Speaker 1: A media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. What's pew in my pews?
Speaker 1: This is Robert Evans and it could happen here a
Speaker 1: podcast about it happening here as it seems to be
Speaker 1: more every week and when things get worse, one thing
Speaker 1: that a lot of folks start talking about is should
Speaker 1: I buy a gun? And obviously this is a fraught
Speaker 1: question and the only responsible answers to it are very complicated.
Speaker 1: And so to talk over some very complicated answers, we've
Speaker 1: got James Stout and we have in the audience with
Speaker 1: us the great Carl Casarta, Carl of en Range TV.
Speaker 1: Thank you for coming on to be our resident firearms
Speaker 1: expert in this podcast where we try not to be
Speaker 1: deeply irresponsible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's always a
Speaker 2: pleasure to come back to the show, and people always
Speaker 2: ask for more collabs, and here we are, but on
Speaker 2: a very important topic, and yes they course. What I
Speaker 2: have is now is when do you change the name
Speaker 2: of the podcast too?
Speaker 1: Oh no, it's happening here. We're talking with the marketing people.
Speaker 1: It done happened here. Oh shit, it's happening again. It's
Speaker 1: been happening here. Yeah, here, it is here now right
Speaker 1: in this moment.
Speaker 3: Be here now it Yeah, we got we got to
Speaker 3: work out each one seo's best.
Speaker 2: But we're on it. Called don't worry.
Speaker 3: Great, we're working on it, so as I think both
Speaker 3: of you know, But maybe listeners don't. Gun sales typically
Speaker 3: saw before elections as to ammunition purchases. People are afraid
Speaker 3: of gun bands has been traditionally one reason why, and
Speaker 3: the firearms industry is not afraid of hyping those up
Speaker 3: to increase sales in election years. And no, many prices
Speaker 3: increase inline with demand. Like if you get back to
Speaker 3: November twenty twenty and look at the prices of ammunition
Speaker 3: and guns compared to now, you'll see how much incredibly
Speaker 3: high they That was for a number of reasons. But
Speaker 3: considering inflation, gun prices are pretty low right now.
Speaker 1: You know that is kind of a recurrent thing for
Speaker 1: the most part, is that while everything else gets more expensive,
Speaker 1: television and firearms remain affordable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, gun gone to the point where they are more
Speaker 2: affordable than they've ever been. Uh huh, Yeah, they really are.
Speaker 2: Air fifteens or I used to talk about this on
Speaker 2: air fifteens are essentially cord wood and you can get
Speaker 2: a fully fled good to go air fifteen now for
Speaker 2: like four to five hundred bucks. The epistols for two
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty bucks. Oh yeah. The prices on guns
Speaker 2: are like through the floor. And yeah, it's interesting to
Speaker 2: note that, like, if you are a gun manufacturer, a
Speaker 2: firearms dealer, even if you don't hype elections, it would
Speaker 2: be unintelligent of you to not prep for elections because
Speaker 2: they're so consistently yeah, the Christmas of guns. So this
Speaker 2: is an instance in which we didn't see that. It's
Speaker 2: it's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: I think there's an element because obviously when we talk
Speaker 1: I think to people who are not into guns and
Speaker 1: talk about how cheap guns have gotten, they're like, well,
Speaker 1: that's very bad. And there's definitely downsides to that, But
Speaker 1: an upside of that is it does kind of suggest
Speaker 1: we are not seeing the degree of panicked hoarding for
Speaker 1: a civil war that we have seen at previous points
Speaker 1: when gun prices were not as as cratered and AMMO
Speaker 1: prices were a lot higher and am ava availability was
Speaker 1: a lot lower. Like in some ways, that's kind of
Speaker 1: an optimistic sign.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or the dark side of that is the traditional
Speaker 2: prepper air quote is so saturated in guns and ammunition, right,
Speaker 2: but they don't need another one, right.
Speaker 1: Well, that's I think that is where a lot of
Speaker 1: people are.
Speaker 3: Also, like capacity really increased in twenty twenty, and I
Speaker 3: think they've been pumping out Like it's interesting to look
Speaker 3: at the cost of nine millimeters E and five five
Speaker 3: six ammunition, which, if you're not familiar, are like the
Speaker 3: most commonly used defensive ammunition compared to more niche stuff
Speaker 3: like that hasn't gone down as much if you're trying
Speaker 3: to get three hundred wisdom or something.
Speaker 2: The funny thing that, yeah, five y six and nine
Speaker 2: milimeters both to defensively add well is just recreationally are
Speaker 2: the most common ammunition YEA by far, and some of
Speaker 2: the weird old stuff I like to shoot, like percussion
Speaker 2: caps for percussion revolvers. You can't find that stuff to
Speaker 2: save your life. That's those through the roof and expensive.
Speaker 2: So yeah, they've literally just bunkered down cook intent there
Speaker 2: and are making five, six, a nine millimeters because that's
Speaker 2: where the demand is and will continue to be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't find you can't see it. I have
Speaker 3: a little reloading set up here. I can't find shot
Speaker 3: gun primers or seven powders anyway.
Speaker 1: Now, and this is going to be a problem because
Speaker 1: if we have another Cowboys and Aliens kind of situation,
Speaker 1: what are we going to use? You know, what is
Speaker 1: Harrison Ford going to use to save us? Anyway? Nobody
Speaker 1: saw that movie. Why am I making that joke?
Speaker 4: Let me know.
Speaker 2: I've got a good stash of percussion cap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're all going to be leaning heavily on Carl.
Speaker 2: Call fural humanity.
Speaker 1: So I think we've gotten a little bit ahead of
Speaker 1: our skis here. We should we should start by talking
Speaker 1: because again, I think we've all seen a lot of
Speaker 1: people being like, well, I guess I should get a
Speaker 1: gun now. As in the wake of Trump's victory, and
Speaker 1: I think the first caveat we should give everyone is like,
Speaker 1: if you are reacting in a way that is totally
Speaker 1: reasonable to this news, being depressed, right, if you're somebody
Speaker 1: who deals with suicidal ideation, if you have been spiraling lately,
Speaker 1: if you have been thinking about self harm, if you
Speaker 1: are just not in a stable mental place, and especially
Speaker 1: if you have no experience with firearms and are not
Speaker 1: in a stable mental place, don't go rush to pick
Speaker 1: one up now. Look for one thing, I assure you
Speaker 1: they will be available in the future. They are not
Speaker 1: going to get harder to buy.
Speaker 2: No, you know. It mights be of a line from
Speaker 2: the movie We Were Soldiers, which is actually a pretty
Speaker 2: pretty good movie speaking oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a
Speaker 2: lot of fun, not a Gibson. It was pretty good.
Speaker 2: And there's a scene where like the old hardened soldier
Speaker 2: from Korea World War two, Rhea it gets the Vietnam
Speaker 2: and he's like, he's just got a pistol, and like
Speaker 2: everyone's around him saying don't you one to In m
Speaker 2: sixteen he goes, don't worry, There'll be plenty of those
Speaker 2: laying around if I need one, So right, kind of
Speaker 2: that's where we're at in this country.
Speaker 4: Don't worry.
Speaker 2: There'll be plenty laying around if you need one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we are not entering a period where that's you know,
Speaker 1: I think there are some specific worries where there may
Speaker 1: be attempts to restrict specific groups from arming themselves. But
Speaker 1: even so, I wouldn't say that elevates it above a threat.
Speaker 1: If you are dealing with suicidal ideation, having a gun
Speaker 1: is not a talisman, as our friend tactical girlfriend often
Speaker 1: brings up, and you shouldn't treat it as one. And
Speaker 1: part of what that means is that, like, you have
Speaker 1: to model like the threat that you're facing, right and
Speaker 1: if you are not in immediate danger, if nobody is
Speaker 1: threatening to kill you specifically, you know, then that may
Speaker 1: not be the safest thing for you, right and particularly,
Speaker 1: I think the other side of it that Carl, you
Speaker 1: are much more qualified to talk about with than me,
Speaker 1: is that if you are going to buy a firearm,
Speaker 1: if you want that to be a thing that can
Speaker 1: actually protect you in a situation where you are in danger,
Speaker 1: where someone is threatening your life, you have to train
Speaker 1: with it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, I think that not to make light of
Speaker 2: that at all with that little joke about that movie.
Speaker 2: But the reality is we as people humans in general,
Speaker 2: all of us are bad at threat modeling. And that's
Speaker 2: not to say that the perceived threat that we're seeing
Speaker 2: with the results isn't real. I think it is. But
Speaker 2: that said, at the moment, if you're dealing with some
Speaker 2: of those issues like you mentioned, or the living situation
Speaker 2: you're in, or even the community around you isn't one
Speaker 2: in which a firearm laying around is particularly safe, could
Speaker 2: mean that you're actually inducing more threat and risk to
Speaker 2: yourself than what might come in two years. So that
Speaker 2: is something we have to think about very carefully. Can
Speaker 2: I possess this responsibly? Do I know how to use
Speaker 2: it responsibly? Am I in a place not only in
Speaker 2: my living situation, but my mental state that possessing this
Speaker 2: very quick and easy to use lethal device is safe
Speaker 2: to have around? Those are questions you should ask first
Speaker 2: before worrying about tomorrow.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I mean, maybe we should address like a
Speaker 3: couple of things that Kyle said right off the bat,
Speaker 3: Like you said, having a.
Speaker 2: Fire I'm lying around right.
Speaker 3: One thing that we should address is like, I know
Speaker 3: I recently purchased a new gun safe, but like if
Speaker 3: you have ex budget to buy a gun. Robert also
Speaker 3: mentioned that without training, your liability with the gun. Right,
Speaker 3: maybe we can break down if you have a thousand dollars,
Speaker 3: you don't need to go out and spend a thousand
Speaker 3: dollars on your gun. Right, perhaps it would be better
Speaker 3: to save some of that money and put it towards
Speaker 3: other things. I think it might make sense to just
Speaker 3: break those down for people in case they're not familiar.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that that might be a good place
Speaker 1: to start. Is if you decide number one, I'm in
Speaker 1: an emotionally stable place. I either have some specific threats
Speaker 1: or I want to be prepared for a future where
Speaker 1: those threats are more likely. And let's start with a
Speaker 1: budget of one thousand dollars, right, And you know this
Speaker 1: is one There's going to be people who can't afford
Speaker 1: a budget of one thousand dollars, and that's very unfortunate.
Speaker 1: But this is one of those things that like isn't fair, right,
Speaker 1: Like guns cost money, everyone has disposable income. But a
Speaker 1: thousand dollars I think is a reasonable floor for not
Speaker 1: just acquiring a firearm, but like the things you need
Speaker 1: to be able to start building proficiency with it. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about that car, like, what would you do?
Speaker 1: What would you advise someone with a grand who is
Speaker 1: looking into getting into shooting and also being set up
Speaker 1: to potentially defend themselves if they need to.
Speaker 2: Right, So, it's such a nuanced question and answer because
Speaker 2: there's so many variabilities there, one of which is you
Speaker 2: have to understand the living situation you're in. Are you
Speaker 2: living in a place that is solely your own? Do
Speaker 2: you live with roommates? Do you do you have children
Speaker 2: and your parents? I mean, like these things all come
Speaker 2: into the equation about how well can you secure this
Speaker 2: thing should you acquire it? And so that comes up
Speaker 2: to do you need a full bolt into the wall safe?
Speaker 2: Do you need something that is locked with cable underneath
Speaker 2: the bed that still is reasonably difficult to get into
Speaker 2: but is accessible otherwise? Do you have a situation in
Speaker 2: which you're the only one that could access this and
Speaker 2: therefore you're not worried about that? So the first thing
Speaker 2: you have to think about is that I'm taking possession
Speaker 2: of responsibility of this. It is a lethal weapon. What
Speaker 2: am I going to do to make sure that that
Speaker 2: doesn't fall into the wrong hands, Whether the are people
Speaker 2: that live within your own structure or outside of it
Speaker 2: should something go awry, So you have to consider that.
Speaker 2: So right off the bat is what are the situation
Speaker 2: I'm in and what are the things I need to
Speaker 2: consider to make sure this doesn't leak out of my control?
Speaker 2: Because we've seen in so many instances, especially some of
Speaker 2: the horrible spree shootings and such, in which is not
Speaker 2: the person that possessed the gun but someone around them
Speaker 2: that took it from them and used it for them. Absolutely,
Speaker 2: and that's because it wasn't stored well. And so that's
Speaker 2: number one. So you're going to think about one, are
Speaker 2: you getting a small a pithol or a long arm?
Speaker 2: And that's a discussion that we had too, but those
Speaker 2: two equate. And then depending on which one of those
Speaker 2: two you're acquiring determines the kind of safe storage requirements
Speaker 2: that also aligned with your current living situation. Of course,
Speaker 2: the best thing is a safe bolted to the floor
Speaker 2: that only you can get into. But that's not viable
Speaker 2: for everyone, yeah right, but it's something right yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So what comes along with that is you also, this
Speaker 1: is going to be true at every stage of this process,
Speaker 1: you need to know the laws of your state, and
Speaker 1: maybe even your local area. Right Like, in Oregon, we
Speaker 1: have very strict safe storage laws, right Like, you can
Speaker 1: be held accountable to a higher degree in this state
Speaker 1: if you don't secure a weapon and someone gets access
Speaker 1: to it. Right now, Obviously, if you have a safe
Speaker 1: and someone drills into your safe, you're not liable, right like,
Speaker 1: you took the actions you could to stop them from
Speaker 1: being able to get to your firearms. There's not an
Speaker 1: expectation that you have a fortress of solitude or whatever,
Speaker 1: but you have to have taken reasonable steps to lock
Speaker 1: them away, right and you know that's going to be different.
Speaker 1: A lot of states have absolutely no requirements whatsoever, but
Speaker 1: you need to be aware of what your local legal
Speaker 1: situation is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that to the table because myself,
Speaker 2: living in Arizona, we have no such rules, and so
Speaker 2: I can essentially you can just keep them on the floor.
Speaker 2: I could stack them in my front yard, right I'm like,
Speaker 2: I put them out in the yar. We'll see. I
Speaker 2: had extra rs.
Speaker 1: I use them to make a fence cheaper than right now,
Speaker 1: literally cold would now.
Speaker 2: So the thing about that is this is again, these
Speaker 2: things get more and more complicated over time, but we
Speaker 2: don't want to make this conversation impenetrable. But like, the
Speaker 2: kind of safe you acquire is important too, and this
Speaker 2: is that's a deeper topic than we could ever do
Speaker 2: in one video. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and just
Speaker 2: dovetail out to a friend of mine, Devian Olaf. He
Speaker 2: has a channel. He does a lot of video work
Speaker 2: about gun safe and which ones are good or bad.
Speaker 2: But let's just say the cheap ninety dollars thing with
Speaker 2: the cylindrical key lock, isn't it. So you've got to
Speaker 2: be a little better than that. So I would ask them,
Speaker 2: let's go with costs you're buying. Let's say in air fifteen,
Speaker 2: you're probably gonna need to spend and I'm guessing here
Speaker 2: around two hundred and fifty dollars for a safe that's
Speaker 2: actually worth a damn Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's about what I spent recently for little hangguns safe.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So let's let's build on that. Right.
Speaker 3: Let's say you've society, do you want a gun, and
Speaker 3: that it is safe for you to have a gun?
Speaker 3: I think, Yeah, the first thing you want to prioritize
Speaker 3: is making sure that no one who who that it's
Speaker 3: not safe gets that gun, which we've addressed, right. The
Speaker 3: second thing that you need to prioritize is that you
Speaker 3: could use that gun safely and like you another liability
Speaker 3: every time, yeah, that you pick up and load that gun, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, And part of that is in And maybe I
Speaker 1: will have different opinions on this, but I think we're
Speaker 1: probably sympatico picking the right type of firearm. I see
Speaker 1: a lot of people saying, I am worried I'm going
Speaker 1: to get attacked, you know.
Speaker 2: I am.
Speaker 1: I've been I've gotten a death threat. You know, I'm scared,
Speaker 1: particularly of this group of you know, Nazis or whatever.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to buy a handgun. And I will
Speaker 1: tell you right now. My opinion is that if you
Speaker 1: are looking for a self defense weapon, a handgun probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't be what you pick unless you are looking to
Speaker 1: carry a gun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's a good quote, right. I carry a
Speaker 2: handgun because it's unwieldy to walk around with a fifty
Speaker 2: BMG yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I cannot. I cannot take my ar with me in
Speaker 1: the street, right, so I keep an eye on me.
Speaker 2: You know, handguns are the most difficult thing to use
Speaker 2: skillfully under distress and duress than any other firearm. And yes,
Speaker 2: above and beyond that, they are actually the least the
Speaker 2: fact of it doing the job you think they're going
Speaker 2: to do than anything else.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're a shocking number of people are shot way
Speaker 1: more times than you would expect they could survive with
Speaker 1: a handgun, right, Like that is just a reality of
Speaker 1: the way that they work, because they're much much less
Speaker 1: powerful than a rifle. And it's also like, I had
Speaker 1: a friend a couple of years ago who bought a
Speaker 1: snubnose thirty eight, thinking, well, this is simple, I can't
Speaker 1: fuck it up. It's a good And I took her
Speaker 1: out and was like, I'm going to set up a
Speaker 1: ten foot target and we'll see how many times you
Speaker 1: can hit it with this gun. And she could not
Speaker 1: do it one out of five times. And then I
Speaker 1: brought out my glock and she was able to hit
Speaker 1: it every time.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: And it's because one of those is a much easier
Speaker 1: weapon for somebody who is complete a complete novice to
Speaker 1: learn how to use functionally. Right, And it's not the
Speaker 1: snubnose thirty eight in the roughest.
Speaker 2: Of most senses. Typically the smaller the gun is, the
Speaker 2: more a professionally you need to be to use it right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like with that in mind, you're responsible for
Speaker 3: every shot you fire right training in self defense? What
Speaker 3: by fucking accident because you don't know how to clean
Speaker 3: your gun or what have you. Every bullet that leaves
Speaker 3: that barrel, it's your fault and every one of those
Speaker 3: is potentially someone's life. So when you're thinking about buying
Speaker 3: a gun, you want to have something where you can
Speaker 3: a handle it safely and be discharging and know where
Speaker 3: that bullet's going to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So on that note, this has been asked for
Speaker 2: me many times, and we're talking about we're all we
Speaker 2: are on the same page. It's like when someone asking
Speaker 2: this question and it comes up more than you'd think.
