Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it could happen here a podcast where I
Speaker 1: just made my colleagues I can see them through the
Speaker 1: zoom deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with with with
Speaker 1: a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace. I'm
Speaker 1: Robert Evans. Joining me today is Mia Wong and Garrison
Speaker 1: Davis me. I take it from here.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, So it's been a you know, this is Okay,
Speaker 2: So this, I guess is now like last week's Twitter thing.
Speaker 2: But okay, so also not this is this is this
Speaker 2: is not a Twitter thing? No, well it kind of is.
Speaker 1: It kind of is, but like let's not let's not
Speaker 1: frame this as a Twitter thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, okay, So what this is we we are okay,
Speaker 2: we have been experiencing in the last you know, like
Speaker 2: half decade, actually belonging from that, because it's like this
Speaker 2: seventy eight years now, like the the sort of incredible
Speaker 2: rise in casual American anti semitism and the level of
Speaker 2: anti semitism that you could just do in in sort
Speaker 2: of public discourse and it's quote unquote fine. And one
Speaker 2: of the sort of biggest indicators of this is the
Speaker 2: like the the extent to which it's now socially acceptable
Speaker 2: to just do the most like absolutely like unhinged, like
Speaker 2: antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. And specifically the thing
Speaker 2: that specifically was like, Okay, I need to do this
Speaker 2: episode was last week Elon Musk like compared George Soros
Speaker 2: to Magneto and then said, quote, you assume they are
Speaker 2: good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the fabric,
Speaker 2: the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity. And this
Speaker 2: is just like the mainstreamline of the Republican Party now
Speaker 2: like they just all do this. You can just sort
Speaker 2: of I mean, and this and honestly like as bad,
Speaker 2: like you know, this is like the stuff that Elon
Speaker 2: Musk is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere
Speaker 2: near as bad as it goes. Like it's pretty common
Speaker 2: to just sho these people like talking about the Satan
Speaker 2: Sorrow's agenda and shit. Now like it's it has gotten
Speaker 2: unbelievably unfathomably out of control. And so today I wanted
Speaker 2: to take a look at, Okay, who George Soros actually is,
Speaker 2: like the real human being and not the sort of
Speaker 2: like caricature projection that has been created of him on
Speaker 2: the right, and I wanted to also sort of look
Speaker 2: at why the right hates him so much. And you know,
Speaker 2: Soros is kind of an interesting figure because he falls
Speaker 2: like right in the middle of like our two shows
Speaker 2: about people, because he's not he's not really like a
Speaker 2: cool person. He does cool stuff, but though he does
Speaker 2: stuff that's cool sometimes, but he's not also like a
Speaker 2: bastard properly.
Speaker 1: So though he's done some bastardy stuff too.
Speaker 2: Oh he has, We are going to talk about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he said, he's a Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: Most of what this episode is about, he's.
Speaker 1: I would say he's like twenty percent more complicated than
Speaker 1: the average billionaire A on a more Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think I think like twenty or thirty percent. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah, you know, and I
Speaker 2: think there's three George Soros's. Two of them are real
Speaker 2: and one of them is fake. There is you know.
Speaker 2: So George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist, right, and you know,
Speaker 2: so that means that he has a sort of billionaire
Speaker 2: side and a philanthropist's side, and they are very often
Speaker 2: working across purposes. Sometimes they're not working sometimes there he
Speaker 2: aligns them together, sometimes he doesn't. And so the way
Speaker 2: I've sort of structured this is like the first episode
Speaker 2: we're gonna be talking about the sort of billionaire side
Speaker 2: and how he did that, and the second episode is
Speaker 2: going to be more about the philanthropist's side, and how
Speaker 2: both of these basically have been kind of accidentally structured
Speaker 2: in such a way that the right was like, oh
Speaker 2: my god, this is the perfect guy to do atise
Speaker 2: medic conspiracy theories about. And then there's also the third
Speaker 2: George Soros is like the one who's just literally the
Speaker 2: devil who the Republicans have made up And yeah, so
Speaker 2: George Soros was born to a Jewish family in Hungary
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty, which is not not a good time
Speaker 2: to be born into a Jewish family in Hungary.
Speaker 1: No, really, there's not a good time to be born
Speaker 1: to a Jewish and family in Hungary until like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get I'm gonna say sometime in the fifties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I will say that it gets way
Speaker 2: like it it is way worse when he is born
Speaker 2: than it was in like even like the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 2: which is like not a great time, but it's gotten
Speaker 2: significantly worse. He is fourteen when the Nazis invade Hungary
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four, and this is the point at which
Speaker 2: we get to our first Soros conspiracy, which is that
Speaker 2: there's this, there's this.
