalued for whatever reason. You can go to a futures market and buy pork in 10 years. Obviously, those pigs haven't been born yet. So you're buying pork that will be going to market in 10 years now at a price that the futures markets have established is the price that should be in 10 years. And if you think so let's say I don't I'm making this up. Let's say it's a dollar a pound right now. You you think it's going to be $2 a pound. Well then you want to buy, right? Because if you put a million dollars down and you're right, you'll have $2 million in 10 years. So that's that's the gamble. You're you're betting on the future, the direction you think things are going. Derivatives were completely illegal in the United States until basically Bill Clinton um except in futures markets. A derivative is instead of buying the pork, you bet on the price of the pork. That's why I'm calling it Las Vegas gambling. it. So, I can go into the futures market. Instead of buying pork, I say, "I think it's going to be $2. I'm going to make a bet, a million-doll bet that it's going to be $2, but I don't actually want to receive the pork. I just want to bet on the price." The reason why we made that legal was we realized there were a bunch of really bored upper class white men who didn't know what to do with their time and their money who would love to go and spend some time doing research on pork prices or oil or rubber or plastic, whatever commodities being traded on the futures markets. And then they'll make their bet. you'll see the direction the bets are going and in it might inform you on how you want to price if you're actually buying the product. In other words, it was a way of tricking a bunch of bored white men into doing a bunch of research for you and then you could look at what their research results were. Reagan wanted to bring that over into the economy. He thought we should just do this. We could just turn Wall Street into a giant gambling debt. He failed. George Bush senior appointed a person to be in charge of regulating derivatives markets who didn't believe in regulating derivative markets. So she effectively didn't do her job. And then Clinton came in and basically they got rid of the laws restricting derivatives and opened up the world for it. That's what one of the major things that tanked the economy in 2008. What the banks did was you'd walk into this you'd walk into a bank because you want to buy a house. Let's say you did you went on to uh bankrate.com. I don't even know if that's a real website. You went into mortgage.com. I one of there's some there's some websites where you can go figure out what your down payment needs to be for a house and what your monthly payments will be. So you can you can calculate your income and see if you'd qualify for a loan. So let's say you did that. You went online and we'll make it 2007 2006. You went online to one of these websites and you you realized you had the ability to buy a $100,000 home based on your income and how much money you had for a down payment and what your credit rating was. You figured I can buy a $100,000 home. So, you go in to the bank and you're like, "I found a $100,000 home with my realtor. We're ready to make a bid on it. I need a mortgage for $100,000." The banker says, "Okay, let me let me get your income. I need your income, your down payment size, your credit rating, your social security number, your date of birth, your gender, all that stuff." You give it to the banker. The banker runs the numbers and they go, "Wait, I'll be right back." They leave. They go and pretend to talk to somebody and then they come back and they go, "You know what? We did the math and I looked and I went and I talked to my supervisor. We can put you in a $500,000 home. Do you want to go back into the marketplace and go look for a bigger, nicer house?" And you're like, "Wait, what? No, you can't put me in a $500,000 home. I went to bankrate.com and they said 100,000 was all I'd qualify for." And then the banker says, "Yeah, but I'm a professional. I'm not a website. I know what I'm doing. I did the math. I talked to my supervisor. The supervisor okayed it. We're willing to give you a $500,000 home. And you're like, "Oh my god, think of the parties I'm going to throw in that house. Think I'm going to invite my cousins who are always jealous of me. I'm going to I'm going to rub it in their faces. I'm going to invite, you know, my brother who's always competitive with me and I'm going to show them my house. This is going to be amazing. I can't wait." and you will allow yourself to be tricked into signing that mortgage and it's a disaster because you'll never be able to make the payments. And what the the bank will do is they'll put in balloon payments. So the payments will increase every month until they become outrageous and way past your ability to pay. But that'll be in 10 years. So you'll be able to manage the payments for the first few years. It'll get harder and harder and you'll be like, "This is getting weird. Why is this going up?" That's because you didn't read the fine print. They give you the $500,000 loan that there's no way you're going to be able to pay. It's 30-year mortgage. By year 10, you'll be you'll be bankrupt. They don't You're thinking right now, why would you do that? It's irresponsible. Well, Glass Deagle is gone. Clinton got rid of it. So, there's nothing stopping the bank from giving an irresponsible loan. Now, their goal isn't to make money off the loan. They don't care. Their goal is to go to the derivatives markets and sell bad loans on the derivatives markets and make money off the derivatives for the loans instead of the loans. Cynthia, isn't that kind of the same as what they're doing in the uh late 90s, early 