Speaker 2: First of all, we're getting past the issue of like
Speaker 2: are you safe to onllness and safe storage. So now
Speaker 2: we're at the point you are buying a gun, right,
Speaker 2: so you have to think, oh, what's the threat? Are
Speaker 2: we worried about three years from now and the potential
Speaker 2: realities of a very caustic and dangerous political future. Are
Speaker 2: you worried about only defense? Are you worried about your
Speaker 2: own self protection walking down the street, because obviously you're
Speaker 2: not going to be well, not obviously, but for the
Speaker 2: most part, you're not going to be carrying an AR
Speaker 2: fifteen down the street. But if you are only worried
Speaker 2: about your castle, make a joke about castle, doctor, And
Speaker 2: if you're only worried about your house, inside your house,
Speaker 2: there is no reason to be picking a pistol none whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Now, I will say that there's a number of folks
Speaker 1: in the lefty gun space who will say, so, just
Speaker 1: get an AR fifteen. That's not always going to be
Speaker 1: practical depending on your loss, right, Like, that is not
Speaker 1: something that we can say everyone will be able to do, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we can say there will be a non handgun
Speaker 1: option that will probably be a better fit for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, And this is where we see a lot
Speaker 2: of people in the gun space. It's kind of weird,
Speaker 2: like cultural shifts in the zeitgeist. What's the cool defensive
Speaker 2: thing of the time. But there's a lot to be
Speaker 2: said depending on what you think you're going to have
Speaker 2: to shoot at. Hopefully never of course, but like, yeah,
Speaker 2: an AR fifteen does things like armor piercing in terms
Speaker 2: of kevlar and da da da da dah. But for
Speaker 2: home defense, it really still is kind of hard to
Speaker 2: go wrong with a shotgun in many instances, and that
Speaker 2: should not be ignored. You know what else shouldn't be ignored.
Speaker 3: It's our obligation to pivot to advertisements about every fifteen
Speaker 3: minutes on this show. All right, we're back, Kyle, you'd
Speaker 3: mentioned that you think a shotgun sometimes can be more
Speaker 3: effective than NOW fifteen.
Speaker 2: Especially.
Speaker 3: Another thing I would add, as you're in a state
Speaker 3: like California, the laws regarding Samuel automatic centerfire rifles are
Speaker 3: incredibly confusing. It's extremely easy to buy something on Amazon
Speaker 3: and slap it on your gun and render it a felony.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would generally say, like in most situations, an AR,
Speaker 1: if you're new to shooting, it's going to be easier
Speaker 1: to figure out. They're very simple, easy to upgrade and modify.
Speaker 1: But like, yeah, in California, in a state New York
Speaker 1: is similar, it's very easy to commit a felony with
Speaker 1: an AR fifteen and not know that you are. And
Speaker 1: you don't want to find out that your gun is
Speaker 1: a felony when you have to use it in self defense.
Speaker 2: Right. This is an instance in which the good old
Speaker 2: man again. I'm not trying to perm I'm not I'm
Speaker 2: not on team shotgun here, But when it comes to
Speaker 2: cross all state lines, I mean, sure, there's an exception somewhere,
Speaker 2: but for the most part, a manually pump activated shotgun, yeah,
Speaker 2: is likely to not run a foul of the law anywhere. Additionally,
Speaker 2: there's a good chance that if you were to and
Speaker 2: we have to consider all realities, there's a good chance
Speaker 2: that should you need to use it, that when you're
Speaker 2: in court trying to defend yourself for using this lethal weapon.
Speaker 2: A shotgun doesn't seem to evoke the same concerns let's say,
Speaker 2: from courts and from judges that.
Speaker 4: An ar might and yar.
Speaker 2: You know, regardless of how common they are and how
Speaker 2: much they proliferate society, there's still those scary rifles. A
Speaker 2: shotgun does not tend to evoke that same kind of response.
Speaker 2: It is most likely legal almost anywhere. And the diversity
Speaker 2: of I mean, you can use in it really bridge
Speaker 2: of the gap from one yard to one hundred yards
Speaker 2: or more. But a lot of people that are new
Speaker 2: to guns, we'll think, well, shotgun don't need to aim.
Speaker 2: That is incorrect shotguns need to be aimed as much
Speaker 2: as any other long arm. They're just very effective when
Speaker 2: they actually connect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one of those I think because I do change,
Speaker 1: like what I am taking with me based on where
Speaker 1: I go, and like when I'm in California, I generally
Speaker 1: like if I'm going camping or something, I'll make sure
Speaker 1: i have a twelve gage in the car, right, because
Speaker 1: I'm not going to try to get whatever this month's
Speaker 1: gun laws are, right, you know, like that's just not
Speaker 1: practical to me. That said, I think because there are
Speaker 1: a number of people who will be very frustrated us
Speaker 1: talking about shotguns. One thing that they are right about
Speaker 1: is there's a different type of training that's necessary with
Speaker 1: the shotgun, and they are in some ways more complicated
Speaker 1: to use than an ar. In part because for every shot,
Speaker 1: well unless it's a semi automatic, like for every shot
Speaker 1: you're pumping it, right, and like that is that there's
Speaker 1: muscle memory that has to be built there. Right, it's harder,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe a little bit slower to get up
Speaker 1: to a level or at least you have to train
Speaker 1: differently with it. Right. The other thing about it is
Speaker 1: that like it loads very differently you know, a shotgun
Speaker 1: is a completely different kind of ammunition than an ar has,
Speaker 1: which all goes back to the whole like you have
Speaker 1: to be willing to train with whatever it is you're
Speaker 1: going to use fair enough. Yeah.
Speaker 2: See.
Speaker 3: Ideally, like if you're in this position of thinking, if
Speaker 3: you can find a friend or failing that, arrange that
Speaker 3: will allow you to try different guns. I think as
Speaker 3: a novice you're going to pick up if you've never
Speaker 3: shot a gun before. I probably wouldn't pick up a
Speaker 3: twelve gage shotgun and start pueuing away because the recoil
Speaker 3: will be quite profound and notable to you. So don't
Speaker 3: start there. Start with something else.
Speaker 1: There's smaller shotguns a twenty gauge, yeah.
Speaker 3: And those are fine expectedly if you're a smaller statute person,
Speaker 3: even a twenty eight or sixteams are hard to probably
Speaker 3: buy defensive ammunition.
Speaker 4: Four.
Speaker 3: But I think if you can and you begin that journey,
Speaker 3: like after the TV ball, say with Hangouns, find one
Speaker 3: that fits your hand.
Speaker 2: You probably have no.
Speaker 3: Idea what fits you and feels good if you're just
Speaker 3: starting out. Yeah, finding someone who is local to you,
Speaker 3: ideally who has some experience who can help you along
Speaker 3: that process, I think, and someone who you trust, right,
Speaker 3: Like I've been like I have to train.
Speaker 2: I have a concealed carry weapons permit in California.
Speaker 3: The last time I went to take a course, like
Speaker 3: from the outset, I got like xenophobia, homophobia, like jokes
Speaker 3: that I guess the guy who was instructing the course
Speaker 3: thought that everyone was in on just like they made
Speaker 3: me feel unwelcome and I'm a cis heep white guy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but I think maybe we should address that, Like, if
Speaker 3: you're thinking getting started, what kind of instruction should you
Speaker 3: look for? Where should you look for it? And like
Speaker 3: what would you recommend maybe other sources to Kyle, Like
Speaker 3: your YouTube channel has been a great resource for me.
Speaker 2: This is this is where we're in the firearms it's
Speaker 2: owning a thing doesn't mean a community. So there's always
Speaker 2: phrase the gun community. It's not a thing. Owning a
Speaker 2: thing doesn't make a community. A community is a group
Speaker 2: of people that bond together over a mutual beliefs and
Speaker 2: hopefully care for one another. So there's no firearms community.
Speaker 2: But that said, the broad scope of people that have
Speaker 2: been interested in the topic for the longest duration of
Speaker 2: time has been mostly seceded to a group that we
Speaker 2: would not find ourselves aligned with or comfortable with being around.
Speaker 2: And so this is where the community building thing is
Speaker 2: real because the more we build communities and we're behind
Speaker 2: in this regards in terms to alternative voices in the
Speaker 2: firearm space, but the more we build that community not
Speaker 2: only online but amongst one another, the more we're going
Speaker 2: to have safer, better spaces for us to work together
Speaker 2: to learn how to use these things safely and efficiently.
Speaker 2: And that is a challenge. If you walk in sight
Speaker 2: unseen to a place that is probably foreign to you
Speaker 2: in firearms land, sadly at this time point in time,
Speaker 2: is a pretty good chance it's not going to be
Speaker 2: something you're going to be comfortable with, quite honestly, just
Speaker 2: like you mentioned, James, like, it's going to be that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff. There's probably going to be Trump stuff
Speaker 2: on the wall, there's probably going you're probably going to
Speaker 2: hear some jokes that are just jokes but you know
Speaker 2: they're really not. Yeah, that's the kind of space that
Speaker 2: that's filled with. And so when people come and say,
Speaker 2: well who can I go to to get this training with,
Speaker 2: I'm like, that's challenging. There's some options online. There's like
Speaker 2: Operation Blazing Sword, there's a there's there's the Liberal Gun
Speaker 2: Club has some training options as well. But what's better
Speaker 2: is finding people and interconnecting with people of like mind
Speaker 2: around you, if you can, and working together, and then
Speaker 2: actually building a real community that isn't a gun community.
Speaker 2: And that's where we're going to find solace in the
Speaker 2: ability to get better with this stuff together. Not a
Speaker 2: great exactly a strong answer, but if the truth. But
Speaker 2: if you're going in, if you're going in just unhindered,
Speaker 2: you're going to expect it to be a place that
Speaker 2: you're probably not going to be happy with.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think that's a really good point. I'd
Speaker 1: like you can we talk a little bit more about
Speaker 1: training options, like not just because you mentioned Operation Blazing Sword,
Speaker 1: I'd like to hear a little more about them, but
Speaker 1: also where people could go for like reading and videos
Speaker 1: in order to kind of find more information on how
Speaker 1: to develop proficiency.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So okay, so YouTube university doesn't teach you how
Speaker 2: to actually like effectively hit targets with something that stiffly
Speaker 2: that you can You can't. There's no way to learn
Speaker 2: that besides doing it. But in terms of general firearms understanding,
Speaker 2: learning some of the history, learning about how guns work,
Speaker 2: there are some YouTube resources out there. Tactical Girlfriend you
Speaker 2: already mentioned, has four years of a legacy of content
Speaker 2: on her site that a lot of it is focused
Speaker 2: on beginner style content. In fact, she just posted a playlist.
Speaker 2: She has kind of stopped making videos in general, she
Speaker 2: mentioned that a while back, but she still has her
Speaker 2: content online and she posted a playlist recently of all
Speaker 2: of her how to get going videos one oh one stuff,
Speaker 2: and that would kind of be where I'd start with. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 2: my channel in Range TV has some of that. I
Speaker 2: tend to focus a little bit on the more esoteric
Speaker 2: and like next level, but that's not to say it's
Speaker 2: not there as well. So I'm not trying to sell promote,
Speaker 2: but I would actually say her playlist is going to
Speaker 2: be better than some of my own, although we have
Speaker 2: stuff like that on in Range TV as well. If
Speaker 2: you want to open up that dark boy called reddit,
Speaker 2: the Liberal Gun Club has resources on it. If you
Speaker 2: go there, they have a list of people and local resources.
Speaker 2: You can also google the Liberal Gun Club. I'm not
Speaker 2: even trying to say anyone doing that is necessarily identifying
Speaker 2: as a liberal, but they have gathered lists of statewide
Speaker 2: resources as many as they can that are providing training
Speaker 2: in regional places. That would be a good place to start.
Speaker 2: Operation Blating Sword is a subset of that. Blake o'l
Speaker 2: I can I pronounced them that dam Blake has been
Speaker 2: on my channel and you'll find him there in the
Speaker 2: Liberal Gun Club listing. When I think of that, I
Speaker 2: would say, go to YouTube. He had a tactical girlfriend.
Speaker 2: Go to in Range TV if you want to see
Speaker 2: maybe not one on one but next level stuff, but
Speaker 2: a friendly space to you, and then check out the
Speaker 2: Liberal Gun Club best I can say, because they do
Speaker 2: have a list of resources that they're gathering across the country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think one thing that tactical girl old
Speaker 1: friend talks about that is a because because you're right,
Speaker 1: and I think this is an important point that like,
Speaker 1: you have to spend time shooting, and you know that
Speaker 1: costs money in order to get better, But there is
Speaker 1: one thing that you can do that does not cost
Speaker 1: ongoing money to get better with a handgun if you're
Speaker 1: again looking to carry a gun, which is dry fire training, right,
Speaker 1: which is a very useful process of building proficiency. You
Speaker 1: can do it. I mean you could do it every
Speaker 1: day if you want. It will help. It does not
Speaker 1: replace needing to go shoot right, but you can find guides.
Speaker 1: Tactical girlfriend talks about it a lot, but you can
Speaker 1: find other guides online. And that is a way that
Speaker 1: you can kind of stretch your AMMO budget and gain
Speaker 1: additional proficiency.
Speaker 2: There are even products design specifically for that. One of
Speaker 2: them Possule Mind and there are others like mantis X,
Speaker 2: and you make sure your gun is safely unloaded in
Speaker 2: your proficient with that part of it. You put these
Speaker 2: devices in and you can actually fire a dry fire
Speaker 2: is firing with no ammunition the gun, click out a
Speaker 2: target on the wall, and it'll teach you things about
Speaker 2: like did you pull to the right, did you push
Speaker 2: to the yes? Did you dip the gone? And those
Speaker 2: are very good products that you can use once you
Speaker 2: buy them. Gets more money, but you could train professionally
Speaker 2: in a safe place without firing live ammunition and improve
Speaker 2: your skills quite a bit.
Speaker 1: That's a good point, yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say like another organization I would plug
Speaker 3: is armed Equality, especially for like LGBTQIA people. Friends of mine,
Speaker 3: very nice people. Perhaps we should go back then to that,
Speaker 3: Like Roberts mentioned dry firing, we'd meant.
Speaker 1: Well, first, I think we need to go to ads Jas.
Speaker 3: You're right, Robert, we should go back to Chumba Casino.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so dry fire at the wall and think of
Speaker 1: Trumpet Casino, or just download an operator from neurallink that
Speaker 1: you got for me long Yep, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: Our primary sponsors a brain ship.
Speaker 2: All right, we're back.
Speaker 3: So we've had discussion about training, safe storage, and a
Speaker 3: little bit about like what to look at firearms wise.
Speaker 3: I want to go back to that third one because
Speaker 3: you are marketed at so heavily when you're trying to
Speaker 3: buy a firearm, right, and the likelihood of you getting misinformation.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: We all know smaller statute people who have been given
Speaker 3: yeah as snubnose thirty eight, a gun that's entirely inappropriate
Speaker 3: for them.
Speaker 2: Cow.
Speaker 3: What like if you could maybe go through like each
Speaker 3: major category, right, if we do hanggun, shotgun, semi automatic rifle,
Speaker 3: maybe one that is compatible with ar band states, and
Speaker 3: one that's you know, yeah, you're in real America.
Speaker 1: There are some options like the ares SCR that are
Speaker 1: basically AR fifteen's that are a lot easier to keep
Speaker 1: in compliance in a state like California, but they are
Speaker 1: also more than twice as expensive as like a budget
Speaker 1: AR fifteen right like, Which is not to say it's
Speaker 1: impossible to have a budget AR fifteen that is in
Speaker 1: comp a lot in compliance with California law. It's just
Speaker 1: I am not going to take on the responsibility of
Speaker 1: telling you how to do that legally, because when I
Speaker 1: lived in California, I was only about eighty percent share
Speaker 1: that I was in compliance.
Speaker 2: With the law.
Speaker 3: If you're in California, my advice would be to go
Speaker 3: to a shop and buy the gun complete.
Speaker 2: Yes, don't piece it together of the Internet.
Speaker 1: That's good, good advice.
Speaker 2: Oh well, if you're a new gun owner, don't piece
Speaker 2: to get anything together, because the knowledge to make something
Speaker 2: reliable that you've put together from bits and pieces is
Speaker 2: not a good idea. You want something that's got to
Speaker 2: I mean literally, you want something from a quote unquote
Speaker 2: reputable manufacturer, but as a warranty, like, let's just be that.
Speaker 2: Don't even start with trying to put something together. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: so let's just go ahead and start with pistol. So
Speaker 2: the challenge there is like, of course, it would be
Speaker 2: very nice to be able to buy like four of them,
Speaker 2: because you can train with the twenty two and practice
Speaker 2: with this. M Well, let's go with the constraint that
Speaker 2: we had earlier of this thousand dollars and you're going
Speaker 2: to buy a pistol and with it you plan to train,
Speaker 2: get better, be proficient, but also maybe have to use
Speaker 2: it for self defense. You really want to stick with
Speaker 2: a nine millimeter. I mean there are smaller guns like
Speaker 2: three eighties and such like that, but we're getting into
Speaker 2: specialist guns. Yeah, what is what I'm going to say
Speaker 2: here across the board? When I recommend something, it's going
Speaker 2: to be the opposite of specialist. It's going to be
Speaker 2: the most bland, boring possible thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And when it comes to that, and I know that,
Speaker 2: everyone like, but it's a nine millimeter probably a glock yep.
Speaker 2: The Glock nineteen is a relatively reasonably sized gun. The
Speaker 2: seventeen's a little bigger the nineteens. In this nice middle ground,
Speaker 2: it is carriable, it's small enough to be concealed should
Speaker 2: you have the right to do so, but it's big
Speaker 2: enough to be viable for being reasonably accurate with with
Speaker 2: not extensive amounts of training, but enough training to get good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's a bunch around the nine milimeters magazine that
Speaker 2: just playing works. Yep, Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3: If you're on a tight bygit, I will say that
Speaker 3: cops are always you can find trade in police clocks
Speaker 3: pretty cheap, cops don't shoot very much.
Speaker 2: You can sometimes get some pretty good deals on those.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 2: That's it. I'm revealing a little bit of future history
Speaker 2: of what's going on in range. We're doing a video
Speaker 2: in a couple of weeks. There is a strange trade
Speaker 2: imbalance between us and never mind on the politics. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Turkey and they are making some really high end, oh
Speaker 2: well made gun There is a glock clone from Turkey
Speaker 2: that I can vouch for yet. But this is the
Speaker 2: kind of where we're at in the gun space. This
Speaker 2: thing is interchangeable with all glock parts and the guns
Speaker 2: like two hundred fifty bucks. Oh well, you can't be
Speaker 2: We don't know. Yeah, I'm not saying go buy that,
Speaker 2: but I'm saying we're going to do a review of it.
Speaker 2: The point is there are glocks and glocklike things. They
Speaker 2: can get the price down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, And so you're looking at you know, if
Speaker 1: you get a budget ar for five hundred bucks, you know,
Speaker 1: a budget not a nine millimeter handgun. Because even if
Speaker 1: with not counting that one, there are other budget options
Speaker 1: that are in the three hundred ish dollar range. You
Speaker 1: just have to look around a bit. And I should
Speaker 1: also note buying used with a firearm is not like
Speaker 1: buying used with electronics. If a gun is well maintained,
Speaker 1: it will outlast you. Right, there are some parts that
Speaker 1: will need replacing from time to time. Right, Your springs
Speaker 1: and stuff are going to age faster than other things.
Speaker 1: And like barrels, you can shoot out, but it takes
Speaker 1: quite a bit of shooting to shoot a barrel, you know, smooth. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's never a bad to consider like finding, like
Speaker 1: you said, like a police trade in or something like that,
Speaker 1: Like that could be a great way to save money.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: So when it comes to the pistol, we're talking about
Speaker 2: buying just one pretty much boil it down to a
Speaker 2: nine millimeter yep, that is probably a polymer frame gun,
Speaker 2: not some big heavy steel thing. A glock is the
Speaker 2: is like the de facto, but there are others. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's there's hks, there's rugers.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I like SIGs, but they're pricier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The
Speaker 2: thing about glock is block's been around forever. It's the
Speaker 2: standard finding, accessorizing, buying magazines, or even getting repairs done
Speaker 2: to a block is ubiquitous across the country. If you
Speaker 2: get a glock y, you'll be able to deal with it,
Speaker 2: fix it, do whatever you want to it straight up.