Speaker 1: It's a little more complicated than that. It's not really
Speaker 1: the Nazis, and well it's a little more complex than
Speaker 1: when extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community begins really in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty four.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And so there's a thing that happens. I
Speaker 2: don't know. He and his dad have a kind of
Speaker 2: complicated like set of things they survive. And there's a
Speaker 2: part of the story that gets picked up by the
Speaker 2: right that gets if you've ever heard Alex Jones talk
Speaker 2: about sorows, like the second or third thing he will
Speaker 2: say is that like Soros is a Nazi collaborator, was
Speaker 2: like a willing collaborator with the Nazis, which is not true.
Speaker 2: And also like he's fourteen, like you know, like I.
Speaker 1: Don't really call even like fourteen year olds and the
Speaker 1: Hitler youth willing collaborators because they're children. Yeah, you have
Speaker 1: to have a lion at some point, even with Nazis,
Speaker 1: where if their kids they're not really morally responsible either way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like, you know, so the speific thing that
Speaker 2: he does, there's these notices that are sent up by
Speaker 2: the government that's like telling Jewish people to like go
Speaker 2: like to a place and if you go to the place,
Speaker 2: you're gonna get routed up and killed. And basically, so
Speaker 2: the thing that actually happened is that so Georg Ros's
Speaker 2: dad is told to do this, and he gives it
Speaker 2: to George Soros and is like, go tell these people
Speaker 2: that they've been called for this and that if they go,
Speaker 2: they're like they're gonna get taken away. And this has
Speaker 2: been transformed by you know this that is this is
Speaker 2: a nightmarish thing and these people are surviving. This has
Speaker 2: been transformed by a bunch of the worst people wh've
Speaker 2: ever lived into Nazi collaboration. Which is also you know,
Speaker 2: the part of the story that never gets told, even
Speaker 2: even when people sort of like do the like dive
Speaker 2: into like oh this is fake, is that the thing
Speaker 2: that like Soros's family spends the rest of the war
Speaker 2: doing is basically getting like counterfeit papers to Jewish families
Speaker 2: that like says that they're Christian, and you know, they
Speaker 2: like they stay legitimately save a bunch of families from
Speaker 2: dying in the Holocaust, and.
Speaker 1: You know the ship that Joeanes pulls on them as
Speaker 1: like part of this because of like the job this
Speaker 1: guy who's like saving young George Soros has involves like
Speaker 1: basically like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced
Speaker 1: out of their homes. He's like they were profiting off
Speaker 1: of the holl No, they were like doing whatever job
Speaker 1: kept them under the radar while they attempted to help.
Speaker 1: Like it was the Holocaust, it was messy. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: like it's almost like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage
Speaker 1: of slave labors. Well, no, it's actually what Schindler was
Speaker 1: doing was not that. Yeah, Like he was using the
Speaker 1: trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people.