2000s when they were pushing student loans? you know, they they were giving, you know, yes, there are some kids that needed to go to school and they needed to have money for rent and stuff, living expenses, but they would go and they would give you what you could through FASA and PEL grants. Then they would come with these big loan numbers that were almost as much as your your FASA, PEL grant, any of that kind of stuff. And if you didn't get it, they were giving you a large amount and just really telling you like, "Oh, yes, you, you know, use the extra, buy a laptop, take care of your living, you know, your rent, and you know, you don't need to work while you're in school, you know, and then when you get out of school, you'll have a job that's going to pay you enough to pay these loans back." But what's gone on is these loans have just the compound interest, you know, the never ending. But they really, you know, they were really pushing that and that's when they were also pushing them to not go into trade as much. you know, the schools had a lot of trade, you know, well, you know, certain types of schools had trades in them and uh yeah, and they started taking those out of those schools, too, and really pushing the go to, you know, go to college, take the loans out, you'll make money to pay it off. So, you you are partly right in the sense that yeah, they really were pushing these loans, but it's more complicated than that. So, um, as a person who got through grad school and undergrad with student loans, I actually like the program. One of the reasons why I like it is the amount you pay per month is actually pegged to the income you're making. And depending on the on the what you qualify for, you'll either qualify for a 10 year, 20 year, or 30-year loan. At the end of that time, whatever is left over, you don't have to pay for. So in other words, let's say you only paid half the principal on that loan. At the end of 30 years, the other half just disappears. It vanishes into the ether. So there is a guaranteed aspect to it in the sense that um you your your payments are pegged to your income. Having said that, there's no doubt it takes a big chunk of money out of your paycheck. So, you will you will notice that you're making the payments no matter how much you're making, unless you're super rich. But where did we get to the point though where taking out $20,000 turned into 50,000? Okay, so here's what happened. This is going to sound crazy, but public schools used to be almost free. They weren't Yeah. Until Reagan got involved, right? Well, so it actually started in the Nixon administration. Reagan advanced it. So in 1973, for example, UT started charging tuition. Um, up until then, you had it you had some administrative fees and you had to buy your books. It wasn't like it wasn't truly free, but it was really close to free. In 1973, I don't remember what the tuition was, but it was some ridiculous fee like $300 a year. Like, yeah, here you go. You want an extra hundred? I happen to have it. You know, like who cares? Yeah. What happened then was the reason why they began doing that was Nixon and the Republicans were trying to figure out how to make it so that there would never be another 1960s in the United States again. And the 1960s happened because three things converged at the same time. The 1960s was a perfect storm. Mhm. There was a labor movement, a a a very heavily unionized labor force that was insisting on increased labor justice. Basically, there was a religious left represented by people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who believed that we that Jesus mandated that we take care of the poor, that we treat each other with some dignity and decency, and that religious left was very heavily involved in the civil rights movement. And then on top of that, there was this student movement where all of a sudden students and professors were going into the streets and protesting and they converged civil rights, women's rights, anti-war, antivietnam war stuff and they and they brought it all together and they they created a revolution. We have had two revolutions in United States history. the revolution which turned into a civil war and then the 1960s which didn't turn into a civil war. It stayed a revolution. I it is it became really popular in the 90s and even in the 80s it started to mock the 60s and say they were a failure. They weren't a failure. They didn't they didn't completely succeed in their goals but they definitely changed the United States in in a positive direction. Women definitely saw an increase in rights. Black people definitely saw an increase in rights. Brown people definitely saw an increase. There's no two ways about it. The 60s had an impact and ultimately the Vietnam War ended in, you know, 73 or 75, depending on how you want to count it. Officially, we withdrew in 73. So, in the end, the 60s was a victory victorious revolution, even if it wasn't a the a revolution that fulfilled all of its goals. So the Nixon people believed that they were they were elected to undo this. The the Republican party in 1968 when they won the election thought our mandate is to destroy the 1960s and to repeal back everything to to to get women back into the the kitchen and the home knocking out babies. It was to, you know, stop premarital sex. It was to get rid of birth control. All those things that they rock and roll, all the things they thought were decadent. They thought that's what their goal was. The first thing they did was they went to the religious left and they asked them a question. What's more important, going to heaven or having food? And the religious left said, "Obviously, it's better to go to heaven and starve to death than it is to live