Speaker 1: And what has helped me a lot in general is,
Speaker 1: you know, I have my carry gun, I have my
Speaker 1: my home defense firearm, and then I have I have
Speaker 1: bought built a couple of firearms from the ground up,
Speaker 1: and I would certainly, as you said, I would never
Speaker 1: have started there. But because I had the extra money
Speaker 1: doing that means that has given me so much deeper
Speaker 1: of an understanding of what goes wrong when things do
Speaker 1: go wrong with a gun and how to fix it.
Speaker 1: I've replaced every part on my carry gun at this point,
Speaker 1: right like, over time, and it's given me a much
Speaker 1: deeper level of understanding off just like mechanically, how these
Speaker 1: things function. You know, building an AR fifteen was the
Speaker 1: same process, and I'm really I do find that valuable. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it's throwing more money at the problem too totally.
Speaker 2: So the other advantage of nine milimeter, which is reasonably
Speaker 2: cheap defeat and shoot, he reasonably cheap to practice with.
Speaker 2: For those of you that don't know anything about guns.
Speaker 2: He will typically practice with what's called FMJ bulkpack ammunition. Yeah,
Speaker 2: nine milimeter one hundred and fifteen grain. It's just a
Speaker 2: bullet that's got a copper jacket on it, and that's
Speaker 2: your practice AMMO. And then for Carrie, should you be
Speaker 2: carrying it, you'll probably want to carry something that's specifically
Speaker 2: designed to be defensive ammunition. It'll be far more expensive
Speaker 2: per box, But once you get to the point of yes,
Speaker 2: I am ready safe and capable to carry this, you're
Speaker 2: going to want to pick something gold Dots Spear gold
Speaker 2: Dots are a haul of point ye designed to specifically
Speaker 2: be for self defense. But make sure the gun you've
Speaker 2: chosen works reliably with that defensive AMMO, because even though
Speaker 2: it works one hundred percent with that FMJ, it may
Speaker 2: not work with the defensive AMMI. Y'ALLMO have to play
Speaker 2: with a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we should also know when you are buying AMMO online,
Speaker 1: which is not going to be legal in every state.
Speaker 1: But most people will be able to do this. It
Speaker 1: pays to be careful. There is a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that is sketchier out there, and there can be consequences.
Speaker 1: I have had a firearm. I have had like a
Speaker 1: handgun blow up in my hand as a result of
Speaker 1: getting ammunition that I had not shot before. This was
Speaker 1: in fact turkish. I think it was because I think
Speaker 1: it was a hot load, but it's possible that it
Speaker 1: was the result of a bullet be a squib and
Speaker 1: that then jammed in the barrel and then another around
Speaker 1: came in after it. I generally have been pretty good
Speaker 1: at checking to make sure there's a hole in the
Speaker 1: paper with each shot, which is something you should be
Speaker 1: making sure of, like yeah, when you're shooting, because if
Speaker 1: you get if you shoot around that like does not
Speaker 1: have enough powder behind it, right, if you get a
Speaker 1: bad round, it can jam in the barrel, and then
Speaker 1: the second round can cause the barrel to burst. This
Speaker 1: is also why we always wear eye protection. But when
Speaker 1: looking at AMMO, if you think this looks like good
Speaker 1: AMMO and it's cheap, look online add like reddit to
Speaker 1: the name. See what other people say about it, right,
Speaker 1: Like see if you can find anything written about that.
Speaker 1: If other usually other people, if it's like a less
Speaker 1: reliable manufacturer, will have said I've had a bad experience
Speaker 1: with this ammunition. Yep, do your diligence right the first
Speaker 1: time you're shooting a new kind of cheap target AMMO.
Speaker 2: That that being said, like there's a lot of names
Speaker 2: that almost anyone that's never owned a gun before will recognize,
Speaker 2: names like Remington, right, Winchester. Yes, these are That's not
Speaker 2: to say that they don't make mistakes too, but like,
Speaker 2: if you're going to go buy a Winchester bulk back
Speaker 2: of ammunition, you are bonding at least what is generally
Speaker 2: considered consumer level reliable AMMO.
Speaker 1: If you're buying it absolutely crazy, Bob's reloading shack right,
Speaker 1: you don't know that was what because it's a lot
Speaker 1: of the sketchy stuff isn't even a manufacturer. It's like
Speaker 1: Ammo that you may not notice immediately it's like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: this seems really cheap, and then it'll say in small
Speaker 1: letters remanufactured right, which means somebody has reloaded it, reloaded AMMA,
Speaker 1: And like you know, you can reload Ammo and have
Speaker 1: it be perfectly good ammunition. But do you know who
Speaker 1: reloaded this amo?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 2: I will tell you as a person that shoots a
Speaker 2: lot and has been doing it for decades, I personally,
Speaker 2: even with all that, I will never fire re manufactured ammunition.
Speaker 2: I want to deal with Crazy Bob's weird badnes Yes.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, exactly, Crazy Bob's bad Wednesday.
Speaker 2: It's yeah.
Speaker 3: We've addressed a pistol, right, like I want to dress lunguns.
Speaker 3: And then you mentioned a couple of things callege. You
Speaker 3: should also address whitch up like accessories. Robert mentioned eye protection.
Speaker 2: So let me let me add one more piece of
Speaker 2: the pistol.
Speaker 4: We'll move on. Uh.
Speaker 2: The thing now, the whizbang thing now is every custill
Speaker 2: has a red dot site on it. A red dot
Speaker 2: site is essentially an electro optical box that sits on
Speaker 2: the top of the slide and you look through it
Speaker 2: to aim and it projects a red dot like almost
Speaker 2: like a laser dot if you're not familiar with it
Speaker 2: to aim with. For the most part, I'm not saying
Speaker 2: you shouldn't have one because they're cool, But for the
Speaker 2: most part, a person getting into this specifically for self
Speaker 2: defense does not need one of those. You don't need
Speaker 2: to spend three hundred dollars on a red dot. The
Speaker 2: iron sights that come on any of these guns should
Speaker 2: be sufficient for most purposes. So don't get suckered into
Speaker 2: I need that. Yeah, if that's something you want later,
Speaker 2: think about it, but it's not a requirement.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 1: That said, if a gun has one on it, I
Speaker 1: don't agree with people who say, like, you can't learn
Speaker 1: to shoot on a red dot. I think that that's
Speaker 1: now you should. You will need to look up because
Speaker 1: it may not be sighted, how to site it right,
Speaker 1: because it like red dots are a thing like you
Speaker 1: need to dial them in right, and there is a
Speaker 1: way to do that. Again, you can find guides to
Speaker 1: this online, just like you can find guides like mounting
Speaker 1: a scope on a rifle. These are complex mechanical tasks.
Speaker 1: A red dot less so than a scope. But you
Speaker 1: can't just buy a gun with a red dot on
Speaker 1: it and trust that that red dot points out where
Speaker 1: the bullet's going to go. That's not how they work.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. My point being is if you gave me, you said,
Speaker 2: this person here needs to be able to hit a
Speaker 2: target fifteen yards away, you've got one hour, right, I
Speaker 2: would not be messing by giving them a red dot.
Speaker 2: I would give them with something with iron sights and
Speaker 2: just get them through the task.
Speaker 1: If that's what go where I'm going with that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's perfectly reasonable. Yeah. I prefer, like, now
Speaker 1: that I know what I'm doing, to use my red
Speaker 1: dots and stuff. But I also pretty regularly shoot with
Speaker 1: iron sights, in part because I like it, Like it's
Speaker 1: it's enjoyable mechanically, and it's kind of how I learned.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or don't get me wrong, it is better. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it also has another level of complexity and it's more
Speaker 2: to go wrong, Like if you're installing that.
Speaker 3: Yourself, it's annoying and it's easy to mess up and
Speaker 3: then you're yeah upset and yeah. Yeah, let's move on
Speaker 3: to long guns. Like one thing that we should mention
Speaker 3: that you might buy an AR, specifically an AR actually
Speaker 3: and find that it comes with no sighting systems at all. Yes,
Speaker 3: and that's a thing to build into a budget. So
Speaker 3: let's talk about like what to get feel budget in
Speaker 3: in their long gun catcherycal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so when we go to long guns, we talk
Speaker 2: about rifles and shotguns. Let's stick with rifles for now
Speaker 2: I'm assuming so in that regard, this is the thing
Speaker 2: where like, actually I have a video on my channel
Speaker 2: about the NFA, which is the National Firearms Act, which
Speaker 2: is what regulates a lot of machine guns and stuff.
Speaker 2: But this also occurs across many gun control laws. They're
Speaker 2: frequently ablest and the things that they pust the most
Speaker 2: rescriptions on are the things that are actually most capable.
Speaker 2: And that means that means AAR fifteen's in their general
Speaker 2: guys with a pistol grip and a red dot site
Speaker 2: which we just mentioned for pistols and a thirty round
Speaker 2: magazine is the thing that is going to be the
Speaker 2: most I could get anyone. I tell you, anyone capable
Speaker 2: of hitting at a target at fifty yards within a
Speaker 2: four hour training session with a red dot sided Air
Speaker 2: fifteen and a good magazine. It's a good ammunition. Air
Speaker 2: fifteens are light, low recoil. They're loud because of the
Speaker 2: five five six, but they're light, low recoil guns that
Speaker 2: almost any one of most body structure can handle. Now
Speaker 2: there's exceptions, of course, if you have specific physical challenges
Speaker 2: that's another discussion. But if almost anyone tiny to large
Speaker 2: can handle a basic Air fifteen, and it is the
Speaker 2: gun that is most focused on for gun control, ironically
Speaker 2: places like California where they take away things that make
Speaker 2: it more functional like no testol grip or reduce your
Speaker 2: magazine capacity because they're trying to diminish the functionality of
Speaker 2: the gun. But the reality is the reason they're doing
Speaker 2: that is because that is the gun that is most
Speaker 2: functional for most people, and it is therefore the one
Speaker 2: that almost anyone can handle pretty well with the smallest
Speaker 2: amount of training.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I think there's a good point there in
Speaker 1: if I were coaching someone who is buying an AR
Speaker 1: that has no you know, does not have iron sights
Speaker 1: on it at all, you are it is much easier
Speaker 1: to learn how to sit in and use a red
Speaker 1: dot on an AR than learning how to adjust the
Speaker 1: site the iron sights on an AR fifteen. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: not that you can't learn that that you should again,
Speaker 1: you have to, you can watch a video on it,
Speaker 1: but it's much more intuitive to set up a red
Speaker 1: dot in that way.
Speaker 2: This is actually where I would flip flop. If you're
Speaker 2: with the pistol, don't concern yourself too much with the
Speaker 2: red dot. If you're going with an air fifteen, concern
Speaker 2: yourself with the lease. Get a red dot to the opposite.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, unless you were like in the Marines or
Speaker 1: something and you know how to dial in your irons right,
Speaker 1: and even then you're gonna have a better time with
Speaker 1: a red dot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally and once and a red dot is
Speaker 2: very intuitive. So one of the things that people are
Speaker 2: from the with firearms, but when you bring up a
Speaker 2: long arm, there's multiple points of contact to the person
Speaker 2: shooting the gun. When you bring up a pistol, you
Speaker 2: probably have two hands on it and you're pushing your
Speaker 2: arms out almost like you're like making a triangle. When
Speaker 2: you're using a long arm like an air fifteen, there's
Speaker 2: a butt stock on your shoulder, your cheek is on
Speaker 2: the actual comb which is the bay of the stock.
Speaker 2: Your other hand your support hand, it's holding the gun
Speaker 2: up on the front of it. You have a minimum
Speaker 2: of three points of contact with a red dot. That
Speaker 2: makes it very stable and easy to get reliable hits.
Speaker 2: And the red dot means you can keep both eyes open,
Speaker 2: don't need to worry about the idiosyncrasies of focusing on
Speaker 2: a front site. Essentially, if it's zero meaning the dot
Speaker 2: is regulated to where the gun hits. And you put
Speaker 2: the dot on the thing and press the trigger without
Speaker 2: doing something like jerking the gun, you'll hit the target.
Speaker 2: And so that's why that matters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so what sort of bud each people be looking at,
Speaker 3: and like, would you be comfortable recommending, like even brands
Speaker 3: that they should look at.
Speaker 2: It all comes down the cost when it comes to
Speaker 2: our fifteen. So you can spend as much money as
Speaker 2: you want. The reality is I have a video on
Speaker 2: the channel. Never mind if you like or dis like
Speaker 2: the company. They're one of the ones that really push
Speaker 2: the lower cost products out there. PSA it stands for
Speaker 2: Palm Models, pal Metal State Armory. You can go there
Speaker 2: and get your branded trump lower but at the same time,
Speaker 2: you can get an AR fifteen for like four hundred bucks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like in the gun space, you're not going
Speaker 1: to find someone to buy who is spotless and selling
Speaker 1: guns in large numbers cheaply.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that's not so like so so for foreigner
Speaker 2: bucks are around there. From PSA, you can get a
Speaker 2: traditional what's called an M four. It's essentially a sixteen
Speaker 2: inch car beam. It won't have any sighting system on it,
Speaker 2: so expect to throw another two hundred bucks ish onto
Speaker 2: a reasonable red dot site on that. So for around
Speaker 2: the six hundred dollars range, you're gonna get a gun
Speaker 2: that's going to weigh seven pounds, but it's gonna have
Speaker 2: low recoil and you're going to have something that's for
Speaker 2: the most part, reasonably reliable. Is it the best of
Speaker 2: the company. Is the best of the best. No, but
Speaker 2: it's reasonably lightweight. It is well manufactured. I've done videos
Speaker 2: about them on my channel. They've worked just fine, and
Speaker 2: so foreigner ish for the gun of the two hundred,
Speaker 2: for the sighting system, couple mags, you could get out
Speaker 2: of the door for under seven hundred dollars with everything
Speaker 2: probably under that, maybe under six hundred even if you're careful.
Speaker 2: Oh but let me plug one thing. If you've got
Speaker 2: lots and lots more money, double that. You you know what
Speaker 2: would Staughtter do? Carbon which I designed. It'll be half
Speaker 2: the way and super reliable from Katie Arms. But I
Speaker 2: love mind doesn't bring any money to me. I'm just saying.
Speaker 2: The point I'm making here is you can get something
Speaker 2: good enough, and if you've got more money, there is
Speaker 2: better out there that are lighter, more reliable guns, but
Speaker 2: you don't need to. As my point, I'm not trying
Speaker 2: to sell anything here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they are one of the few manufacturers who offer
Speaker 3: like a California compliance solution at checkout, which is nice
Speaker 3: for California people.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, so that can be a really beneficial thing
Speaker 1: to you in terms of you know, not having it
Speaker 1: be something that you're scared about.
Speaker 2: California Compliant will probably mean no flash hider, no pistol grim,
Speaker 2: and a fixed magazine at least.
Speaker 3: At point in time you can have you can have
Speaker 3: the removable magazine if you don't have the flash heighted
Speaker 3: pistol grip and the collapsing stock.
Speaker 2: So okay, all right, Well, if you can buy it
Speaker 2: from them ready to go, there's I know, there's also
Speaker 2: magazine capacity requirements in so maybe you have to buy
Speaker 2: like a couple ten round bags or something like that.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, obviously thirty round bags are better than ten round bags,
Speaker 2: and for mostly if you live in a place like California,
Speaker 2: do not worry too much about that. If you get
Speaker 2: a little proficiency on that, a couple ten round bags
Speaker 2: will do a lot.
Speaker 1: And to be honest, in self defense, shootings. The odds
Speaker 1: are load that you will be firing that many rounds
Speaker 1: right now. If you're in a self defense shooting where
Speaker 1: you do need more bullets than that, there's really nothing
Speaker 1: that can replace having those bullets you know available.
Speaker 3: But yeah, don't get reptraniacs on it, like there's no
Speaker 3: something you can change.
Speaker 1: The fact that you only have a ten round magazine
Speaker 1: does not mean that you can't become reficient.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I don't want anyone here to think that
Speaker 2: I'm saying you shouldn't. You should be able to get
Speaker 2: a six ye round bag. You're one far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 2: Places like California have these restrictions, have them statistically speaking,
Speaker 2: and I don't know if this data has changed. Most
Speaker 2: self defense shootings happen within three yards, three seconds, three
Speaker 2: shots fired.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, yeah, yep.
Speaker 3: I think it's really good to remember that when you
Speaker 3: are seeing some ube they tell you need to be
Speaker 3: able to have thirty rounds in five five hundred yards.
Speaker 1: I don't go downtown without my backpack and my SBR
Speaker 1: and three hundred black at with six thirty round magazine successible.
Speaker 2: I was in conceptive Man Scat of cities. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I carry an RPG and I take the little safety
Speaker 2: camp off because I like to live that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, dangerously down. My clothing is made out
Speaker 1: of debt cord. I just wear nothing but debt cord
Speaker 1: wherever I go. We're all going down.
Speaker 2: At least you take some people with you. It's all
Speaker 2: city blocks though. Yeah, self defense mataden. But let me
Speaker 2: say one more thing about long arms. Another thing you'll
Speaker 2: see from people that are new in the space, depending
Speaker 2: on what they've seen or what they've consumed. This is
Speaker 2: going to get some hate. Don't bother with aks, Yeah,
Speaker 2: just don't. This is the United States of America, and
Speaker 2: this country believes in the air fifteen. And what that
Speaker 2: boiled down to is they're everywhere. They're prolific. The parts
Speaker 2: are here, yeah, the repairs here, they're well manufactured. When
Speaker 2: you stray from that course to something like an AK,
Speaker 2: your first while, you're losing eronomics. But that's a different problem.
Speaker 2: You're dealing with an unknown quantity of problems. You get
Speaker 2: an air fifteen. That's what's in this country. It's what's prolific. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if you were in if you were in somewhere war
Speaker 2: torn Africa, get your AK here.
Speaker 1: I'll say this about the war torn AK countries because
Speaker 1: I've been in three countries where the primary arm is
Speaker 1: an AK M right, like a kind of AK right Siria, Ukraine,
Speaker 1: in Iraq. In all three of those countries, every soldier
Speaker 1: who knew their stuff, who was proficient and had the option,
Speaker 1: chosen AR platform. If they could get one hundred percent
Speaker 1: of the time, they're just better fire arms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's been my experience as well. They look cool,
Speaker 2: but but don't go Yeah, just get an air forea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, I love my ak's, but they're they're range
Speaker 1: fut toys, right like.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about.
Speaker 3: Accessorizing, which again is much easier with ais and aks. Like,
Speaker 3: what other stuff you need to build into a budget.
Speaker 3: If you've not show up before, you might not know
Speaker 3: that you need a pro I pro sling, maybe ulster.
Speaker 2: Well, we'll start with the firearms accessories, right, So with
Speaker 2: the pistol. First of all, we talked about safe storage.
Speaker 2: That's already off the table. With the pistol, if you
Speaker 2: plan to carry it, you need a good reliable holster
Speaker 2: and a good reliable gun belt.
Speaker 1: Good lord, yes.
Speaker 2: Depending on how you want to carry it. That'll determine
Speaker 2: the kind of holster. If you want an outside the waistband,
Speaker 2: which means it sits outside your belt, that's one thing.