Speaker 1: It's quite different from just enslaving people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the thing that's really desturbing about the
Speaker 2: stow right is like, Okay, like this is like Alex
Speaker 2: Joses Alex Jones, Right, he's just gonna say the worst
Speaker 2: shit you've ever heard. But like this is like a
Speaker 2: thing that mainstream right wingers just say. Now, yeah, and
Speaker 2: it's just unbelievably horrible and it sucks and it's just
Speaker 2: like not true. But fortunately for George Soros, his family
Speaker 2: makes it through the Holocaust, well his immediate family does,
Speaker 2: and they like get out and they end up in
Speaker 2: the US. And this is where, Okay, this is something,
Speaker 2: this is something that I think is very important to
Speaker 2: the story that isn't told very much. So Soros is
Speaker 2: like a finance whiz, right, he is very very very
Speaker 2: good at finance. And we're gonna be talking a bit
Speaker 2: about like how like the things that he figured out
Speaker 2: to let him do this, because it's interesting. But he's
Speaker 2: also not from the sort of like American or the
Speaker 2: British financial elite, Like if I don't there's like a
Speaker 2: certain kind of person, right who like goes into finance,
Speaker 2: and you know it's like like like wasp frat brose
Speaker 2: or like in bred British aristocrats, right, And George Soros
Speaker 2: is like a hung is a Hungarian immigrant, right. He
Speaker 2: he is not sort of from these people. He is
Speaker 2: like and and you know this is this is gonna
Speaker 2: be a really big deal when he like goes up
Speaker 2: against a British financial elite later on. But you know,
Speaker 2: he threw sort of like he's able to turn like
Speaker 2: a job doing door to door salesman into like a
Speaker 2: way into a firm, and he's able to sort of
Speaker 2: work his way up to a point where like he
Speaker 2: has suddenly like has his own hedge fund, and he
Speaker 2: is really really good at this. He's one of the
Speaker 2: sort of early people who does hedge funds. There's a
Speaker 2: great book called The Influence of Soros, Politics, Power, and
Speaker 2: the Struggle for an Open Society by Emily Tampkin, who
Speaker 2: did a lot of really great work, like interviewed Soros,
Speaker 2: interviewed an enormous number of the people who were around him,
Speaker 2: and I want to read a passage of this about
Speaker 2: like how he figured out how to sort of beat
Speaker 2: the market. He's talking about this guy named Carl Popper,
Speaker 2: who's like a philosopher of science who also wrote this
Speaker 2: book called The Open Society that we'll talk about next
Speaker 2: episode more. Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the
Speaker 2: role of misconceptions in financial markets. Decades later, people believe
Speaker 2: that markets don't lie and shouldn't be and should be trusted,
Speaker 2: but that isn't true. Sorow's knew markets react to humans
Speaker 2: and humans are fallible. Instead of looking at the money
Speaker 2: being made, or as Sebastian Malaby put it, in more
Speaker 2: money than God, his book on the history of hedge funds,
Speaker 2: the psychology that drove investors' appetites, Soros looked at how
Speaker 2: one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the
Speaker 2: other forward until the trust were so completely overvalued that
Speaker 2: a crash was inevitable. And this is this is really smart,
Speaker 2: like if you even today, right, you know, if you're
Speaker 2: able to understand that, you know, like the way a
Speaker 2: lot of hedgehoon people tend to think about the market
Speaker 2: as like the market, you know, especially in this period,
Speaker 2: is this is this sort of dogmatic, neo lible thing
Speaker 2: of like the market is like a perfect condvance of
Speaker 2: price signals and Sorow's just like no, it's made out
Speaker 2: of people. And those people like get greedy. They have
Speaker 2: emotional stuff they like they give get into these like
Speaker 2: fomo like fear of missing out stuff. You know, they
Speaker 2: like intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees the assets
Speaker 2: like expensive, so everyone like you know, rushes to buy it,
Speaker 2: and like this is something like like even now right,
Speaker 2: this is this is like a very smart way to
Speaker 2: understand finance. He's figured this out in like the seventies,
Speaker 2: and if you, if you, if you're able to do
Speaker 2: this kind of stuff and like use this to understand
Speaker 2: how the market works in the seventies, you are going
Speaker 2: to look like a god among men. And he starts
Speaker 2: a hedge fund in nineteen seventy three, but by nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty one he has a fund that is worth three
Speaker 2: hundred and eighty one million dollars in like nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: one money. I don't know what that is in modern money,
Speaker 2: but I assume it's a lot. I'm a hack of
Speaker 2: a fraud. I should actually figured this out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's like a billion dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like he personally is like has like for
Speaker 2: himself like one hundred million dollars, right, and he you know,
Speaker 2: at this point he starts to become sort of very
Speaker 2: famous in finance circles because you know, I mean he's
Speaker 2: just like absolutely destroying the market. Now, okay, this is
Speaker 2: where things get. You know, up until this point, he's
Speaker 2: kind of like he's been doing a lot of sort
Speaker 2: of finance stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly
Speaker 2: just been him, like ripping off other finance people, which
Speaker 2: I'm entirely okay with, like that's just very funny. But
Speaker 2: he starts to get into currency speculation, and in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty five he has one of his big breaks, which
Speaker 2: is he predicts the Plaza Chords. Now, okay, Aplasa chord
Speaker 2: is something we've talked about on the show before, but
Speaker 2: I need to talk about it a bit more because
Speaker 2: unfortunately it's we have to talk about the Asian financial
Speaker 2: collaps this episode. And this is a like one of
Speaker 2: the key moments of the Asian financial collaps even though
Speaker 2: it was like a decade earlier. So in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 2: Ronald Reagan is trying to like revive the US as
Speaker 2: a domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying, and you know,
Speaker 2: and the reason part of the like a big part
Speaker 2: of the reason is dying is that they're getting absolutely
Speaker 2: destroyed by sort of German and like West German and
Speaker 2: Japanese manufacturers. And part of what's happening here is that
Speaker 2: particularly Japan's currencies are worth way currency is worth way
Speaker 2: less than the dollar. This is called having a weak currency,
Speaker 2: and having a weak currency is really good for if
Speaker 2: you have like an export based manufacturing economy. And so
Speaker 2: Reagan basically like walks into a meeting with like the Germans,
Speaker 2: Japanese government, the British and like few other people and
Speaker 2: just basically just like not quite in so many words,
Speaker 2: but basically just says like you are all American military protectorates,
Speaker 2: and because you're all American military protectorates, like I can
Speaker 2: I can force you to increase the value of your
Speaker 2: currency like or else capital O, capital e. And they do,
Speaker 2: they comply, and this is this, this becomes this is
Speaker 2: a thing called the Plaza Cords and this this, you know,
Speaker 2: weakens the value of the dollar versus a bunch of
Speaker 2: other currencies. And this like literally handedly like restores the
Speaker 2: profitability of American manufacturing like through the nineties, which is
Speaker 2: really wild. But the the other the important thing for
Speaker 2: this story is that I I don't know how he
Speaker 2: did this, but like George Soros predicts that this is
Speaker 2: gonna happen, and she makes an unbelievable amount of money
Speaker 2: basically like no, no, like basically doing currency speculation because
Speaker 2: he knows what, like currencies are going to increase in value,
Speaker 2: which you know, he knows that like uh. For example,
Speaker 2: he knows that like the Japanese yen is going to
Speaker 2: increase in value. So he makes an enormous amount of
Speaker 2: money doing this stuff, and he gets very famous for
Speaker 2: like he'll like make it much of money, and then
Speaker 2: I'll lose it again, and then he'll make it again.
Speaker 2: And this all culminates in Okay, so they're they're okay.
Speaker 2: He starts taking ah, truly enormous bets, like against national currencies,
Speaker 2: and there's one of these that's just funny, and there's
Speaker 2: one of these that's really bad. So we're gonna do
Speaker 2: the funny one first, which is so in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: two Soros And this is the other part that they
Speaker 2: ever gonna talked about. It's like it's not just Soros
Speaker 2: doing this stuff. He has like allies because like as
Speaker 2: big as Soros as for MBA is right, he can't
Speaker 2: him and his ally is gonna take a fifteen billion
Speaker 2: dollars short position on the pound, and even he doesn't
Speaker 2: have like nobody like this is like fifteen billion of
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties money, right, Like you need a bunch of
Speaker 2: firms working together in order to do this. But he
Speaker 2: basically takes this massive bet the pound is gonna go down,
Speaker 2: and because of the way that these these bets work,
Speaker 2: like the actual value of the pounds like collapses, and
Speaker 2: the British Central Bank like like doesn't have enough. And
Speaker 2: the reason we're able to do is they figure out
Speaker 2: that the British Central Bank doesn't have enough money to
Speaker 2: stop them, like they don't have enough money to like
Speaker 2: maintain like they don't have enough reserves to like maintain
Speaker 2: the value of the pound. And so he gets like
Speaker 2: completely blamed for this, even though again there's like other
Speaker 2: people involved in this, right, Like the front page of
Speaker 2: the Daily Mail is literally his face in the title
Speaker 2: I made a billion crashing the pound baste, which is
Speaker 2: I okay, so like an anti British level, this is
Speaker 2: very funny. It's no, there's a bunch of arguments about
Speaker 2: like what does this mean for like the world economy
Speaker 2: and for national sovereignty. Soros thinks that like currency speculation
Speaker 2: is necessary evil and he has this sort.
Speaker 1: Of tay to think that when you're making that much money,
Speaker 1: yeah right, you know.
Speaker 2: Now, okay, this this like specific thing which is like
Speaker 2: a a a bank. A banker comes in and is
Speaker 2: able to manipulate the value of a currency. This is like,
Speaker 2: this is like absolutely like this is the fodder for
Speaker 2: like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of the anti Semitic right.
Speaker 2: Like it's this sort of like rootless cosmopolitan banker like
Speaker 2: attacks the good and righteous like noble people of Britain thing.