and end up in hell." And so the the conservatives said, "Okay, if you switch and stop caring about the poor, we'll help fund your anti- sin legislation with all our money. We'll help you go after abortion. We'll help you go after tattoos. We'll help you go after gay rights. We'll help you roll back women's rights. Those are the those are the things we're willing to champion if you'll abandon taking care of the poor and you'll stop caring about children and you'll stop caring about immigrants and you'll stop caring about refugees. And that's why there's a religious right in the United States. It worked and they switched. Not all of them obviously there's still a religious left. It's just they're they're a small voice relative to the religious right. They then went after the schools. And the way they went after the schools was by charging tuition for public schools. When you think about that, that's The public schools are already funded by the states. They're are public. Why are they charging tuition? They're double dipping. They're getting like in Texas, we we use oil money and tax money to fund the schools and the lottery, too, which is stupid. But anyway, um we we have sources of money to fund the schools. Why charge tuition? That's one of the things that I love about the new ACC administration is they're they're trying to figure out how to completely dump tuition. That is their ultimate goal. And yes, ACC is a public school. It has always had low tuition, but it should have zero tuition. It's a public school. It's already funded. The reason the Republicans wanted the public schools to charge tuition was because if you're having to pay tuition, you have to get a job. and if you have a job and you're going to school full-time, you don't have time to organize and protest. And they thought that was how they could spay and neuter college students. They wanted to go after the unions, but they weren't powerful enough to do it. Reagan did it. He went after the unions and he destroyed the unions. He he was very successful. US unions are now starting to come back. there's been like a couple of years of rebounding, but the reality is is it's been a disaster. In the process of charging tuition, the banks came up with an idea. We could give loans to students so they can get through the tuition. The problem is that created a feedback loop because then the universities went, "Oh, wait a minute. If they're giving these large loans out, we can raise tuition." And then as tuition went up, the loans went up. And as the loans went up, the tuition went up. And we ended up in a toxic situation where there was this feedback loop that allowed for these psychotic tuitions to be charged at public schools. And then Republicans wanting to cut taxes went, let's defund the schools. Let's actually start cutting their the amount that So the schools became more and more reliant on tuition and in effect stopped being public schools and became private schools. They just pretended they were p public. But if they're charging $30,000 to go to school, they're definitely not public anymore. And so that's how we ended up in this situation. Cynthia, sorry, me again. And I'm not against the student loans at all. Um it's just yeah, this how it got. And yeah, you just explained it and you when you said that how you're making it to where you have to work to go to school full-time, blah blah. Well, now with this new bill they're passing, it's the same thing. They've upped it to where now you have to take 15 hours of classes to be able and they've capped out the the amount of loans. So rather than go and fix the problem, they're just saying, "Oh, hold on. We're just going to limit the amount of education you can get." Dumb people are easier to manipulate. The goal is ultimately to destroy system. Absolutely. Uh for the record, I am done paying my student loans and it was a huge relief when I got to that place. Uh, so I'm not I don't want to minimize it and say there isn't an economic burden to having student loans. There definitely is. But in my experience, the benefit was greater than the than the cost. One of the reasons why I'm done is because there's a program that Obama created that the Republicans will probably try and destroy that said if you work at a public institution instead of a private institution, you only have to pay 10 years instead of 30. And ACC is public. So I got the benefit of working at ACC. One of the real tragedies about Texas is so much of it, so much of the government work is actually privatized. So for example, I have friends who are social workers, but because the state doesn't do social work, it it hires private firms to do it. They are officially working for a private entity doing public work. So they don't qualify for that 10-year student loan thing. They're stuck paying 30 years. If the state hadn't privatized social work, they would have already paid off their student loans. So, my advice to you is move. Go to a state that cares about its people instead of trashing its humans. Uh, I'm a member of the AFT, American Federation of Teachers, because I believe in unions and I don't believe in being a hypocrite. So, I pay my dues. And on their their website, they said, "If if you're a teacher and a member of the AFT, what advice would you give to a brand new teacher in Texas?" And I my advice was move to New Mexico. Um just for the record at the time because this is a few years ago a AISD was paying 52,000 for a teacher. New Mexico is paying 60,000. So that's an extra 8,000. The most expensive city in New Mexico is Santa Fe. Austin is obviously our most expensive city in Texas. And the the standard of living is 83% the cost to live in Santa Fe. So, you would be paying 17% less if you move to Santa