Speaker 2: If you're carrying it concealed, you're probably gonna want an
Speaker 2: inside the waistband, which goes between your belt and your body.
Speaker 2: Again under the level of training there, because when you're
Speaker 2: drawing from that, things can go wrong. Sure, and that's
Speaker 2: where people tend to shoot themselves. So that's what you
Speaker 2: needed to be very cautious of. Yeah, but with a pistol,
Speaker 2: typically you're going to want probably an extra magazine or two.
Speaker 2: It may come with one, depending on what you bought.
Speaker 2: A quality gun belt and a quality holster.
Speaker 1: Now what about a forty four derringer and an ankle
Speaker 1: holster on each angle? Right like that seems like the
Speaker 1: ideal solution. Anytime you're in danger. You just got a
Speaker 1: squat right down there, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: get real low, especially when you've.
Speaker 2: Been pushed pushed onto your back by by the mob
Speaker 2: and you're there in that scene and you're pulling it
Speaker 2: out of your ankle holster.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, no, no, no, just just get a wire
Speaker 1: around the trigger and attach it to your toes so
Speaker 1: that you can squeeze your toes and fire the What.
Speaker 2: You need is the belt buckle revolver from North American US. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that is great. Yeah, no, from that freaking movie, the
Speaker 2: vampire movie Quinn Tarantino.
Speaker 1: Oh geez, so that's still done.
Speaker 2: God yeah, no, before the belt, a magazine or two
Speaker 2: extra it might come with them, and a quality holster. Now,
Speaker 2: the obvious question is what's a quality holster And the
Speaker 2: obvious answer is there's too many out there to be
Speaker 2: able to offer you that answer right now. Probably something
Speaker 2: polymer if it's going to be outside the waistband. And
Speaker 2: this will be another one that'll get people fired up. Generally,
Speaker 2: avoid the Surpa holsters unless you really want to have
Speaker 2: a lot of training. Surple holsters are one that have
Speaker 2: a little button on the side that the gun to
Speaker 2: come out if you're not brained well or have the
Speaker 2: wrong gun in it. It also allows you to accidentally shoot
Speaker 2: yourself quite easily as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, best avoided. That's that's a very good point. And
Speaker 1: also one thing I will note is there's a danger
Speaker 1: that a lot of people aren't aware of with leather,
Speaker 1: which is that leather holsters. Now, there are some leather
Speaker 1: holsters that have like a trigger area reinforced with kaidex,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, a rigid, plasticky substance. But if
Speaker 1: it's not in time, those can start to like get
Speaker 1: weaker and warn in such a way that it can
Speaker 1: also cause it to press the trigger when you holster it. Like,
Speaker 1: that's a thing that has happened to people. So I
Speaker 1: generally think you want whatever you want the trigger guard
Speaker 1: to be rigid and not something that's going to like
Speaker 1: warp and be malleable around the trigger, right, Like the
Speaker 1: whole point is that it stops the trigger from fire.
Speaker 3: Yes, this you want to avoid that. How about with
Speaker 3: the with the long guns, like what are you going
Speaker 3: to need to budget for those? And then other things
Speaker 3: like for shooting Germany that you'll need if you don't
Speaker 3: already have.
Speaker 2: So when it comes to the long arm, we already
Speaker 2: said if you're going to get an Air fifteen, you're
Speaker 2: going to want to stick some sort of red dot
Speaker 2: site on it. The lowest cost ones that are the
Speaker 2: unbelievably bomb proof are a Chinese company called hollow Sun. Hell, yeah,
Speaker 2: I have a hollow Sun from twenty seventeen. That is
Speaker 2: still works just fine. I love my hollow suns. Yea,
Speaker 2: my hollow sun's been bounced down an asphalt road and
Speaker 2: it still works fine.
Speaker 1: So it's the opposite of a fail sun, a hollow sun.
Speaker 2: So you can pick up a red dot hollow sun.
Speaker 2: Those can go and you can get those sometimes sometimes
Speaker 2: that low is like one hundred and fifty bucks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you'll need a red dot site. A sling is nice,
Speaker 2: not required, especially if you're going to be using within
Speaker 2: the premises of your property. You probably don't need to
Speaker 2: worry about that. It Also, slings can cause issues like
Speaker 2: get caught on things or things in your house or
Speaker 2: even tangle you up. So that's this training issue. So
Speaker 2: sling is iffy an extra magazine or two. And if
Speaker 2: you're planning on needing to use this for a defensive
Speaker 2: purpose inside of your home or structure or at night,
Speaker 2: it's not the worst thing in the world to throw
Speaker 2: on a flashlight.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, especially if it's like a defensive firearm, like
Speaker 1: it's your home defense gun or a carry gun like
Speaker 1: a flashlight. And also if you're I think it's generally
Speaker 1: a good idea if you're going to carry a carry
Speaker 1: firearm with a flashlight. Have another flashlight that's not on
Speaker 1: a gun, because one thing you should never do is
Speaker 1: use your gun flashlight to look at just random shit
Speaker 1: that you need a flashlight.
Speaker 2: When you come home at night in the dark. You forgot,
Speaker 2: you forgot, you can't find which key is the right Nah,
Speaker 2: don't do that. Don't do that.
Speaker 3: Don't do that. That's a pretty good list of accessories.
Speaker 3: And make sure you have a lad air and eye
Speaker 3: protection as well.
Speaker 2: So that's we're gonna go all the safety side of things.
Speaker 2: You need proper shooting glasses. That means not the glasses
Speaker 2: that you picked up for readers at Walgreen. If they're
Speaker 2: shooting glasses can be as cheap as nine bucks all
Speaker 2: the way up to hundreds of bucks. You can get
Speaker 2: them at the sporting good store. But there does not
Speaker 2: with the kind of plastic to be able to take
Speaker 2: shrapnel or hits from pieces of fragments that are high velocity.
Speaker 2: They're meant for that. So ten dollars shooting glasses. Yes, yes,
Speaker 2: hearing protection.
Speaker 10: Those can be squishy earplugs you put in your ear,
Speaker 10: or they can be over the head mouths. Do not
Speaker 10: ever shoot guns except in the most critical conditions or
Speaker 10: situations without eye protection and hearing protection. Because that's the
Speaker 10: kind of stuff where you lose an eye and every
Speaker 10: time you fire that gun, you're losing hearing every time.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, and like for the really because obviously most
Speaker 1: like it hurts to shoot a firearm without hearing protection.
Speaker 1: Like you can get away with shooting a gun without
Speaker 1: EyePro every time, but the one time, right, which is
Speaker 1: why I really emphasize eye protection. It's easy to convince
Speaker 1: yourself I don't need to have it on right now, you.
Speaker 2: Do, like, because that's the day that it does the thing.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, guns do fuck up for lack of a
Speaker 1: better tear and you really don't want your eye unprotected
Speaker 1: if they do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's a bad.
Speaker 2: Day, absolutely, and so but you on the safety side
Speaker 2: of eye protection and hearing protection, it can be as
Speaker 2: cheap as ten dollars shooting glasses and a bottle of
Speaker 2: squishy earplugs. You're going to be in there for twenty bucks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it doesn't have to be expensive. Make sure
Speaker 3: you have it and make sure you use it.
Speaker 2: But you know what, before you do any of this,
Speaker 2: you know what's a smart thing to do. Go take
Speaker 2: a class from Stop the Bleed and learn how to
Speaker 2: use tourniquets and medical gear. Yeah, and have that around
Speaker 2: anyway before you ever buy a gun. Go do that, Yes,
Speaker 2: a mess, that's the most important thing you could do
Speaker 2: for anyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yes, And that, as you said, should be a
Speaker 1: priority before getting the firearm. And if you have the
Speaker 1: money to get and train a gun, you have no
Speaker 1: excuse for not having an individual first Aid kit an
Speaker 1: IFAC and the knowledge of how to use it.
Speaker 2: Ye right, And I think Stop the Bleed classes are
Speaker 2: usually free. You can look it up and Stop the
Speaker 2: Bleed dot com or dot org, google it. Take a
Speaker 2: class that's chasy, how to use a tournique, use how
Speaker 2: to use a bandage. Have an IPAC, as was just mentioned,
Speaker 2: can be a pretty simple kit. And as you said, Robert,
Speaker 2: if you can afford a gun, you can afford that
Speaker 2: and have that with you on the range anytime you're shooting,
Speaker 2: because as you said, guns can fuck up. They usually don't,
Speaker 2: but if they do, you're gonna want that I fact,
Speaker 2: and that I fact, and that training might just help
Speaker 2: your neighbor one day when they get in a car
Speaker 2: accident or whatever.
Speaker 1: I regularly make the decision not to carry my gun
Speaker 1: with me places. Right, you know, I'm gonna go out
Speaker 1: and get drunk tonight. I don't need if I have
Speaker 1: a fire alarm one me when I'm drunk. But you
Speaker 1: know what I always have is the IFAC, right every
Speaker 1: single time. You know, because number one drunk with an
Speaker 1: I FAC, I'm no.
Speaker 4: I might.
Speaker 1: I'm probably less effective, but I'm not going to endanger anyone.
Speaker 2: You're just like, hey, buddy, I think you need a
Speaker 2: PARNA kit and he's like, no, give me here. Google said,
Speaker 2: this goes around the neck. But once again, a softable
Speaker 2: class and an IPAC is more likely to serve you
Speaker 2: or your community more than any gun ever will.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's a great place. I would say that.
Speaker 3: If you are going down this pathway and you're looking
Speaker 3: to join openly leftist gun organizations, there are several, right
Speaker 3: John Brown, grun Club, Socialist RFE Association.
Speaker 2: We've had those people on a show before.
Speaker 3: Be cautious when you're doing that, and keep an eye
Speaker 3: on things because that could be something that might get
Speaker 3: you into trouble in the long run. So it's something
Speaker 3: to be aware of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it might be good to just put a holder
Speaker 1: on joining a new organization until we're a few months
Speaker 1: into this thing coming up next year. Maybe have an
Speaker 1: idea about what kind of things might be safe and
Speaker 1: what kind of things might be less safe.
Speaker 2: Definitely, no, but none of that stops you from using signal,
Speaker 2: building community and learning how to use a firearm properly.
Speaker 1: Right at meeting people, yes, and like training with them,
Speaker 1: you know, and taking getting training, building proficiency. Absolutely, all
Speaker 1: of that is legal and will remain legal. Just don't
Speaker 1: start if anyone ever talks to you about let's make
Speaker 1: a militia to do that, it's time to leave that conversation,
Speaker 1: right because, among other things, at this point, there's a
Speaker 1: good chance it's the FBI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you live in Michigan, do not. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this podcast brought to you by co Intel proh.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2: But I mean it's a tough challenge. And so the
Speaker 2: other thing you can do is also, once you've got
Speaker 2: your basic proficiency up and you know that you are
Speaker 2: safe in terms of handling things, let me throw this
Speaker 2: out there too. It doesn't have to be any specific one,
Speaker 2: although remember you're going into a space that may not
Speaker 2: be politically your comfortable place. A good place to build
Speaker 2: up skill is to go shoot matches competitions. Yeah, for
Speaker 2: the most part, it's business oriented. You'll see you'll hear
Speaker 2: some stupid comments here or there, depending on what match
Speaker 2: you're at, But the reality is you're not there for that.
Speaker 2: You're there to get better with your gun on a
Speaker 2: course of fire that they put up for you. Pay
Speaker 2: your ten bucks or twenty bucks and learn how to
Speaker 2: shoot better in those conditions. And that's another space to
Speaker 2: once the basic trainings out of the way, don't go
Speaker 2: to match the b training. Use the match to help
Speaker 2: increase your skill after you've gotten training. But those matches
Speaker 2: can be a place to really help you out a lot.
Speaker 2: And there's a lot of them around and those are
Speaker 2: easier to find than almost anything.
Speaker 3: Yep, practice scores where you can lick them up if
Speaker 3: you're into that.
Speaker 2: Kind of thing. Excellent, Thanks very much for joining uskyle.
Speaker 3: Do you want to very briefly plug your YouTube channel
Speaker 3: where can people find you?
Speaker 11: Well?
Speaker 2: Sure, and thank you for having me on the show.
Speaker 2: It's always a treat. I really appreciate it. It's always
Speaker 2: great to be able just to hang out with you
Speaker 2: both do it more often. You can find my work
Speaker 2: It's in Range TV. You can find my website at
Speaker 2: Range dot tv. I'm distributed, decentralized across multiple platforms, a
Speaker 2: predominant one being YouTube. Cover everything from civil rights history,
Speaker 2: human rights to firearms to from old West flintlocks up
Speaker 2: to the most modern machine guns across the channel. Some
Speaker 2: of it is instructional, some of its history. And I've
Speaker 2: got a cool video dropping tomorrow, in fact, well tomorrow
Speaker 2: based on when we're recording this on the Opium Wars
Speaker 2: and how Britain and China's firearms technology discrepancy caused Hong
Speaker 2: Kong to be owned by Britain. That's the kind of
Speaker 2: stuff I do on my channel, So check that out.
Speaker 2: And if you want to find matches that are going
Speaker 2: to be a place that is truly an inclusive space,
Speaker 2: we do run matches called Brutality Matches. You can find
Speaker 2: them at brutalitymatches dot org. They're not monthly, we have
Speaker 2: run a couple of them across the country, but I
Speaker 2: can guarantee you that's the space you will feel comfortable
Speaker 2: because we make.
Speaker 1: It that way. Awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks col.
Speaker 12: Last week, two major news networks CNN and CNBC partnered
Speaker 12: with the so called prediction market Calshi, an online political
Speaker 12: betting platform, to use Calshi's real time betting data in
Speaker 12: TV news segments, online news content, and, as Calshi announced
Speaker 12: on X the Everything app quote to integrate prediction markets
Speaker 12: into CNN's global newsroom, with Calshi threatening quote, a new
Speaker 12: era of media is here. This is it could happen here.
Speaker 12: I'm Garrison Davis. Regular CNN viewers may have noticed this
Speaker 12: integration has already been happening for some time. This past
Speaker 12: election cycle, news anchors used betting odds in place of
Speaker 12: an addition to polling data to weigh the likelihood of
Speaker 12: candidate's winning elections. CNN's chief data analyst, Harry Enton Nate
Speaker 12: Silver Protege, who used to work for five point thirty
Speaker 12: eight trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news
Speaker 12: stories earlier this year. How she praised Entin by name
Speaker 12: in their announcement of the CNN partnership.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 12: Enton is an expert at translating what data and polling
Speaker 12: are saying on any given issue, and through this integration,
Speaker 12: he can tap into real time prediction markets data to
Speaker 12: better inform and fact check his reporting unquote. Here's an
Speaker 12: example of this reporting in a CNN segment from October
Speaker 12: twenty twenty five.
Speaker 13: If you go back six months ago, you go back
Speaker 13: to April k Bauld when what were we looking at. Well,
Speaker 13: we were looking at the Democrats with a very clear
Speaker 13: shot of taking control of the US House of Representatives.
Speaker 13: According to the Calshi prediction market odds. We saw them
Speaker 13: in an eighty three percent chance. But those odds have
Speaker 13: gone plummeting down. Now we're talking about just a sixty
Speaker 13: three percent chance, while the gopiece chances up like a
Speaker 13: rocket up like gold, up from seventeen percent to now
Speaker 13: a thirty seven percent chance.
Speaker 1: So we'll look like a pretty clear.
Speaker 13: Demo likely Democratic winning the House come next year has
Speaker 13: become much closer to toss up at this point, although
Speaker 13: still slightly leading Democratic.
Speaker 12: Harry Enton never clarifies how these quote unquote odds are
Speaker 12: formed for what they really are. To a viewer who
Speaker 12: just tuned in or maybe isn't paying that much attention,
Speaker 12: it would be very unclear that these numbers are actually
Speaker 12: from a gambling website. They're just big percentages displayed on
Speaker 12: screen the way you would see pull data or legitimate
Speaker 12: information used in a newsroom. This short section using the
Speaker 12: Calshi prediction market odds was then followed by three minutes
Speaker 12: of analysis using selective mid term voting data from twenty
Speaker 12: seventeen to twenty eighteen to support the movement in these
Speaker 12: gambling odds. The gambling ods themselves were a load bearing
Speaker 12: piece of information in this piece. Calshi's main competitor, another
Speaker 12: so called prediction market called poly Market, partnered with x
Speaker 12: the Everything app and Yahoo Finance earlier this year to
Speaker 12: integrate their prediction data into online news content. Time Magazine
Speaker 12: and Sports Illustrated have also both launched deals with the
Speaker 12: prediction market platform Galactic. So what exactly are these prediction
Speaker 12: markets and how do they function? On poly Market and Calshi,
Speaker 12: users can bet yes or no on the outcome of
Speaker 12: a question relating to world events, which is called a market.
Speaker 12: As more money is wagered on either side, the odds
Speaker 12: of the outcome change. Currently, top questions include various predictions
Speaker 12: for Time Person of the Year, will the US strike
Speaker 12: Venezuela before the end of the year, the release of
Speaker 12: the Epstein files, and who will be the next president.
Speaker 12: Calshi has Trump's chances at six percent. Here's Polymarket CEO
Speaker 12: Shane Copelan explaining on sixty minutes.
Speaker 11: You make money if you're right, you lose money if
Speaker 11: you're wrong, and as a result, it creates this information
Speaker 11: that's reallyseful for people.
Speaker 12: These companies would like you to believe that the ratio
Speaker 12: of people betting yes or no on a certain outcome
Speaker 12: of world events is somehow useful or reliable information for
Speaker 12: the general public to forecast the future, whether that's through
Speaker 12: betting on the likelihood of an upcoming recession, the winner
Speaker 12: of a sports game, which days of the week Israel
Speaker 12: will be Gaza, or what movie will win Best Picture.
Speaker 12: Almost fifty million dollars is currently being wagered over a
Speaker 12: potential Russia Ukraine ceasefire in twenty twenty five. Production markets
Speaker 12: currently have three billion dollars in weekly trading volume. I
Speaker 12: do need to note these companies argue that hedging outcomes
Speaker 12: of world events legally is not gambling, because that would
Speaker 12: be illegal. Payments through unauthorized gambling sites are illegal under
Speaker 12: the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of two thousand and six,
Speaker 12: which suppressed the early prediction markets of the two thousands
Speaker 12: but Kalshi is regulated as a platform for trading financial
Speaker 12: derivatives rather than securities trading or straight up legalized gambling,
Speaker 12: and this determines what entity they have to register with
Speaker 12: and what regulations they're subject to. Calshi launched in twenty
Speaker 12: twenty one with a federal license from the Commodity Futures
Speaker 12: Trading Commission, and after a year's long battle, in October
Speaker 12: twenty twenty four, a federal appeals court ruled in favor
Speaker 12: of Calshi, allowing online prediction market betting on US elections,
Speaker 12: rejecting claims by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that the
Speaker 12: practice was illegal gambling and their concerns that prediction market
Speaker 12: betting could undermine election integrity. Former CFDC chairman Rostam Benham
Speaker 12: misstatement in May of twenty twenty four, reading quote contracts
Speaker 12: involving political events ultimately commoditize and degrade the integrity of
Speaker 12: the uniquely American experience participating in the democratic electoral process.
Speaker 12: Allowing these contracts would push the CFTC, a financial market regulator,
Speaker 12: into a position far beyond its congressional mandate and expertise.