Speaker 2: And this is how it gets framed in the press,
Speaker 2: who are like the press is I mean it's the
Speaker 2: British press, right, Like the British are not known for,
Speaker 2: you know, not being anti Semitic, so they just like
Speaker 2: go wild with this. But you know, like this particular
Speaker 2: thing he's doing against the British. Part of what's happening here, right,
Speaker 2: is there's this sort of there's this kind of like
Speaker 2: national populist equation thing going on here, where there's this
Speaker 2: assumption that like the Bank of Britain, like the bank,
Speaker 2: like the British Central Bank is like an entity that
Speaker 2: is identifiable with like an ordinary person in Britain, and
Speaker 2: like no, like the British Central Bank is run by
Speaker 2: just unbelievably in bred aristocrats, right, and you.
Speaker 1: Know I think they're pretty believably in bred.
Speaker 2: Oh that's fair.
Speaker 1: We're just talking about like like zero point five six
Speaker 1: of a Habsburg unit, you know, a hack. The Habsburg
Speaker 1: is the international unit for measuring how inbred someone is.
Speaker 2: If you're if you're unaware, Yeah, yeah that that seems
Speaker 2: like a reasonable amount of inbred for these specific people.
Speaker 2: But you know, like but this is what I was
Speaker 2: talking about, Like at the very beginning, I was talking
Speaker 2: about sort of like Sorrow's not being from this sort
Speaker 2: of like normal class of finance people. And the thing is,
Speaker 2: like the normal class of finance people are fucking terrible
Speaker 2: at their jobs, right, like these amber British aristocrats and
Speaker 2: like the fucking American like cocaine frat boys like like
Speaker 2: just like doing lines of cocaine off each other's as cracks.
Speaker 2: Like these people all suck at their jobs. And George
Speaker 2: Soros is like smart and is good at his job.
Speaker 2: And so she just like absolutely goes through these people
Speaker 2: like a fucking flaming chainsaw, and she just like, you know,
Speaker 2: and the maneuvers that he's doing here, she just like
Speaker 2: absolutely humiliates all of the people at the at the
Speaker 2: British Central Bank. He's humiliating like and not just those
Speaker 2: guys too, it's humiliating the Tories. He's humiliating like all
Speaker 2: of the people who are seriously important in the real economy,
Speaker 2: in the sort of real British economy. And he can
Speaker 2: do this right because like his opponents are you know,
Speaker 2: people who are like they're they're they're promoting, they're like
Speaker 2: they're they're they're okay, they take in like their people
Speaker 2: from college, right, and they're promoting the base off how
Speaker 2: good they are at golf. And so when when he
Speaker 2: just sort of like like walks in and just makes
Speaker 2: it like makes like billions of dollars just like destroying
Speaker 2: these people, he makes just a permanent enemy of a
Speaker 2: very very powerful like faction of the British ruling class
Speaker 2: and the British ruling class. Like I don't know, they
Speaker 2: they it is hard to find people who will beat
Speaker 2: the British ruling class in an anti Semitism off. And
Speaker 2: this is this is one of the things that sort
Speaker 2: of you know, if you're looking at like why Sorrow
Speaker 2: specifically is the guy who all of these sort of
Speaker 2: right wing conspiracies wind up being about, like part of
Speaker 2: it is because he pisses off these specif people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these guys who's like dads were all friends with
Speaker 1: the King of England, who was like a close personal
Speaker 1: buddy with Hitler. Like there it's a bunch of like,
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted
Speaker 1: and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game.
Speaker 1: And so like the fact that it's a Jewish dude
Speaker 1: who does it means that they're going to be even
Speaker 1: more racist than they already were. And the fact that
Speaker 1: there's plenty of international anti semitism and that George Soros
Speaker 1: after this starts funding liberal and you know, vaguely progressive
Speaker 1: causes like yeah, it's not this is not a it's
Speaker 1: not surprising that this is the way things went.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, and again, like I can't under
Speaker 2: emphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically
Speaker 2: the reaction to British media class. Who I mean, we
Speaker 2: know now that those people are psychos, Like we have
Speaker 2: seen them see a transperson at a boat race and
Speaker 2: like like ten years ago and like like draw a
Speaker 2: gi things circling them in a boat and making it
Speaker 2: a front page news story. Those people in the nineties
Speaker 2: were like sure, they are biological biologically better at navigation.
Speaker 2: That is that has actually been improved. Yeah, but then
Speaker 2: they're like justice, they're they're they're just a sort of
Speaker 2: feral and like terrifying lead bigoted then as they are now.