Fe and you get that $8,000 bump and you live in a prettier state where people aren't running around shooting each other. I I I just don't like I as a Texan, I'm pissed. I can't stand the fact that we make all these stupid ass policies and mistreat our people. And I'm now advocating let's abandon the state until the state feels the pain and then maybe maybe we'll come back because we're never going to do unions. And as a teacher, we can't. teachers who strike go get fired. The state has made teachers strikes illegal. Um, by the way, firefighters and police as well. Um, I have a friend who's a firefighter and uh, we talk about this every once in a while because he's a union guy as well because of course the firefighters union is a big deal and we're constantly annoyed because we can't strike. But anyway, these things are irritating and complicated. What what ends up happening, long story short, is when derivatives markets got going, the banks went crazy, began giving out one awful loan after the other. They would then stack them in these instruments that were included hundreds of thousands of loans. The banks were thinking nobody would sit there and read a 100,000 loans or more to discover whether or not the loans were good or not. and and then they then what they would do is they would drop them into Wall Street and then people would buy derivatives off of them. So if the loans made money, you would gain money on the derivatives and you didn't even have to own you didn't even have to get into banking. So a bunch of people thought, I can get the money from banking without actually banking. I'm just betting on the banking. And the banks were making so much coin off of this that they knew eventually these mortgages would fail. They didn't care. Um, Countrywide was Bank of America. I'll just give you an example. Bank of America created a spin-off company called Countrywide and they took all of their bad loans and they dropped it into Countrywide. That way when Countrywide went bankrupt, it wouldn't take out Bank of America. This is how nasty the system that they were they had created was. They knew they had all these toxic loans. Bank of America executives eventually forgot why they created Countrywide to begin with and actually bought it and reabsorbed it into Bank of America right before the 2008 crash and it took out Bank of America. And they're like, "You idiots, you made this because you knew what you were doing was evil and wrong and stupid and you got suckered into it." Like, never believe your own lies. You should only you should only make other people believe your lies. Don't don't you believe your lies. But of course that doesn't really work since 90% of the lies you tell will always be to yourself. All right, we're out of time. And uh so what I want to do when we start back up next time is I want to talk about and hopefully I'll remember to do this but if I don't you can remind me what happens in 1964. So there's an event that takes place in 1964 that will transform the United States even more than what we've already talked about because obviously what Cynthia brought up the thing the 1973 tuition thing obviously had a huge impact. I mean notice we haven't had another 1960s the Republicans definitely made us revolution proof at least to some degree. I have a sneaky suspicion if we stay on the path we're on that we'll either end up with another revolution or a civil war, which is horrific and frightening to me. And I don't know why we have to do this. I I would really rather we didn't do this. Uh what because you know like there's nowhere to run. If you move the United States tanking because it went into a civil war takes off the entire global economy. We're 25% of the global economy. the world can't function without. In other words, there's no solution other than let's avoid doing this. This is not okay. Uh also, why can't we just like hang out and I don't know, have barbecue and just why why do we have to be so mad at each other all the time over stupid policy issues that nobody in the country is an expert in? Like, everybody's so attached to their dumb opinion. Your your opinion is dumb. Mine is dumb. Everybody's dumb and I spend hours researching this and I'm admitting I'm dumb. Like a person who literally spends three seconds researching something suddenly has this giant opinion that they're so convinced of that they're willing to kill their neighbor over. It's like, "Oh my god, Jesus." Get some perspective. Read a book. Do some traveling and eat more barbecue. I I just think that's just hang out with each other. Talk more. Uh parties, swim in swimming pools. I don't know. Don't Don't do Town Lake during the summer, though, because it's got that brain aating virus. You don't want that. In the fall and spring, you're okay. In winter, it's just the summer. It sucks. All right. On that note, I need to let you go because now we're really over. Uh, professor. Yeah. I have a question. Uh, how soon can we get our essays braided? Yeah. So, I'm working on them. Uh, for the record, I you know, I haven't I'm definitely nowhere near done. I am actually hoping to be done by the time we have class on Wednesday. Uh the ones that I've looked at so far made me happy. Like usually by that point I'm in tears and I'm I'm ready to quit and never teach again. And I'm not right now in tears. I'm actually quite hopeful. So I'm excited. Uh that could just be that randomly I got a good bunch up front and I'm going to be sad later. Thank you, Nathan. Um uh but for now I'm I'm happy with what I'm seeing. So, but yeah, hopefully Wednesday. Okay. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Have a good day. You too. All right. I'm going to stop recording and let you go. Recording stopped.