Speaker 12: A week before his dad took office in January twenty
Speaker 12: twenty five, Donald Trump Junior became a strategic advisor at Calshi.
Speaker 12: Polymarket launched in twenty twenty without registering with the Commodity
Speaker 12: Futures Trading Commission, and was fined one point four million
Speaker 12: dollars by the CFTC in twenty twenty two for operating
Speaker 12: as an unregulated exchange and was henceforth prohibited from allowing
Speaker 12: bets from US based users, though the poly Market CEO
Speaker 12: sees it a little different.
Speaker 14: It was at one point four million dollar fine and
Speaker 14: also U was a settlement and you could not have
Speaker 14: customers in the United States.
Speaker 11: Yeah, we had to go in jeoblock trading in the
Speaker 11: US and move certain operations offshore. And it wasn't hey,
Speaker 11: you're banned from trading the US. It's like until you're licensed.
Speaker 4: I mean it was breaking the law.
Speaker 2: I mean people say breaking the law. It's like which
Speaker 2: law you know? So if anything it's.
Speaker 4: Incompatible, it's incompatible with the law.
Speaker 2: Yet, with the regulatory matrix that existed.
Speaker 12: The past two years, Polymarket has found to be facilitating
Speaker 12: illegal gambling and subsequently banned in the countries of Switzerland, France,
Speaker 12: the UK, Poland, Upore, Belgium, Romania and Australia. Most of
Speaker 12: these bans just require geoblocking users, which can be easily
Speaker 12: circumvented through the use of a VPN, and since the
Speaker 12: financial transactions on poly market are all done through cryptocurrency,
Speaker 12: it's not clear that polymarket is taking any steps to
Speaker 12: enforce these bans beyond geo blocking. In the midst of
Speaker 12: facing regulatory hurdles and bands from across the globe, Polymarket
Speaker 12: still exploded in popularity last year, attracting investment from Peter
Speaker 12: Thiel's venture capital firm and hundreds of thousands of new users,
Speaker 12: primarily driven by betting on the US presidential election, speculation
Speaker 12: on whether Biden would drop out of the race and
Speaker 12: who Trump would pick as vice president, all despite the
Speaker 12: platform technically being banned in the United States after the
Speaker 12: first presidential debate in July twenty twenty four, around the
Speaker 12: attempted assassination of Trump and the RNCA, Polymarket gained sixty
Speaker 12: thousand new accounts. The year prior, polymarket averaged two thousand,
Speaker 12: three hundred new accounts per month. August twenty twenty four
Speaker 12: saw seventy thousand new accounts September ninety thousand, October three
Speaker 12: hundred thousand, the month after Trump's second inauguration four hundred thousand. Currently,
Speaker 12: polymarket has over sixty thousand daily active traders and hundreds
Speaker 12: of thousands of monthly traders since October twenty twenty four.
Speaker 12: To give another example of their recent growth, in April
Speaker 12: twenty twenty three, Polymarket's monthly volume was about three million dollars.
Speaker 12: A year later, it was thirty nine million. In November
Speaker 12: twenty twenty four, it was two point five billion. Last month,
Speaker 12: it was three point seven billion. In summer twenty twenty five,
Speaker 12: cash Ptel's, FBI and a CFTC under Trump dropped investigations
Speaker 12: into whether polymarket was illegally allowing US users to place
Speaker 12: bets using VPNs. Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump Junior's venture capital
Speaker 12: firm invested in the platform, and Trump Junior himself joined
Speaker 12: Polymarket's advisory board. Curiously, a few days after Trump Junior
Speaker 12: joined Polymarket, the Commodity Futures Training Commission announced it was
Speaker 12: going to allow polymarket to operate in the United States
Speaker 12: after acquiring another company that held a US license. This
Speaker 12: past October, Trump's own Truth Social announced it was partnering
Speaker 12: with Crypto dot com to launch truth Predict quote, a
Speaker 12: revolutionary prediction market backed by President tru for enhanced decision
Speaker 12: making unquote. When Barry Weiss's sixty Minutes did a puff
Speaker 12: piece on poly Market with its CEO last week, Anderson
Speaker 12: Cooper inquired about the risk of insider trading, poly Markets
Speaker 12: CEO Shane Kaplan seemed to think that a little bit
Speaker 12: of insider trading might be good actually.
Speaker 14: But predicted markets do rely on someone having some inside information.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think that people going and having an edge
Speaker 11: to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need
Speaker 11: to curate them, and you need to be really clear
Speaker 11: and stringent on where the line is drawn in like
Speaker 11: sort of ethics, and we spend a lot of time
Speaker 11: on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this
Speaker 11: will happen and there's a lot of benefits from it
Speaker 11: and people will adapt.
Speaker 12: The CEO did not elaborate on what poly markets practice
Speaker 12: of curating insider trading looks like and where their quote
Speaker 12: unquote stringent line is drawn, because in reality it doesn't
Speaker 12: seem this line exists. They essentially encourage insider trading through
Speaker 12: these vague statements and lack of clear enforcement. From the
Speaker 12: point of view of these platforms, insider trading makes their
Speaker 12: prediction markets more accurate, so it's a net positive, and
Speaker 12: if it fucks over some users on the other side
Speaker 12: of a bet, that's just the cost of business. Last week,
Speaker 12: an alleged insider trader won over a million dollars for
Speaker 12: bets on Google's twenty twenty five year in search rankings,
Speaker 12: listing twenty two out of twenty three in the correct order.
Speaker 12: This user has made a series of early bets related
Speaker 12: to Google the past year, like the exact release date
Speaker 12: of Google's Gemini three point zero, which they won one
Speaker 12: hundred and fifty thousand dollars on. But because this polymarket
Speaker 12: user isn't trading stock, there's no clear regulatory mechanism to
Speaker 12: stop this behavior, and poly market can't reverse these trades
Speaker 12: because they run through the blockchain, not that they would
Speaker 12: even necessarily want to. Professional gambler, political data analyst and
Speaker 12: poly Market advisor Nate Silver was also asked about insider
Speaker 12: trading on the China Talk podcast two months ago.
Speaker 2: Are you worried about insider trading with this.
Speaker 15: With all this political betting, I mean there's an aspect
Speaker 15: of like, look, these are all crypto, uh, you know,
Speaker 15: you get on these markets with crypto and like like
Speaker 15: there were markets like which way is Suzanne Collins going
Speaker 15: to vote? And you know the sort of the like
Speaker 15: you know, like the tail outcomes for like a legislative
Speaker 15: assistant in her office? Are you know you can make
Speaker 15: ten times your salary? And like a minute, right, what's
Speaker 15: your what's your think think on this?
Speaker 4: For sure?
Speaker 16: I mean, look, I think there are a couple of
Speaker 16: qualifications though, Like, first of all, I think people on
Speaker 16: the inside often aren't as well as some formed as
Speaker 16: they think, and or there are.
Speaker 2: Some downsides having an inside view and not an outside
Speaker 2: of you.
Speaker 16: You might drink the kool aid, so to speak, right,
Speaker 16: you might be in a bubble.
Speaker 15: Yeah, look, I mean, I mean there are ones where
Speaker 15: it's like you can literally I mean there's been a
Speaker 15: lots of group chats people talking about like very very
Speaker 15: sketchy trades, uh and one way bets that are being
Speaker 15: made in the stock market of like what's going to
Speaker 15: happen with a trade deal? I mean you can literally
Speaker 15: be the person who decides right and be vetting on
Speaker 15: the side if they're weird.
Speaker 16: If there are incentives to make money in a world
Speaker 16: of eight million people, many of them are very competitive,
Speaker 16: in all of whom and not all of them, most
Speaker 16: of them access to the Internet. Right, people are gonna
Speaker 16: find a way a way to do it.
Speaker 12: Right, let's pause here for a sec. What do you
Speaker 12: think Nick goes on to list as a comparison to
Speaker 12: political insider trading as like an unfortunate but somewhat inevitable
Speaker 12: consequence of our evolving system of fire, as like.
Speaker 16: In the crypto space, we've seen like an increasing number
Speaker 16: of like crypto kidnappings. Right, Well, I mean that's one
Speaker 16: of the consequences if people are worth vast amounts of
Speaker 16: wealth that isn't very secure. It's just it's just gonna
Speaker 16: gonna happen until you up security or have better solutions
Speaker 16: or whatever else.
Speaker 4: And so like, you know, I don't think there's.
Speaker 16: Necessarily anymore or less insider creating on like polymarket than there.
Speaker 4: Might be for in sports betting sides.
Speaker 16: We've seen a lot of sports betting scandals or for
Speaker 16: regular equities. You know, I believe the literature says that
Speaker 16: like members of Congress achieve abnormal returns from their stock portfolios.
Speaker 4: I'd have to do. I'm sure there's some debate about that.
Speaker 4: I have to like to double check that.
Speaker 17: Right.
Speaker 12: It's fine, bros. It's just like cryptocurrency kidnapping. It's fine.
Speaker 4: Actually.
Speaker 12: So Naate goes on to say that prediction market insider
Speaker 12: trading isn't that different from congressmen doing insider trading on
Speaker 12: the stock market, or like rigged sports betting, but he
Speaker 12: really neglects to emphasize that those things are also bad
Speaker 12: and should be aggressively clamped down on. That shouldn't be allowed,
Speaker 12: and prediction markets intentionally skirt regulation. They currently have far
Speaker 12: less legal protections for users against unfair practices, and with
Speaker 12: crypto they can be pretty anonymized, enabling bad actors. And
Speaker 12: now news companies are legitimizing turning everyone's phone into a
Speaker 12: corrupt casino for world events, whether that's Israel starving Palestine
Speaker 12: or how many tweets Elon Musk is going to publish
Speaker 12: this week. The day before CAWSHI announced their partnership agreement
Speaker 12: with CNN and NCNBC, CBS aired a sixty minutes puff
Speaker 12: piece on polymarket, anchored by Anderson Cooper.
Speaker 4: When we met with Copeland.
Speaker 14: Last month, more than three point six million dollars had
Speaker 14: been wagered on whether or not Venezuela's president, Nicholas Muduro
Speaker 14: would be out.
Speaker 18: Of power by the end of the year.
Speaker 14: Polymarket users didn't think, so they gave it only a
Speaker 14: twenty three percent chance. And if you buy no on that,
Speaker 14: and you're buying it at seventy eight cents and at
Speaker 14: the end of the year he's still in power, yeah,
Speaker 14: you get a dollar per share, so you've made a
Speaker 14: profit of twenty two to share. I can see why
Speaker 14: this would be I mean, I don't want to use
Speaker 14: a term addictive, but it would be compelling.
Speaker 4: I mean maybe it is a tick fire. No, well,
Speaker 4: certainly compelling.
Speaker 1: This is how I see it.
Speaker 11: If you are into geopolitics, this creates an incentive for
Speaker 11: you to dig in to what's going on in Venezuela
Speaker 11: and try and get an edge.
Speaker 12: Anderson Cooper, who both works for the newly Calshi partnered
Speaker 12: CNN as well as CBS's Sixty Minutes, is so hesitant
Speaker 12: to call this clearly addictive practice addictive, quote unquote compelling.
Speaker 12: Here's how Polymarket CEO Shane Copelan explained the platform earlier
Speaker 12: in this piece.
Speaker 11: It's a site where you can basically bet on current events,
Speaker 11: some sort of question about the future, like an election,
Speaker 11: and as a result, when a ton of people are betting,
Speaker 11: you get the betting odds, which basically tell you how
Speaker 11: likely each outcome is.
Speaker 14: And how accurate is it.
Speaker 2: It's the most.
Speaker 11: Accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone
Speaker 11: else creates some sort of super crystal ball.
Speaker 12: Anderson Cooper responds with narration that the CEO quote may
Speaker 12: be prone to hyperbole, but he's definitely onto something unquote.
Speaker 12: In explaining how polymarket users attempt to seek truth and
Speaker 12: gain an edge, Copeland told the story of how in
Speaker 12: twenty twenty four, an anonymous French user made over eighty
Speaker 12: million dollars on Polymarket by betting on Trump winning the
Speaker 12: presidential election, and to bolster his bets, he contracted you
Speaker 12: gov to conduct private polls in swing states.
Speaker 11: People thought he'd just liked Trump, and he had actually
Speaker 11: commissioned a ton of private polls something called neighbor polling,
Speaker 11: which is you ask people who they think their neighbors.
Speaker 2: Are likely to vote for.
Speaker 11: For scenarios for an election where there's a stigma to
Speaker 11: saying you're going to vote for somebody, and people feel
Speaker 11: some sort of social awkwardness. And what he noticed was
Speaker 11: there was huge discrepancy in the neighbor polling versus the
Speaker 11: normal polling, and the neighbor polling favored Trump enormously.
Speaker 2: He thought Trump was undervalued.
Speaker 11: If this guy was not able to make eighty million,
Speaker 11: but rather able to make eighty thousand dollars, he would
Speaker 11: have never gone through the hassle. But when you get
Speaker 11: markets that are big enough, you create this incentive for
Speaker 11: people to go above and beyond to try and find truth.
Speaker 12: What the CEO is arguing here is that the sheer
Speaker 12: scale of money being wagered creates incentive to quote unquote
Speaker 12: find truths. In media discussions of prediction markets, there's this
Speaker 12: specter of objectivity around the gambled odds, which obviously the
Speaker 12: CEO of poly Market has a personal incentive to encourage.
Speaker 12: But Anderson Cooper here doesn't challenge this notion of t truth.
Speaker 12: Even though Donald Trump was way ahead in prediction market
Speaker 12: odds back during the twenty twenty election, which had his
Speaker 12: chances of winning that election far higher than what pure
Speaker 12: polling models showed. Calshi claims that prediction markets can help
Speaker 12: journalists quote unquote fact check, but doesn't explain how fact
Speaker 12: can be determined from speculative gambling markets. Where is the
Speaker 12: fact in gambling? Well, we will find out after these
Speaker 12: ads to quote from polymarket advisor Nate Silver's blog The
Speaker 12: Silver Bulletin quote, It's basically good when people are more
Speaker 12: exposed to probabilities and they become more normalized. But of
Speaker 12: course I also analyze polls and build probabilistic models myself.
Speaker 12: In that capacity, I strongly disagree with the notion that
Speaker 12: prediction markets can serve as a good substitute for polls.
Speaker 12: These sorts of claims are sometimes advanced by the prediction
Speaker 12: market companies themselves, including Polymarket. To be fair, one minor
Speaker 12: pet peeve is that both reporters and readers often confuse
Speaker 12: probabilities for poll results. Quote, as Nate goes on to explain,
Speaker 12: if Trump is up fifty five to forty five over
Speaker 12: Kamala Harris on a prediction market, that's not saying that
Speaker 12: Trump is expected to win by ten points. It means
Speaker 12: that ten percent more users on the website favor Trump winning,
Speaker 12: which is pretty close to a toss up. This confusion
Speaker 12: is a huge problem which is bolstered in both how
Speaker 12: prediction market companies market their platform, but also how journalists
Speaker 12: use gambling data in news store. If you see a
Speaker 12: social media post, an advertisement, or a random news segment
Speaker 12: showing percentages tied to pictures of two politicians in a
Speaker 12: race without context, those betting numbers could be interpreted in
Speaker 12: a number of ways and influenced someone's perception of an
Speaker 12: election and maybe even their choice on who to vote for,
Speaker 12: or even whether to vote at all. In an October speech,
Speaker 12: Zora Mumdani reference to Calshi billboards predicting a Cuomo victory
Speaker 12: in the Democratic primary.
Speaker 19: When I walked the length of Manhattan just a few
Speaker 19: days before the election, hundreds of New Yorkers marched alongside me.
Speaker 19: And when we strolled into Times Square under a billboard
Speaker 19: with betting odds that showed Cuomo's chances of winning at
Speaker 19: nearly eighty percent, we knew that the so called experts
Speaker 19: were set to get it wrong yet again. Andrew Cuomo,
Speaker 19: it was supposed to be inevitable. When you see the
Speaker 19: Calcy odds that have our chances of victory in the nineties,
Speaker 19: know this. You are reading the same things that Andrew
Speaker 19: Cuomo read when he went to sleep each night in June,
Speaker 19: believing that his victory was promised. We cannot allow complacency
Speaker 19: to infiltrate this movement.
Speaker 12: Calci excitedly shared the latter half of that clip, proclaiming
Speaker 12: breaking zoron Mamdani references his Calci odds on stage, Calshi
Speaker 12: is mainstream quote despite this clip demonstrating how prediction markets
Speaker 12: often suffer from inaccurate bias. Last week, Discount Steve Kornaki,
Speaker 12: former five point thirty eight analyst and now CNN's data expert,
Speaker 12: Harry Enton shared this segment about the Tennessee District seven
Speaker 12: special election on X the Everything app with the caption
Speaker 12: odds are Dems will come within ten points of a win,
Speaker 12: if not outright win.
Speaker 20: I would say, if you had to look at the
Speaker 20: congressional map any district that Donald Trump won by twenty
Speaker 20: two points, you would say, you know, you've got like
Speaker 20: nearly a one hundred percent chance of winning if you're
Speaker 20: running for Congress there.
Speaker 2: But what are the prediction markets saying right now?
Speaker 13: You know, what are we talking about in terms of
Speaker 13: the prediction market us look the Democrat has a fifteen
Speaker 13: percent chance of winning in that race. Okay, a fifteen
Speaker 13: percent chance, which ain't nothing in a district that Donald
Speaker 13: Trump won by twenty two points. But here I think
Speaker 13: is the key nugget on this side of the of
Speaker 13: the ledger, and that is a GOP win by under
Speaker 13: ten points. There's a sixty eight percent chance of that.
Speaker 13: So there is a more than two thirds chance that
Speaker 13: the Republican candidate, Yes, they win, but they win by
Speaker 13: a significantly lower margin than Donald Trump. We're talking about
Speaker 13: double digits, smaller. We're talking about a huge, huge shift
Speaker 13: to the left. We're talking about when you add these
Speaker 13: two together, we're talking about a more than eighty percent
Speaker 13: chance that there is a clear double digit shift to
Speaker 13: the left, and a fifteen percent chance the Democrat actually
Speaker 13: wins in a district that Donald Trump won by twenty
Speaker 13: two points. That just shows you how bad the environment
Speaker 13: is for Republicans right now that the Democrat has any
Speaker 13: sort of a chance in this talk to me about.
Speaker 12: With special look, he's just authoritatively rattling off complete speculation
Speaker 12: on a Democrat victory. As big screens display percentages in
Speaker 12: huge text with source Calshi in tiny text, the bottom
Speaker 12: of the screen. Ordinary polling showed that this was a
Speaker 12: close race that leaned Red by two to eight points,
Speaker 12: and the Republican did end up winning by nine points.
Speaker 12: To quote the broken clock Nate silver quote. Without having
Speaker 12: polls to look at, the prediction markets would probably kind
Speaker 12: of suck at making election forecasts. Translating polls into probabilities
Speaker 12: is considerably more complicated when there are many correlated races
Speaker 12: is at once, such as in the battle for the
Speaker 12: Electoral College or control of Congress. Prediction markets had a
Speaker 12: strong twenty twenty four in this regard. They leaned toward
Speaker 12: Trump when our model had it at fifty to fifty.