Speaker 2: And this means that like like just if you're a
Speaker 2: regular British person and you are like walking down the
Speaker 2: street and there's a newspaper sand you are seeing like
Speaker 2: like they truly unbelievably terrifying anti Semitic shit, like just
Speaker 2: literally everywhere. And this this will have no consequences whatsoever.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, it's all good, nothing bad ever happens. And
Speaker 2: speaking of no consequences, I do you know what we
Speaker 2: can promise about about training services? Twenty three minutes in?
Speaker 2: You know, look you're welcome, Damnan. Okay, we're back and
Speaker 2: we have to talk about Okay. So the doing it
Speaker 2: to the British economy was mostly just really funny because
Speaker 2: the British economy is going to be fine. And it's
Speaker 2: the funny part about she was doing it to the
Speaker 2: British economy is that this actually unfortunately helps the British
Speaker 2: economy because it forces the British to like abandon some
Speaker 2: truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they were doing.
Speaker 2: But then he does it to Thailand, and that is
Speaker 2: a lot less justifiable. So it in this is five
Speaker 2: years later, this is nineteen ninety seven. Sous brings in
Speaker 2: some economists, Arminio Fraga, like Roddy Joe's David Kowitz. Uh
Speaker 2: he he brings He's bringing in people who are sort
Speaker 2: of experts in like developing market uh economics. And that's
Speaker 2: never no one has ever brought in a developing market
Speaker 2: economist for like a good reason. And what they what
Speaker 2: they realize is that they start doing analysis of Southeast Asia,
Speaker 2: like the Southeast Asian markets, and they realize very quickly
Speaker 2: that Thailand is fucked. They they figure out that Thailand
Speaker 2: has Thailand has his currency pegged to the dollar and this,
Speaker 2: but you know, they don't have the reserves support this,
Speaker 2: and the tie like actual tai currency isn't strong enough
Speaker 2: to maintain like like stay being pegged to the dollars.
Speaker 2: It's not a strong enough currency. And so they do
Speaker 2: a two billion dollars short of of of like Thailand's currency.
Speaker 2: And I mean, I'm gonna read from the Influence of
Speaker 2: Sorrows again about like the process of this. It was
Speaker 2: a debate we had. Jones told me we'd gone to
Speaker 2: work in Asia, and here you are taking large scale
Speaker 2: short positions in countries with institutional fragility. Going for the
Speaker 2: juggular in the United Kingdom was one thing doing the same,
Speaker 2: and Thailand was another. The Bank of England would surely recover.
Speaker 2: Thailand was a developing economy and it was unclear what
Speaker 2: impact outside investors could have. Soros has justified speculation with
Speaker 2: the idea that it could serve as a kind of
Speaker 2: warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the bot needs to devalue.
Speaker 2: Change your policy now before a currency collapses, devastating for
Speaker 2: your people. The trouble is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead,
Speaker 2: it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves to buy
Speaker 2: Tai bot. When it finally ran out in early summer
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety seven, the value of the bot plunged thirty
Speaker 2: two percent against the dollar and millions of people lost
Speaker 2: Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made seven
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes,
Speaker 1: I made a lot of money selling heroin to those
Speaker 1: middle schoolers. But really, when you think about it, it
Speaker 1: was a warning to those schools that it was too
Speaker 1: easy for me to bribe the janitor to sell heroin
Speaker 1: to kids there. You know, I was actually performing a
Speaker 1: public service. So true, Robert, It is just like that,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: To be fair, you know, I'm not going to every money.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to finish that thought. That's probably for
Speaker 2: the best.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we need we need one person to remain uncanceled
Speaker 1: here to keep the lights on.
Speaker 2: Oh God, doesn't have to be me.
Speaker 1: Oh no, yeah, no, legally it does.
Speaker 2: It's really bad. Yeah, no more joking, but yeah, we can't.
Speaker 2: We can't suffer any other jokes.
Speaker 1: Yes, somebody's gotta upload this episode.
Speaker 2: All right here, here, here, here's the next joke. Soros
Speaker 2: actually doesn't make money off of the speculation, if off
Speaker 2: of a speculating in Southeast Asia, because he loses basically
Speaker 2: the same amount of money taking like a long position
Speaker 2: in Indonesia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took
Speaker 1: a long position on doing cocaine in my bathroom with
Speaker 1: the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids.