Speaker 12: I don't think this was because of any special modeling
Speaker 12: insight per se, but because they incorporated some sort of
Speaker 12: prior intuition that Trump would overperform his polls. Again, so
Speaker 12: give the markets credit for that. These sorts of soft
Speaker 12: quote unquote intangible intuitions can be valuable, though you'd need
Speaker 12: a lot of data to determine whether they add or
Speaker 12: subtract value in the long run unquote. As Nate himself acknowledges,
Speaker 12: someone like Andrew Cuomo had much higher betting odds throughout
Speaker 12: the entire New York mayoral race than a purely statistical
Speaker 12: model would show. A contention I have with Nate. One
Speaker 12: of many is though I call prediction market numbers gambling odds.
Speaker 12: They are not actual probabilities. These odds aren't based on
Speaker 12: objective mathematical principles like flipping a coin, the three door problem,
Speaker 12: or even something like blackjack. These odds are created whole
Speaker 12: cloth through guessing, sometimes educated or data informed guessing, but
Speaker 12: still primarily through people's intuition, which is susceptible to group impulses.
Speaker 12: Many random world events lack a reliable basis of continuous
Speaker 12: controlled data that's needed to form a probability, like that
Speaker 12: which is applied to legalized sports betting. This is quite
Speaker 12: evident in the betting odds around the Last People Conclave,
Speaker 12: which had very little relevant data to use for informed predictions.
Speaker 12: There was no existing probability to support the election of
Speaker 12: an American pope, a first time occurrence. With prediction markets,
Speaker 12: people can still do research to make an informed bet,
Speaker 12: but it's not really the case that X candidate is
Speaker 12: mathematically expected to win an election. Eighty out of one
Speaker 12: hundred instances, a hive mind of users have formed that
Speaker 12: statistical division through the power of money. Eighty percent of
Speaker 12: users are betting that a certain result is likely to occur.
Speaker 12: So the problem isn't just that, like Nate says, people
Speaker 12: are confusing probabilities for polls. It's that they're confusing prediction
Speaker 12: market betting odds for mathematical probabilities. It's this difference that
Speaker 12: allows betting on sports outcomes via Calshian polymarket, even in
Speaker 12: states that ban typical sports betting, because you're not actually
Speaker 12: betting on fixed odds, you're betting against other investors. And
Speaker 12: now news companies are not just manufacturing consent and normalizing
Speaker 12: political gambling, but are actively incur the use of these
Speaker 12: platforms and endorsing the predictive capacity of these gambling markets.
Speaker 12: Anderson Cooper calls it the quote unquote wisdom of crowds.
Speaker 12: But we already have methods for learning group consensus, like polling,
Speaker 12: which may have problems, but frankly far fewer problems than
Speaker 12: gambling on world events. Beyond the moral qualms of betting
Speaker 12: money on human suffering, prediction markets are susceptible to not
Speaker 12: just personal bias, but group bias. Based on the current
Speaker 12: ratio of odds. This in group consensus can be influenced
Speaker 12: by short lived trending topics, and these platforms cater to
Speaker 12: a hyper online point of view. Prediction market users provide
Speaker 12: a very non representational sample variety pulling from a very
Speaker 12: specific type of guy who regularly uses these platforms. To
Speaker 12: quote from Calshe's CNN partnership announced quote Calshi has become
Speaker 12: the definitive source for staying informed about the future and
Speaker 12: is used by reporters, politicians, pundits, Wall Street and Main Street,
Speaker 12: and recently called the New York City mayoral election eight
Speaker 12: minutes after polls closed, hours before the media. It's because
Speaker 12: of this accuracy that Calshi's data will serve as a
Speaker 12: powerful compliment to c and n's reporting. Journalists can more
Speaker 12: easily surface credible information to their audiences about the real
Speaker 12: time probabilities of future cultural and political events unquote. In practice,
Speaker 12: this reporting mixes gambling data and actually reputable or credible
Speaker 12: polls in a confusing way, like this recent CNN segment
Speaker 12: which cites calshi odds on whether Trump will send tariff
Speaker 12: stimulus checks, as well as CBS you gov polling data
Speaker 12: on if tears lower prices back to back in this
Speaker 12: same segment, do.
Speaker 13: They think that the tariffs that these rebate checks are
Speaker 13: at actually coming and at this point no, No, I
Speaker 13: mean chance Trump tariff, the tariff simulus checks are sent
Speaker 13: to Americans by August of twenty twenty six. It's a
Speaker 13: twenty five percent chance. That's one in four. So that's
Speaker 13: not nothing. But the American people right now are craving,
Speaker 13: craving some relief, and at this point it doesn't look
Speaker 13: like it is coming. Although I will not John Berman,
Speaker 13: this twenty five percent, it is greater than this six
Speaker 13: percent who say that tariffs decreased prices, or that five
Speaker 13: percent back in March, which are just you never see one, two, three, four,
Speaker 13: five percent. So look, twenty five percent ain't nothing, but
Speaker 13: at this.
Speaker 18: Point it's low.
Speaker 20: Yeah, it's interesting the prediction markets think they only one
Speaker 20: in four chance that will actually happen.
Speaker 12: There is this really what the future of political forecasting
Speaker 12: is going to be?
Speaker 4: Maybe?
Speaker 12: Maybe not, but there are four horsemen of this political
Speaker 12: gambling apocalypse. Nate Silver via his gamification of election prediction
Speaker 12: based on his time as a professional gambler sports betting,
Speaker 12: especially since the Supreme Court struck down a federal law
Speaker 12: banning sports betting outside of Nevada in twenty eighteen, resulting
Speaker 12: in almost forty states subsequently legalizing some form of sports betting,
Speaker 12: which has facilitated the cassibility of gambling to grow dramatically
Speaker 12: across the country in the past ten years through the
Speaker 12: spread of online sports betting apps. The third horseman is Trump,
Speaker 12: for the Trump administration through their removal of regulatory hurdles
Speaker 12: facing prediction markets. And finally that CNN guy Harry Enton,
Speaker 12: a Nate Silver protege who trailblazed the use of political
Speaker 12: gambling data in news stories the past year. These four horsemen,
Speaker 12: Nate Silver, sports betting, Trump, and Harry Enton have created
Speaker 12: the cultural and political conditions for political gambling to spread.
Speaker 12: Like wildfire, which, hey, is also something you can bet on.
Speaker 12: During the LA Fires prediction market, users could bet on
Speaker 12: how many acres would burn. So what is the endgame
Speaker 12: of this, this gambling apocalypse that seems to be inching
Speaker 12: its way closer and closer to answer that? Here's a
Speaker 12: clip from Calshi co founder and CEO Trek Manser.
Speaker 17: The long term vision is to financialize everything and create
Speaker 17: a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. We
Speaker 17: are living in a word where like we have an
Speaker 17: abundance of information, but there's a lot of noise, and
Speaker 17: like we don't really understand what's real from what's not.
Speaker 17: Our prediction markets are an anadote to that. They do
Speaker 17: a very very good job at distilling information and surfacing
Speaker 17: truth to people. And you're seeing the sort of massive
Speaker 17: shift where like people are using them whenever they think
Speaker 17: about questions about the future, you know, whenever they're debating
Speaker 17: about anything. And I think that trajectory is going to
Speaker 17: keep going. That's a new consumer habit that I don't
Speaker 17: think is going to be undone.
Speaker 12: This is the demon child of crypto and sports betting,
Speaker 12: this financialization of everything to form a tradable asset out
Speaker 12: of any difference in opinion, creating new addictive consumer habits.
Speaker 12: These companies want to apply the logic of smartphone sports
Speaker 12: betting to everything, where everyone gets to be their own
Speaker 12: little Nate Silver while carrying around their own digital casino
Speaker 12: in their pocket, getting addicted to gambling on speculation of
Speaker 12: world suffering, and CNN is complicit in this. CNN and
Speaker 12: others have decided to partner with platforms that enable the
Speaker 12: people who decide when to drop bombs around the world
Speaker 12: to win millions of dollars by betting money on the
Speaker 12: choices they themselves are making at the expense of the
Speaker 12: rest of the world. And these companies think this is
Speaker 12: a good thing because the betting odds can serve as
Speaker 12: a potential heads up that something is likely to happen.
Speaker 12: Simple consumer protections for users, which currently are non existent,
Speaker 12: are just not enough. Congress needs to be far more
Speaker 12: involved in regulating online betting, and in the case of
Speaker 12: political events, it should just be completely banned. It is
Speaker 12: detrimental to a healthy society. It incentivizes corruption, cruelty, and
Speaker 12: erodes public trust. Gambling doesn't need to go away entirely,
Speaker 12: but it should return to being time and location locked.
Speaker 12: Go to Las Vegas like a fucking adult. Currently, there
Speaker 12: is no existing mechanism for individual states to regulate prediction markets.
Speaker 12: Only the federal government can, and Trump's federal government certainly
Speaker 12: seems like it's not going to considering the President's sun
Speaker 12: works for both of the main platforms, Kalshi and poly Market,
Speaker 12: and while news companies are legitimizing this, these platforms are
Speaker 12: now working as their own news aggregators, specifically Polymarket social
Speaker 12: media account, which is acting as a news aggregation account
Speaker 12: because that drives traffic back to their website, where people
Speaker 12: can bet on the news stories that Polymarket is sharing,
Speaker 12: even if those news stories are speculative or completely made up.
Speaker 12: On December fifth, Polymarket posted quote justin suspected J six
Speaker 12: pipe Bomber's legal council projected to argue he was included
Speaker 12: in Trump's pardon of those involved in January sixth unquote.
Speaker 12: This claim subsequently spread all around the Internet, parroted by
Speaker 12: people of a variety of political orientations. But if you
Speaker 12: read closely, the original post says suspected J six pipe
Speaker 12: Bomber's legal council projected to argue he was included in
Speaker 12: Trump's pardon, Polly Market is just spreading gambling information as
Speaker 12: if it is news content. Quote unquote projected just means
Speaker 12: that polymarket users are betting on this, But these projected
Speaker 12: posts are mixed in with other posts just aggregating the
Speaker 12: day's news. So unless you are paying super close attention,
Speaker 12: which rarely people on the Internet are, this becomes a
Speaker 12: trojan horse of disinformation. When news companies use the term
Speaker 12: projected on election night. Usually that indicates with pretty clear
Speaker 12: mathematical certainty that an event is going to happen. When
Speaker 12: polymarket uses projected in news tweets, it only indicates that
Speaker 12: Internet gamblers are swinging around money in an effort to
Speaker 12: create truth with once legitimate news companies not just complicit
Speaker 12: but active participants in this process. That doesn't for us
Speaker 12: today at it Could Happen Here, see you on the
Speaker 12: other side.
Speaker 4: Welcome to it Could Happen Here podcast, where a bunch
Speaker 4: of incredibly convoluted and very silly financial instruments to shore
Speaker 4: the entire world to come to me. I am your host,
Speaker 4: Mia Wong, and with me today is someone who does
Speaker 4: not spend all of her time deep in the bowels
Speaker 4: of arcane bullshit written by different Federal Reserve boards. And
Speaker 4: that is Maldy Conger, who is the host of the
Speaker 4: absolutely delightful I mean, okay, I guess this is a
Speaker 4: who is really winning here? Kind of question? In terms
Speaker 4: of things research.
Speaker 21: You spent a lot of time reading stuff written by
Speaker 21: Federal Reserve guys. I read a lot of stuff written
Speaker 21: by guys who want to kill the Federal Reserve guys. Yeah,
Speaker 21: you know what, I still don't know what the Federal
Speaker 21: Reserve is and I'm not gonna find out.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't actually think knowing what the Federal
Speaker 4: Reserve is somehow it doesn't change anything, And I don't
Speaker 4: think it's actually relevant to this app I mean it
Speaker 4: kind of. It's obviously it's relevant to everything.
Speaker 21: But well, means to say is the reason I'm here
Speaker 21: is because I don't know what the economy is, and
Speaker 21: at this point I'm afraid to find out.
Speaker 4: And unfortunately your worst fears are happening.
Speaker 21: Oh don't worry. By the end of this, I will
Speaker 21: not understand.
Speaker 4: I am going to attempt to explain the economy, and
Speaker 4: by by the economy, I mean shadow banking. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 4: before before I go into this, though, you should, you
Speaker 4: should listen to Weird Little Guys.
Speaker 22: It is.
Speaker 4: It's it's really good. I like it. All my friends
Speaker 4: really like it.
Speaker 21: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's somehow a nice comma, kind of relaxing show
Speaker 4: about neo Nazis.
Speaker 21: So that's very chill vibes. Yeah for a show about
Speaker 21: guys who are trying to like blow up school bus. Yes, yep.
Speaker 4: So all right, you know I'm reading this I'm looking
Speaker 4: over this script. Miraculously this isn't Oh wait, hold on,
Speaker 4: I think I cut the part where people blow up
Speaker 4: school buses. There was legitimately a segment in here that
Speaker 4: I might put back in or someone blows up a
Speaker 4: school bus.
Speaker 21: But what a crossover event.
Speaker 4: Oh oh boy, the Saudi is really good at that shit.
Speaker 4: It turns out okay, okay, But let let's get back
Speaker 4: to the topic at hand, which is what is shadow banking?
Speaker 4: And why does it matter to all of us people
Speaker 4: who live in the normal real world and not in
Speaker 4: fake finance world.
Speaker 21: Does it have anything to do with shadow wolves?
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, noe?
Speaker 21: What about shadow facts?
Speaker 4: Sadly, actually, there probably is a connection between the financing
Speaker 4: for the Lord of the Rings movies and shadow banking.
Speaker 4: I'm just too tired to work it right now.
Speaker 21: I've dragged us off track if we haven't even gotten
Speaker 21: on track yet. What is shadow bank?
Speaker 4: Okay? So the good news, the good news this is
Speaker 4: this is the first it's not the last piece of
Speaker 4: good news. We're gonna get this episode. But come the
Speaker 4: definition used by most non academics is actually.
Speaker 2: Not that bad.
Speaker 4: There's a pretty good It's very wishy washy because it's
Speaker 4: a congressional report, and so it's specifically not supposed to
Speaker 4: be taking a stance in either direction on anything because
Speaker 4: it's it's the Congressional Review Office, and they're supposed to
Speaker 4: be neutral, et cetera, et cetera. Allegedly, Yeah, right, you know,
Speaker 4: and like obviously they're not, but like you know, it's
Speaker 4: like kind of fine congressional report on the subject. And
Speaker 4: they do the thing that almost everyone does, which is
Speaker 4: they go back to the definition created by the Financial
Speaker 4: Stability Board, and I'm just gonna I'm just going to
Speaker 4: quote that because it's not that bad. Quote financial activities
Speaker 4: facilitated by institutions other than central banks, banks or public
Speaker 4: financial institutions.
Speaker 21: So it's banking that doesn't involve a bank.
Speaker 4: Yeah, canceled.
Speaker 21: I'm out. I'm out already.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 21: And they don't mean like me loaning you twenty dollars, No, no, no,
Speaker 21: of course not. They just mean unregulated banking. Oh yeah,
Speaker 21: which you can't legally call banking.
Speaker 4: I mean you actually can't legally call it banking. It's
Speaker 4: just things get weird really quickly.
Speaker 21: I Mean I'm not a bank understander, but I know
Speaker 21: at least in Virginia. You can't incorporate a business that
Speaker 21: has the word bank in the title unless you are
Speaker 21: legally a bank, because that's like misleading.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think they can legally call themselves a bank,
Speaker 4: but I guess you can call it banking activity.
Speaker 21: That's stupid in a matter already.
Speaker 4: Yes, Oh, you're gonna get so much more mad by
Speaker 4: the end of this. So the base definition is it's
Speaker 4: not that complicated, right, It's something that does banking stuff
Speaker 4: that is legally not a bank, you know, And so
Speaker 4: we could talk about what kinds of things is this, right,
Speaker 4: It's like private equity firms, it's hedge funds, it's venture
Speaker 4: capital firms.
Speaker 21: So it's like evil stuff that ruins the world for
Speaker 21: no reason except for like ten guys make money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it's also you know, pension funds, it's like
Speaker 4: insurance companies. It's sovereign wealth funds, business development companies, repot markets,
Speaker 4: broker dealers, special investment vehicles, securitization vehicles, money market mutual funds,
Speaker 4: assey backed commercial paper conduits.
Speaker 21: Hey thing, Bud, most of those things you just said
Speaker 21: to me are fake and they make me upset.
Speaker 4: It's really bad.
Speaker 21: Sovereign wealth funds. Shop, that's not that's not me. I
Speaker 21: still you know all these all these things are just
Speaker 21: like different ways of saying like you're poor and you're
Speaker 21: gonna die.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I mean.
Speaker 4: The funny thing is sovereign wealth fund is like kind
Speaker 4: of a less fake one in that it's like, hey,
Speaker 4: this is like fake. It's the well. It's like, this
Speaker 4: is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has pooled all of
Speaker 4: the money it's gotten from its like horrific crimes and
Speaker 4: put them together into one giant thing, and that's a
Speaker 4: sovereign wealth fund.
Speaker 21: Oh, so it's good, it's what you mean.
Speaker 4: No, I am a notable. There is, by the way,
Speaker 4: a camp of people who believe that sovereign wealth funds
Speaker 4: are like a socialist thing and that you could use
Speaker 4: them to do socialism.
Speaker 21: I'm gonna jump out the window.
Speaker 4: I think this is so stupid. Yeah, this is we
Speaker 4: haven't even gotten into the nightmare stuff. So remember I
Speaker 4: was talking about the Financial Stability Board definition in that
Speaker 4: congressional right where it's like, okay, this is a bank
Speaker 4: that does non banking stuff or a non bank that
Speaker 4: does banking stuff. Sorry, oh, I.
Speaker 21: Guess we should say, I guess we forgot to say
Speaker 21: at the top. The reason you're explaining shadow banking to
Speaker 21: me is because we saw an article last week that
Speaker 21: what those those not banks were putting a stop on
Speaker 21: withdrawals from their not banks and I didn't know what
Speaker 21: that meant.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's amazingly this this is so convoluted. We're not
Speaker 4: even gonna get to that this week.
Speaker 21: Right, But like that's that's why we're.
Speaker 4: Explaining that's why. Right, there's like, yeah, there's like there's
Speaker 4: like a mini bank run going on with these like
Speaker 4: shadow banks banks. Yeah, so we're gonna get into how
Speaker 4: that can happen and why. But but before we get there,
Speaker 4: we need to talk about all, right, to get a
Speaker 4: sense of the complexity of this. Right, the Congressional report
Speaker 4: and like, the accepted terminology for this is not shadow banks, it.
Speaker 21: Is, right, that can't be their official name. That's not
Speaker 21: their government name.
Speaker 4: No, it's it's non bank financial intermediation. Now what the
Speaker 4: fuck is that? And this is where this episode goes
Speaker 4: completely off the rails, because the components of what count
Speaker 4: as intermediation are so complicated. I Am not going to
Speaker 4: try to describe it until literally the end of this.
Speaker 21: I mean, is it like what is Venmo officially? Really?
Speaker 21: Venmo's not a bank, but it provides like financial services.
Speaker 4: Actually, I by.
Speaker 21: Because it's because it's like a financial intermediary.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, it might technically be a non bank. I
Speaker 4: don't know what the regulatory structure is.
Speaker 21: It's not legally about Yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Think I think that technically is.
Speaker 21: One score one for Mali.
Speaker 4: Yeah. But okay, so this is this is gonna get
Speaker 4: really bad. Okay, So when I first started researching this episode, right,
Speaker 4: the first thing that I click on is is the
Speaker 4: Federal Reserves chart of how the shadow banking sector works
Speaker 4: compared to the normal banking sector. Molly, you have seen
Speaker 4: this because I posted it as a joke in our
Speaker 4: group chat. This chart, I have like a very very large,
Speaker 4: like it is like a big normal ass I monitor
Speaker 4: that I like to do my work on. I had
Speaker 4: to zoom in to three hundred and eighty percent just
Speaker 4: to make out the letters that label the boxes on
Speaker 4: this chart. If you want to read it, you have
Speaker 4: to zoom into five hundred percent.
Speaker 21: That doesn't seem like a well made chart.
Speaker 4: No, here's the thing, it's actually really good. It's just
Speaker 4: this complicated. I learned later from a paper by Copenhagen
Speaker 4: Business School professor Odny Helga Daughter. We're gonna come back
Speaker 4: to Hellga Daughter's work a lot in this episode, but
Speaker 4: I learned from from her because she has also experienced
Speaker 4: seeing this same chart and going what the is this
Speaker 4: fuck ass chart? I found out that the Federal Reserve
Speaker 4: recommends that in order to have the diagram be legible,
Speaker 4: you're supposed to print this chart as a three foot
Speaker 4: by four foot poster.
Speaker 21: Oh that makes sense, like meeting style, but like we're on.
Speaker 4: Easel, yeah right, But like again, this is this is
Speaker 4: a diagram that he's just labeling the parts of the
Speaker 4: system and making and making like a line that shows
Speaker 4: how stuff moves through it.
Speaker 21: I guess I still don't know what we're talking about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this is what we're going to get into
Speaker 4: in a second, But first we have to talk about
Speaker 4: something even more bleak, which is that Oh yeah, by
Speaker 4: the way, these like non banking bank things like these
Speaker 4: like all these like venture capital firms, all these hedge funds,
Speaker 4: all these fucking weird ghoulish banks that are not banks. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 4: they have twice as many assets than the regular banking system.
Speaker 21: Oh that doesn't seem good.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's about to get worse. It's about to get worse.
Speaker 21: Molly, that's that's like saying I keep seventy percent of
Speaker 21: the food in my house outside on the porch like
Speaker 21: it goes in the fridge.
Speaker 4: Oh, oh, it's so bad. It's so bad. So okay.
Speaker 4: There's a pretty good congressional report that I was talking
Speaker 4: about earlier that has this terrifying quote quote. As of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three, the broad measured total financial assets and
Speaker 4: narrow measu your assets at nbfisis is the shadow banks
Speaker 4: reached eighty five point seven trillion dollars and twenty two
Speaker 4: point two trillion dollars, respectively in the United States.
Speaker 21: But that's more than our GDP.
Speaker 4: That's almost three times our GDP.
Speaker 21: So that's a fake amount of money. Yes, that's not real.
Speaker 4: At all, but it kind of is. Right. These compared
Speaker 4: to total financial assets of thirty one point one trillion
Speaker 4: dollars at banks in the same period. So again, this
Speaker 4: is this is almost three times our GDP in assets
Speaker 4: that they manage or control.
Speaker 21: So where does the money live?
Speaker 4: In a whole bunch of unbelievably convoluted bullshit like combinations
Speaker 4: of like loans and real estate and stuff like that.
Speaker 21: It's not real money. So like, okay, imagine this is
Speaker 21: schoolhouse rock and instead of the singing bill, you're like
Speaker 21: a dollar bill, Like where are you we are about
Speaker 21: to explain this, where does the money live?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So okay, okay, we're we are about one huge
Speaker 4: paragraphs away from getting to this or like one paragraph.
Speaker 21: Okay.
Speaker 4: So the other thing that's very important about this, and
Speaker 4: this is something Mollie was kind of touching up at
Speaker 4: the beginning to get the Eppen, So maybe I should
Speaker 4: have opened with this. Yeah, these people, these are the
Speaker 4: people who blew up the economy in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 21: Well, yeah, because they're making stuff up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's so, it's so bullshit, Molly, You're gonna get
Speaker 4: so mad.
Speaker 21: If this is Calvin Ball, fuck you I win.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it literally is. It's nonsense. It's gibberish. They're doing
Speaker 4: fucking betting markets with the entire world economy.
Speaker 21: Oh yeah, we can all do that now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's fun. It's like we we now have the
Speaker 4: power to do the shit that destroyed the entire world
Speaker 4: economy in two thousand and eight. So that the thing
Speaker 4: about shadow banking, and the reason why it's complicated to explain,
Speaker 4: is that it's a catch all term for like a
Speaker 4: million types of institutions that do different things, right, the
Speaker 4: commonality they have is that they're all not regulated by
Speaker 4: the banking regulations.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 21: It's like, we found a way to do financial crime
Speaker 21: that's not illegal because they forgot to make this illegal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, but but the thing is it's
Speaker 4: so embedded into the system that, like the US debt
Speaker 4: working is dependent on the shadow banks buying it.
Speaker 21: Like I don't believe in that either, So I'm good.
Speaker 4: Oh it's so fake, Molly, I'm not even gonna attempt
Speaker 4: to explain what an overnight repo purchases to you, because
Speaker 4: it's the fakest thing I've ever seen, where they just
Speaker 4: they make one trillion dollars exist overnight and then it
Speaker 4: stops existing at the end of the night. It's incredible.
Speaker 21: I love how much of the economy is based on
Speaker 21: guys just imagining stuff and agreeing on the thing they
Speaker 21: imagined and then trading their imaginary tokens like this is
Speaker 21: fucking POGs grow.
Speaker 4: Up, yep, this is this, This this is. This is, unfortunately,
Speaker 4: what our entire world is based on. It's so fun.
Speaker 4: Oh god, Okay, so what is actually shadow banking. I've
Speaker 4: given you the broadest definition possible, which is, like, again,
Speaker 4: it's the it's doing bank ship without being a bank.
Speaker 4: But let's go back to the beginning of the term,
Speaker 4: which is where most people tend to start or get
Speaker 4: to eventually. This is from an IMF paper quote. The
Speaker 4: term shadow bank was coined by economist Paul McCauley at
Speaker 4: a two thousand and seven speech at the Annual Financial
Speaker 4: Symposium hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank in Jackson,
Speaker 4: holl Wyoming. And basically, it's institutions that borrow money in
Speaker 4: the short term through money markets to finance long term loans.
Speaker 4: But they aren't banks, so they can't go through the FED.
Speaker 21: They're financing loans with other loans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're gonna so from a not bank.
Speaker 21: Yeah, but the big loan is from a real bank,
Speaker 21: and then the little loan is from a fake bank.
Speaker 21: Give me, none of the money is real.
Speaker 4: Hold on, hold on, okay, we're going to get there.
Speaker 4: We're going to explain this in terms of burgers. It's
Speaker 4: going to be. Okay, I believe in us perfect, perfect name.
Speaker 4: But the other thing he describes is is and this
Speaker 4: is from Helga quote in the speech. She describes shadow
Speaker 4: banking as the whole alphabet soup of leveraged up investment conduits, vehicles,
Speaker 4: and structures. So what he's talking about specifically is, these
Speaker 4: are the guys who blew up the economy. Who doesn't
Speaker 4: e like these specifically? This is what he's talking about, right,
Speaker 4: These are the people who took a mortgage and then
Speaker 4: did a bunch of bullshit to it and what's called
Speaker 4: a securitization chain. They did a bunch of bullshit to
Speaker 4: it so you could give the loan to someone else,
Speaker 4: so you could sell to someone else, and this blew
Speaker 4: up the entire world economy. That's what he's talking about.
Speaker 4: He's talking about the banks that are not banks, the
Speaker 4: shadow banks that did all of this bullshit to turn
Speaker 4: like someone's mortgage into a fucking thing you could bet on.
Speaker 21: So selling debt is like selling the idea of future money. Yeah,
Speaker 21: and then sometimes that future money doesn't cout, yeah, so
Speaker 21: it doesn't exist.
Speaker 4: So so okay, I will say you do not need
Speaker 4: to understand this yet because we haven't. We still have
Speaker 4: not already the actual explanation.
Speaker 21: I'm never going to.
Speaker 4: I believe in us, we can do this. It's not
Speaker 4: that that. Okay, I'm not torturing you on purpose.
Speaker 2: I'm just no, it's.
Speaker 4: Okay, I believe in you. So I want to mention
Speaker 4: that I'm very indebted here to the paper I mentioned
Speaker 4: earlier from Copenhagen Business School professor Adny Helga Daughter, who
Speaker 4: wrote of She wrote a very good simplified explanation of
Speaker 4: this in her Review of International Political Economy article called
Speaker 4: Banking upside Down the Implicit Politics of Shadow Banking Expertise.
Speaker 4: But okay, as you can tell by the fact that
Speaker 4: it's called Banking upside Down the Implicit Politics of shadow
Speaker 4: Banking Expertise, this has been when she's simplifying it. She's
Speaker 4: simplifying it from like economists down to like a political
Speaker 4: scientist or an anthropologist can understand this. I am about
Speaker 4: to attempt to simplify this down to a regular person,
Speaker 4: can I understand this? So I'm drawing on a lot
Speaker 4: of her stuff for the first part of this explanation,
Speaker 4: but I am I've turned it into burgers.
Speaker 21: So I'll do my best I'm being brave.
Speaker 4: Okay. So a shadow bank, right, it's something that does banking. Ship,
Speaker 4: that's not a bank. So what do I mean by banking?
Speaker 6: Shit?
Speaker 21: That was my next question. Yes, I think we need
Speaker 21: to start with what is a bank?
Speaker 23: Yes?
Speaker 4: So first, so okay, okay, and this is this is
Speaker 4: this is where we're starting here. What does a bank do?
Speaker 21: I put my money in it and they hold it
Speaker 21: for me.
Speaker 4: So no, actually, and this is the interesting part.
Speaker 21: No, they do stuff with it. Oh yeah, they're holding
Speaker 21: onto the promise of my money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so okay, let's let's just let's just look at
Speaker 4: this for a second. So okay, So regular people give
Speaker 4: them money to store in the bank. This is called
Speaker 4: a deposit. The bank takes your money and loans it
Speaker 4: out right and uses that to make more money. This
Speaker 4: is how it pays you interest. Right, is that it's
Speaker 4: it's taking your money and it's loaning it out to
Speaker 4: other to other people, it's buying things with it. That
Speaker 4: part I understand. Yeah, And this is obviously a cartoon image.
Speaker 4: And I know there's gonna be econ people who are
Speaker 4: gonna be mad at me. Look you if you understand why.
Speaker 21: Are they listening to this. If you're you know what
Speaker 21: this means, go away. This isn't for you. I'm not
Speaker 21: humiliating myself for your entertainment, like for the.
Speaker 4: Political economy people here when I say stuff that might
Speaker 4: that's like technically kind of fuzzy.
Speaker 21: It's for me the podcast idiot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like you you understand this, Like I work at
Speaker 4: the level of hamburgers here, so like we have to
Speaker 4: do some abstractions. So okay, the important thing for our purposes, right,
Speaker 4: is that there's two things here, right, There's like the
Speaker 4: deposit to the money you give them, and then there's
Speaker 4: the loans, right, and these operates on different timelines.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: You can take the deposit out at any time, least
Speaker 4: in theory, but they can't get the money from the
Speaker 4: loan back at any time right now. This is like
Speaker 4: one of the critical things of what a bank is
Speaker 4: is is this timeline thing.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: It turns your your money, which you can take out
Speaker 4: at any time, into a different kind of thing, this loan,
Speaker 4: which can't be taken out immediately, right, and the have
Speaker 4: to make money. So this is called maturity transformation. This
Speaker 4: is a very simple concept. They have made very complicated.
Speaker 4: This is one of the core aspects of that definition
Speaker 4: I was talking about earlier. This is one of the
Speaker 4: four things in it. But you now understand this. It's
Speaker 4: not that complicated. It's it's it's takes short term, make
Speaker 4: long term, and we'll get to doing the reverse in
Speaker 4: a second.
Speaker 21: Oh, I don't think it works the other way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's gonna go so badly. It's gonna so badly.
Speaker 21: I don't know about bank, but just generally speaking, like
Speaker 21: in terms of time and like how like material reality works.
Speaker 21: I don't think it works the other way.
Speaker 4: It's it's not great. It's not great, Molly, it's not great. Okay,
Speaker 4: So okay. There is, however, a problem here, right, which
Speaker 4: is what happens if everyone tries to get their short
Speaker 4: term money back at the same time.
Speaker 2: We can't.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, because you have deposit insurance. Yeah right, because
Speaker 4: the banks aren't holding short term cash. What they're holding
Speaker 4: is long term loans, and those loans like you can't
Speaker 4: pay someone alone. Well okay, actually, this entire the crux
Speaker 4: of this episode is they think that they did do that. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 4: and it blew up the entire world economy.
Speaker 21: But if but if I wanted forty thousand dollars out
Speaker 21: of my If I had a checking out, it was
Speaker 21: forty thousand dollars in it. Yeah, and they gave me
Speaker 21: my neighbor's mortgage as a prompt. That would it worked
Speaker 21: for me? That would have worked for no? Fuck that, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 4: You need you need you need, you need something that
Speaker 4: can buy a burger, and they're not giving you that.
Speaker 4: So okay, this is very very bad. If people try
Speaker 4: to do this, it is called a bank run. It
Speaker 4: is not good.
Speaker 21: It's bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 21: And so this this blew up.
Speaker 4: The entire world economy so many goddamn times that eventually
Speaker 4: we got financial regulation. Now this this regulation requires banks
Speaker 4: to have money that is like actual cash they can
Speaker 4: hand you like right now, on hand at all times,
Speaker 4: and the government gets to and this is that's a
Speaker 4: little bit simification, but like, yeah, that's.
Speaker 21: How it works, right, like, and it's insured by the government.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the government will give you your money back
Speaker 4: if if the bank goes under up to like a
Speaker 4: certain amount of dollars fed Yep, this is this this
Speaker 4: that's that's what that means, right, the government will give
Speaker 4: you your money back. But also there's a there's a
Speaker 4: trade off to this. So this is a massive benefit
Speaker 4: for the banks, right, the fact the fact that if
Speaker 4: they go under, all of their assets will be repaid
Speaker 4: by the government. It's a it's a massive benefit for
Speaker 4: them because it means that putting your money in the
Speaker 4: bank is like safe.
Speaker 21: Yeah. I love that for me, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's good. Now, the cost to the banks is that
Speaker 4: the Feds get to see their balance sheet, right, the
Speaker 4: Feds get to see what they're doing with their fucking money,
Speaker 4: and they get to make sure that these banks aren't
Speaker 4: doing insane shit.
Speaker 21: Okay, that makes sense because they're insurance.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that like they're not doing like unbelievably risky
Speaker 4: awful ship. And also that they're actually holding enough money
Speaker 4: to be able to pay people out right.
Speaker 21: Okay, so far, so good. I I understand bank.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Now, Shadow Banking boldly asked the question, Okay, but
Speaker 4: what if you did all of the banking backwards, no
Speaker 4: one had access to the books, and the governments will
Speaker 4: only pay you back if the entire world economy looks
Speaker 4: like it's going to die.
Speaker 21: I feel like at that point the government should just
Speaker 21: just step back.
Speaker 4: And here's the thing, here's the thing, right, I I
Speaker 4: I yeah, Like I'm so dowt with this, Like yeah,
Speaker 4: I don't know. Fuck it, Like every single one of
Speaker 4: your motherfuckers is gonna pay this off by working as
Speaker 4: a barista for thirty years, Like fuck you. But the
Speaker 4: government was like, nah, we want like we want capitalism
Speaker 4: to keep working.
Speaker 21: Make every hedge fund manager work at a waffle house.
Speaker 22: Yeah, fuck them.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm gonna say something and then I'm gonna.
Speaker 21: Make a disclaim.
Speaker 4: So the kind of shadow banks that did two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight work in the opposite direction. They start with debt,
Speaker 4: they take that debt, and they turn that debt into
Speaker 4: like cash, right.
Speaker 21: Can I do that?
Speaker 11: No?
Speaker 21: Does that work for me at my hed No?
Speaker 4: So okay, And I also want to mention there's a
Speaker 4: bunch of other kinds of shadow banks. The kind of
Speaker 4: shadow bank that's going under right now is not really this.
Speaker 4: The kind of shadow bank that's like exploding right now
Speaker 4: is a kind of shadow bank that's like what if
Speaker 4: a bank that wasn't a bank gave a completely unregulated
Speaker 4: loan with secret terms to a corporation, And that's the
Speaker 4: one that's going under right now, but for a long
Speaker 4: long time, the kind of shadow bank that was really
Speaker 4: important to the global economy. And this is still like
Speaker 4: a massive portion of how all of the economic system
Speaker 4: works is these ones where you're trying to take debt
Speaker 4: and turn it into something you can trade for cash. So, okay,
Speaker 4: you take debt, right, you start off with a mortgage. Okay,
Speaker 4: so these mortgagees pay out over the extremely long term, right,
Speaker 4: but you want to be able to trade this mortgage
Speaker 4: for cash. Right, And this is a process called securitization.
Speaker 4: Turning this mortgage into something you can sell for cash
Speaker 4: is making it into what's called a security. So now
Speaker 4: what happens right when his packaged this is into a
Speaker 4: security when there's a securitization process. And then like the
Speaker 4: regular bank, the regular bank sends the mortgage to the
Speaker 4: shadow bank, and the shadow bank like does like stuff
Speaker 4: and turns it into a security. And now what this
Speaker 4: means is that instead if you who paid the mortgage
Speaker 4: owing money to the bank, you own it to the
Speaker 4: shadow bank or whoever the fuck the shadow bank sells
Speaker 4: it to.
Speaker 21: Right, Okay, so the real bank is involved. The real
Speaker 21: bank is involved.
Speaker 4: Yes, oh yes, the real bank is making so much
Speaker 4: money off of this is this is why two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight happened.
Speaker 21: Oh, because Wells Fargo did this with everybody's mortgage. Oh yeah,
Speaker 21: oh yeah, okay, because I couldn't figure out because said,
Speaker 21: this is a two thousand names, and I was like,
Speaker 21: I thought, Wells Fargo did that, that's a real bank.
Speaker 21: Oh the real bank was shadow banking.
Speaker 4: The real bank figured out a way to sell their mortgages.
Speaker 4: And it's gonna get much worse as we go through this.
Speaker 4: But that's what causes this, right, is like turning is
Speaker 4: turning these mortgages into these like securities and like these
Speaker 4: like collateralized debt obligations and these like special packaged bullshit
Speaker 4: that you could sell to someone. So the way I
Speaker 4: would describe this is it's like, do you know how
Speaker 4: a bond works?
Speaker 21: Honestly, Mia, I do not.
Speaker 4: Okay, let's let's do this. We can we can do this, okay.
Speaker 4: So the kind of bond that you are normally likely
Speaker 4: to encounter is a government bond. Yeah, okay, So you
Speaker 4: you pay the government money to buy the bond, and
Speaker 4: what the bond says is, at a certain point in time,
Speaker 4: you hand it back to the government and they pay
Speaker 4: you more money.