Speaker 1: You know, we're a lot alike, him and me, we're
Speaker 1: a lot of like.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, to be fair, to be fair, and this
Speaker 2: is okay, this is the thing. The reason I wanted
Speaker 2: to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay, like
Speaker 2: to this day, if you look under sort of if
Speaker 2: you if you every once in a while, someone someone,
Speaker 2: there'll be a tweet that's like, what did George Sorrows do?
Speaker 2: And immediately there will be a bunch of people talking
Speaker 2: about how he like deliberately destroyed all of the economies
Speaker 2: in Southeast Asia. Yeah, and that's not really what happened.
Speaker 1: And that would be for one thing, too much to
Speaker 1: put on one guy fucking around with a cup.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And I wanted to actually kind of walk
Speaker 2: through this a little bit in depth just because okay,
Speaker 2: there's a really really easy way to think about the
Speaker 2: economy that is bad. It leads you into anti Semitic traps,
Speaker 2: which is like, hey, here is like one banker who
Speaker 2: wanted to make money, and because he wanted to make money,
Speaker 2: he like destroyed all these economies. And like, on the
Speaker 2: one hand, yeah, like like Sorrow's betting against like the
Speaker 2: tai currency is bad, right, like this is this is
Speaker 2: not a thing you should have been doing. On the
Speaker 2: other hand, you know, okay, so that's like the sort
Speaker 2: of level one thing. But the thing about that, you know,
Speaker 2: this is the sort of this is the sort of
Speaker 2: like great Man, anti anti Semitism theory of collapse. And
Speaker 2: this is the theory that a lot of the sort
Speaker 2: of regional leaders take, you know, because and this and
Speaker 2: this is sort of a crucial thing, right, this position
Speaker 2: very conveniently allows them to just like not think about
Speaker 2: capitalism in general or like their role in this in
Speaker 2: this crisis, which is not insignificance. And so in order
Speaker 2: to figure out what what actually happened here, we need
Speaker 2: to look at so so Sorow sort of like tip
Speaker 2: like tip some dominoes, right, but the dominoes were already
Speaker 2: there and they were going like regardless even if Soros
Speaker 2: had never existed, right, Like, they were going to fall.
Speaker 2: And they're going to fall because ironically of the plaza coords.
Speaker 2: So you know, when we talked about the plaza courds earlier.
Speaker 2: The US forces Japan to increase the value of its
Speaker 2: currency relative to the dollar. Okay, so this is great
Speaker 2: for the American economy. This nukes the Japanese economy, I
Speaker 2: mean the Japanese economy, you know. And we'll talk about
Speaker 2: this in a bit too. It was already kind of
Speaker 2: doing bad. When the US does this and its manufacturer
Speaker 2: economy just like implodes it. It guts the Japanese economy.
Speaker 2: It has The Japanese economy has never recovered from this.
Speaker 2: It probably will never recover really into what it was.
Speaker 2: And you know, the effect this has is that now
Speaker 2: the government of Japan has to figure out how to
Speaker 2: grow their economy without having any way to make money
Speaker 2: that grows your economy. But now they have a stronger currency,
Speaker 2: and so their solution is, Okay, what did they all
Speaker 2: the central banking people look around each other and they go,
Speaker 2: what is a strong currency good for housing speculation? And
Speaker 2: so they they start like they start, they start slashing
Speaker 2: interest race, and they start basically building an entire economy, uh,
Speaker 2: based on the assumption that housing prices will always go up,
Speaker 2: and so you should just take out loans so you
Speaker 2: could buy houses because the value of the housing will
Speaker 2: because you know, highing prices will always go up, so
Speaker 2: you can you can have all of these assets based
Speaker 2: and mortgages. H This is this may may or may
Speaker 2: not be sounding familiar to everyone who literally thousand and
Speaker 2: eight I and so you know, in in like in
Speaker 2: like nineteen eighty two, the entire Japanese economy implodes sort
Speaker 2: of again because they they literally built the two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight machine. And so this this forces the US
Speaker 2: to do something called the reverse Plaza Cords, where they
Speaker 2: take the original Plaza records and they reverse it and
Speaker 2: they increase the value of the American dollar. American manufactury
Speaker 2: dies like it's never recovered, it's never coming back. And
Speaker 2: this for a this kind of this stabilizes the Japanese
Speaker 2: a to be a little bit, but it means that
Speaker 2: the US now no longer has a functional economy. And
Speaker 2: so we do. Our solution to this is we need
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight. Right, we build an entire economy
Speaker 2: also on the Japanese model of currency speculat of you know,
Speaker 2: of like housing price speculation, ceculation of like or like
Speaker 2: the rising prices of like stocks. Right, we build an
Speaker 2: economy completely made a bullshit. But you know, okay, but
Speaker 2: what does this have to do with the Asian market collaps? Okay?
Speaker 2: The problem is that like all of the countries and
Speaker 2: in East Asia and like Southeast Asia also do this.
Speaker 2: They also do the thing where they're like, oh, we're
Speaker 2: gonna we're gonna, we're gonna ba We're okay, so our
Speaker 2: manufacturing economies are declining, right, so we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 2: base our entire economy on housing prices going up. And
Speaker 2: you know that's and it's not George Soros. That's the
Speaker 2: thing that actually destroys like the sort of that's something
Speaker 2: that like that like actually destroys all of these economies.
Speaker 2: And you know, and I wanted to sort of run
Speaker 2: through this, and you know, this is like a lot
Speaker 2: of like sort of econ shit, right, But the reason
Speaker 2: I wanted to run through this is that I think
Speaker 2: I think he gets at the sort of truly the
Speaker 2: truly horrifying thing about how our economy works that is
Speaker 2: really difficult to face, and is I think it's at
Speaker 2: least a part of why people really really want there
Speaker 2: to just be one guy who is running anything everything,
Speaker 2: whether that's the CIA, whether that's Soros, whether that's like
Speaker 2: the New World Order. Yeah, right, because if there's if
Speaker 2: there's like a guy who's doing this, right, you can
Speaker 2: stop him. But the great horror of this world is
Speaker 2: that there is no deep state, right, there is no sataniscoball,
Speaker 2: there's no one pulling the strings at all. The only
Speaker 2: thing that is there is just sort of the cold,
Speaker 2: lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital, and that logic
Speaker 2: is moving all of us, right, all you know, the
Speaker 2: people who are doing the conspiracies, insofar as they exist,
Speaker 2: are being moved by this. All of the rulers are
Speaker 2: being moved by capital. All of us, the subjects, are
Speaker 2: being moved by capital. But that like sucks, right, Like
Speaker 2: the fact that all of these economies are destroyed not
Speaker 2: by like the individual actions of people, but by the
Speaker 2: fact that, like returns are less good in Thailand than
Speaker 2: they are in China. And this is just sort of
Speaker 2: the inectable logic of the entire economic system we have.
Speaker 2: This is, you know, this is absolutely terrifying, and faced
Speaker 2: with this sort of reality, right, like, people who want
Speaker 2: to protect capitalism because you know, they have a bunch
Speaker 2: of assets in it, right, retreat into this sort of
Speaker 2: like they you know, they they use Soros as a
Speaker 2: smoke screen for like why everything is suddenly going wrong.
Speaker 2: But sort of simultaneous to this, right, this is also
Speaker 2: a real problem for George Soros because he's, like, you know,
Speaker 2: when he's not sort of in his role as like
Speaker 2: capital He's like not a piece of shit. He's like
Speaker 2: a person who wants the world to be better. And this,
Speaker 2: you know, this causes a sort of there was a
Speaker 2: contradiction in his ideology, right, which is that he wants
Speaker 2: the world to be a better place, and simultaneously he's
Speaker 2: also a capitalist, and these two things are sort of
Speaker 2: warring with each other. Even as early as even as
Speaker 2: early sort of the nineties, he's giving speeches about how
Speaker 2: like his open society that he wants. It's just sort
Speaker 2: of like this liberal democratic society of like laws and
Speaker 2: norms and human rights. The greatest danger Twitter ceased to
Speaker 2: be communism, it's now capitalism. But he can't do anything
Speaker 2: about it because he is also a capitalist. And next episode,
Speaker 2: we're going to watch Soros like through his philanthropic endeavors,
Speaker 2: attempt to solve the problems that his economic system has
Speaker 2: caused and fail catastrophically and become the sort of boogeyman
Speaker 2: and the the anti sementic spector of every conspiracy theory
Speaker 2: in the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so check out that next time. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you're hanging out around Clark Middle School and you
Speaker 1: have forty dollars. I can hook you up with some
Speaker 1: some of that sweet black tar, so you know, give
Speaker 1: me a ring. My phone numbers posted in the show
Speaker 1: notes of every episode It.
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