Speaker 21: Right, it's like a promise for later.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Right, So it's it's basically a loan, but it's
Speaker 4: alone in a form where like the government's technically like
Speaker 4: selling it. And and then the other thing about bonds,
Speaker 4: right is if you hand the bond to someone else,
Speaker 4: well okay, I mean this is technically bare bonds, but
Speaker 4: like you you can then give the bond to someone
Speaker 4: else and now and now if they give it back
Speaker 4: to the government, they get the money in like ten years,
Speaker 4: they get the money.
Speaker 21: Right, right, Okay, I get that.
Speaker 4: And you can sell these things. And this is what
Speaker 4: these people are doing with mortgages.
Speaker 21: That's not as like secured as like a government bond.
Speaker 21: Because if I had one hundred dollars government, like, if
Speaker 21: I have one hundred dollar bearers bond, I know for
Speaker 21: a fact on the date on the bond, it's gonna
Speaker 21: be worth one hundred dollars.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're gonna pay out, right.
Speaker 21: But if it's mortgage mortgage, the government's gonna pay it.
Speaker 21: But like the mortgage, the governy has them work. That's
Speaker 21: not yep, that's not real. That's not money. Nope, yep,
Speaker 21: that's like that's a that's a promise. But like my
Speaker 21: hand it's behind my back.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's a shit show. And this whole process
Speaker 4: is the largest sort of I'm not sure if it's
Speaker 4: actually the largest that I would need to actually get
Speaker 4: I've never I haven't seen in death breakdown sectorially, but like.
Speaker 21: None of this is real.
Speaker 4: You could just say whatever, this this is one of
Speaker 4: the most important kind of shadow banks because in order
Speaker 4: to turn this mortgage into security, the moment you do that,
Speaker 4: you do this by creating what's called a special purpose vehicle,
Speaker 4: or someone else creates one. It's called a special purpose vehicle. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare.
Speaker 21: Gonna I'm gonna put this mortgage on a roller coaster.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's fucking ridiculous. Right, it's a special purpose vehicle.
Speaker 4: Is it does a loopy loop. But the moment you
Speaker 4: create one of these, that the moment you create one
Speaker 4: of these like security mortgages, right, that's a shadow bank.
Speaker 4: You've created a shadow bank, right.
Speaker 21: Because that's not real banking. That's shadow bank.
Speaker 4: Yep. Because because you're creating another entity that is not
Speaker 4: a bank that's doing the banking stuff.
Speaker 21: I thought that the banking and the shadow banking were
Speaker 21: like separate things, right, because it's shadow. It's like they're
Speaker 21: doing non they're all in. If the bank is just
Speaker 21: a shadow banking, I would I'm stupid, but I would
Speaker 21: call that a crime.
Speaker 4: This is this is another thing that costs two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight because a bunch of what was isn't a
Speaker 4: crime because our country is run by the bourgeoisie. Molly
Speaker 4: that that's why it's not a crime.
Speaker 21: You're just telling me this for the first time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's bad. So, so what happened? What happened in
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight. One of the things that happened,
Speaker 4: right is so all of these regulators are supposed to
Speaker 4: be looking at the balance sheets of these companies.
Speaker 21: But they're hiding stuff off the books.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they were hiding these things in these like special
Speaker 4: purpose vehicles, like in these like shadow banks.
Speaker 21: They didn't open the trunks on the special purpose vehicles.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so no one could see the fucking dead bodies
Speaker 4: in the trunks of the vehicles because they weren't on
Speaker 4: the balance sheet that like the government had access to.
Speaker 21: What's the point of the balance sheet if you don't
Speaker 21: put the whole balance on it.
Speaker 4: I'm fucking I don't know. And this is like legitimately
Speaker 4: when you read the accounts of like why shadow making
Speaker 4: US exploded by the way it's exploded in two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight, it's like way bigger exploded.
Speaker 21: Like in popularity or like exploded as in like distrubularity.
Speaker 4: There's so much there's so much more of it. There's
Speaker 4: so much more of it because.
Speaker 21: Also, oh, because it went so well, it went so
Speaker 21: well in two thousand and eight, and now.
Speaker 4: We're because here's the thing. After two thousand and eight,
Speaker 4: we got like a little tiny bit of banking regulation
Speaker 4: and the banks lost their fucking minds, and so more
Speaker 4: and more money went into all of these unhidden shadow
Speaker 4: making things.
Speaker 21: Okay, but so like when a toddler has a tantrum,
Speaker 21: you don't give them a billion dollars.
Speaker 4: When the shadow banks went under, these things were not
Speaker 4: backed by the government. The government bailed them out anyways.
Speaker 21: Yeah, they didn't have to do that, Nope. So they
Speaker 21: really they learned their lesson. They really learned their lesson
Speaker 21: this time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like they bailed out these banks and they fucking
Speaker 4: sold you out, and like you know, like and one
Speaker 4: of the things that I think people have forgotten was
Speaker 4: there's this thing called robocalls during the Obama administration. Right,
Speaker 4: part of how the financial recovery happened was that all
Speaker 4: these banks would like go to courthouses, right, and they
Speaker 4: would just repossess mortgages on Mass. Oh. And they had
Speaker 4: like a robot that was like signed it. It would
Speaker 4: just sign like a blank check sign off on all
Speaker 4: these mortgages that were supposed to be underwater. And they
Speaker 4: would just steal people's houses, people who were on top
Speaker 4: of their payments, people who liked to know money. They
Speaker 4: would just take their houses. And this happened on Mass
Speaker 4: And this is like how the banks recovered, was they
Speaker 4: stole everyone's houses.
Speaker 21: And that's a crime, right, It should have been a crime.
Speaker 4: It was illegal. It didn't matter though.
Speaker 21: Because everything you're describing to me as a crime.
Speaker 4: It's so nightmarish. Well, it's here the thing most of
Speaker 4: this of them describing is not a crime. This was
Speaker 4: actually a crime.
Speaker 21: But why is nobody in jail?
Speaker 4: Because Barack Obama went up in front of these people
Speaker 4: and said, I am the only thing standing between you
Speaker 4: and the guillotines. I'm pretty sure that's a direct quote.
Speaker 21: And why didn't he bring the guillotine with.
Speaker 4: Him because he wants the capital assistant to continue.
Speaker 21: I mean, question, Obama, I'm just upset.
Speaker 4: It's not good. Okay, So let's let's get you another
Speaker 4: question that you asked, which is why why would you
Speaker 4: do this? Why would you do this.
Speaker 21: To make money?
Speaker 4: Yes, but it's actually more complicated than that. Oh okay.
Speaker 4: So on the one hand, these assets, you know, a mortgage,
Speaker 4: does make more money than just putting your money in
Speaker 4: the bank. Right, that's like the basis of banking is
Speaker 4: that they can use your money that's sitting in the
Speaker 4: bank and getting interested, and then they make more money
Speaker 4: by spending it elsewhere.
Speaker 21: But so they're just doing this because they hate us,
Speaker 21: not just to make money. No, there is an actual explanation.
Speaker 21: There's a third reason.
Speaker 4: So then why why would you ever have your money
Speaker 4: in a bank or like buy something like safe like
Speaker 4: government bonds you can sell really quickly, right, Why why
Speaker 4: would you ever want that? And the reason why is
Speaker 4: something called liquidity?
Speaker 22: Right?
Speaker 21: You want to be able to spend the money, yes,
Speaker 21: rather than wait thirty years for it to get paid back.
Speaker 4: Yes. Liquidity is just how easy is it to turn
Speaker 4: whatever you own into cash?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 21: For real money, because most of it we're talking about
Speaker 21: is not money. It's the idea of money.
Speaker 4: Yes, so, so liquidity is is literally it's the burger test,
Speaker 4: right can you buy a burger with this?
Speaker 21: Can I eat this?
Speaker 2: Money?
Speaker 4: Is like the most liquid asset, right because you can?
Speaker 4: You can? You can turn this into a burger?
Speaker 21: Right, So liquidity is the only part of this that's
Speaker 21: actually money. Everything else is not money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, liquidity is the measure of how money is it? Basically,
Speaker 4: like how easy is it to turn this into burger?
Speaker 21: Is this a special vehicle securitization? It's not real mea.
Speaker 4: No, it's fake as shit, right, this is not that complicated,
Speaker 4: right if you if it's like like you can you
Speaker 4: can buy a burger with ten dollars? Yeah right, that's liquid.
Speaker 21: Actually you kind of can't these days.
Speaker 4: I know, I look, I look. I imagine a world
Speaker 4: where you can buy a burger for ten dollars.
Speaker 21: Imagine imagine a burger.
Speaker 4: Yes, imagine a burger that's purchasable. Now, what you can't
Speaker 4: buy a burger with is like the ten bucks that
Speaker 4: a guy you work with owes you for buying him.
Speaker 21: A burger depends on how well you know the burger guy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that's that's where things get bad. Yeah, right, now,
Speaker 4: the thing is right, right, So the ten bucks the
Speaker 4: guy you work with, like owes, you not liquid. You
Speaker 4: don't have the money in your hands, and if you
Speaker 4: want to get it from him, you have to like
Speaker 4: go ask him for the money, and maybe he has
Speaker 4: ten bucks and maybe he doesn't, right, at which point
Speaker 4: you can't get your ten dollars back until he has
Speaker 4: the money.
Speaker 21: But that but then ten dollars that I'm theoretically code
Speaker 21: is an asset though I have not a debt. Yes, okay, yes,
Speaker 21: it's stupid.
Speaker 4: Now loans loans are not liquid assets, right, and they're
Speaker 4: not liquid assets because you can't get the money back
Speaker 4: like immediately.
Speaker 21: So I don't have ten dollars I can spend, but
Speaker 21: on paper, I do have ten theoretical dollars.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, And this is also like most of what
Speaker 4: billionaire money is, hey, correct, Like most of their money
Speaker 4: is like in like a stock or some shit or
Speaker 4: like it's weird fake money.
Speaker 21: Like theoretically they could access this amount of money, but
Speaker 21: they don't have it. Yeah, it's not real.
Speaker 4: Now, Okay, there is this question, So why why would
Speaker 4: you keep your money in fake money instead of real money.
Speaker 4: And the answer is that it gives you more money
Speaker 4: back because say you're an asshole, right, and you're charging
Speaker 4: interest on your coworker for that burger loan.
Speaker 21: Right, So that ten dollars is actually worth more than
Speaker 21: ten dollars money. So the ten dollars that I don't
Speaker 21: have is theoretically worth Twell.
Speaker 4: You're worth more. Yeah, it's worth more than the money
Speaker 4: that you do have.
Speaker 21: I can get cheese on the burger, yes, right.
Speaker 4: And this is this is like the fundamental thing of
Speaker 4: the banking system, Like one of them is that I
Speaker 4: liquid assets or like assets that you that aren't money
Speaker 4: are worth more than money.
Speaker 21: I guess. Like when I put a small amount of
Speaker 21: my savings into a CD, that's what I'm doing, except
Speaker 21: normal style they're doing it weird.
Speaker 4: Yeah, basically because that's like.
Speaker 21: An I liquid asset that I'm I'm I'm trading the
Speaker 21: ability to access that liquidity for the potential of more
Speaker 21: money later.
Speaker 4: Wait, so when you say, do you mean like a
Speaker 4: like a physical like a disc, like a CD.
Speaker 21: No, a CD like at the bank, Like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 21: like the investment product, Yeah sure, yeah, yes, sorry, I
Speaker 21: was like, no, I'm not talking about buying compact disc.
Speaker 4: I would just leave at five am this time.
Speaker 21: It's been ever heard of it.
Speaker 4: Wow, there's there's actually a really an annoying thing researching
Speaker 4: this episode because there's like, so CDOs are like a
Speaker 4: type of loan that will kind of get you in
Speaker 4: a bit. But there's also a tech position called CDO.
Speaker 4: It's like chief something.
Speaker 21: Office officer who cares.
Speaker 4: Yeah, whatever the fuck? Right, But like when you're trying
Speaker 4: to search for stuff that's like about CDOs, right, the
Speaker 4: other one keeps coming up. I hate it. Okay, okay,
Speaker 4: locking in, locking in right, lock and load. Now what
Speaker 4: if you both want into more money and also the
Speaker 4: ability to buy a burger?
Speaker 21: I guess I would uh probably break one of Carl's fingers.
Speaker 21: This is the guy that owes me the ten dollars, Carl.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but even then it's hard to even that's like,
Speaker 4: this is too hard for these people.
Speaker 21: I would go to Carl's house and kick him out
Speaker 21: of it.
Speaker 4: Well yeah, so, but the other thing is like, you
Speaker 4: are not very rich, okay these people. If you are
Speaker 4: really really rich, I am talking like billionaires, maybe like
Speaker 4: high high class multimillionaires. Well you can go to a
Speaker 4: shadow bank.
Speaker 21: Oh right, you can get a loan based on the loan.
Speaker 4: No, well you're saying. So the thing is that you
Speaker 4: have money, right, but you want to turn your money
Speaker 4: into more money, like you have like an actual cash,
Speaker 4: right like you are you are, for example, a pension fund.
Speaker 4: No I'm not. You have a shit ton of cash.
Speaker 4: Or imagine imagine a pension fund. Right, This is okay.
Speaker 4: This is also really hard because it used to be
Speaker 4: easier to explain this because like we used to live
Speaker 4: in a world where people had pension funds and had mortgages,
Speaker 4: and now we no longer have pension funds or mortgages.
Speaker 21: I live in an apartment and I will always live
Speaker 21: in an apartment.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, and still okay, So, like imagine imagine a pension fund,
Speaker 4: right you you have a shit ton of money from
Speaker 4: your members paying into the fund, but it's cash. You
Speaker 4: need to turn that cash into more money. But also
Speaker 4: you're a pension fund, so you constantly have to take
Speaker 4: money back out in order to pay the people who
Speaker 4: are retiring.
Speaker 21: To pay old right.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, and this is also a thing that like,
Speaker 4: you know, if you're just like a rich person. Sometimes
Speaker 4: you want your A lot of times you want your
Speaker 4: money in assets that are like you can you can
Speaker 4: turn back into real money, but also make you a
Speaker 4: shit ton of money.
Speaker 21: Right, They need to sort of revolve a little bit
Speaker 21: theyd be like yeah, I don't know, like a jello
Speaker 21: like partially liquid.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And this is this is what the shadow banks do, right,
Speaker 4: because the thing that you can buy is one of
Speaker 4: those mortgages they've turned into like a security. Right, you
Speaker 4: can go buy someone else's debt, huh, but because it's
Speaker 4: a magic security now, and these are called mortgage backed securities.
Speaker 4: And again if you're to remember, yeah, anything of anything
Speaker 4: about two thousand and eight, that's what blew up the
Speaker 4: whole economy, is these mortgage back securities.
Speaker 21: Yeah, I've heard of that because it was bad, yep,
Speaker 21: terrible idea. And so we're still doing that.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's I mean if it's less specifically, the
Speaker 4: mortgage back ones are less bad. So they started doing
Speaker 4: it with like commercial retail loans, which is incredible, great,
Speaker 4: so that's really fun. They're also doing with other unhidden
Speaker 4: shit that we're gonna do like next episode. And what
Speaker 4: these people are really buying. Aren't just these Like you're
Speaker 4: not buying like one person's mortgage, right.
Speaker 21: Right, they're like pooled and like bundled.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, they're like they bundle them all together and
Speaker 4: then you you buy the rights to a percentage of
Speaker 4: the pool.
Speaker 21: It's not like when you sponsor like an elephant in
Speaker 21: Africa or something, and they send you a picture of
Speaker 21: like a specific element, or they don't send you they
Speaker 21: listen to a picture of the family you're arming. No,
Speaker 21: these are the Joneses. You own their fucking house.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's it's a shit show. No, well,
Speaker 4: I mean eventually you might have to go figure out
Speaker 4: who that is because you like own whatever the fuck
Speaker 4: percentage of like the mortgages or whatever. But like, okay,
Speaker 4: so these are these are just like someone else's debt
Speaker 4: that you're buying, and that the people who can do
Speaker 4: this are, you know, people who have billions of dollars.
Speaker 4: It's not you, the listener. And by the way, if you,
Speaker 4: the listener, have billions of dollars lying around for some reason.
Speaker 21: Can I have some please?
Speaker 4: Yes, please please give me some of them so I
Speaker 4: can house Like literally every trans woman and like transperson
Speaker 4: I can, I can do it, Like, please give me
Speaker 4: your billions of dollars so I can. I can achieve
Speaker 4: this goal. But like we're talking about you know, like
Speaker 4: like the Pension Fund of California, we're talking about mega corporations,
Speaker 4: insurance companies, the kinds of things. I can actually buy these,
Speaker 4: like you know. Now, this is where we get to
Speaker 4: one of the other problems, which is that these things
Speaker 4: are not insured. So yeah, what do you do in
Speaker 4: order to try to make it less risky? What do
Speaker 4: you get if you can't pay the loan back? And
Speaker 4: this is what's called collateral.
Speaker 21: I don't know, swift punch in the nuts.
Speaker 4: Oh no, they take your house, right, Yes, that's supposed
Speaker 4: to be the thing. So okay, the way that like
Speaker 4: shadow banking loans tend to work is that they they
Speaker 4: have collateral, right, so you you give them something or
Speaker 4: or it's either you give them something directly or it's
Speaker 4: like if you promise to give them the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and giving it to them directly is like a repo
Speaker 4: market thing. We're not really going to get into those
Speaker 4: right now, but this does. That's like that's also a
Speaker 4: kind of shadow bank. But there's a problem, right, which is,
Speaker 4: what if the thing that you're paying, you're paying as collateral, Like,
Speaker 4: what if your house becomes worthless? And what if? What if? Mully?
Speaker 21: And it's completely uninsured and there's no way to fix
Speaker 21: it because I don't even have anything to give.
Speaker 4: You now, Now, Molly, what if? And this is purely hypothetical,
Speaker 4: It could never happen in the real world, Molly. But
Speaker 4: what if somehow, someone someone decided to use the same
Speaker 4: house as collateral for multiple different securities.
Speaker 21: Well, that could never go wrong.
Speaker 4: What if, Mollie. They made a word for this that
Speaker 4: is so complicated I am not going to attempt to
Speaker 4: read it on the show. What if, Molly?
Speaker 21: What is it in German or something?
Speaker 4: No, it's like it's just like this, it's like the
Speaker 4: it's like the length of my head. It's like hyper
Speaker 4: hyper something bullshit. Like I refuse to say it because
Speaker 4: it is just like a completely like financed goal bullshit
Speaker 4: term they made up.
Speaker 21: So, but the point of the point of collateral is
Speaker 21: that you can use it to pay off the loan
Speaker 21: if you default on And so that literally won't work
Speaker 21: more than once, because once I eat the burger, once
Speaker 21: I eat the burger. It's bad. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 21: one of the things that happened in two thousand years.
Speaker 21: I can't promise I can't promise ten guys my burger.
Speaker 4: Now, Molly, here's the amazing thing here, right, because but
Speaker 4: the advantage for these companies, right is like, if you're
Speaker 4: the bank that has the mortgage, suddenly you can spin
Speaker 4: your mortgage off into like multiple securities that you can sell.
Speaker 21: Right, It's worth ten times more. And that's great for you.
Speaker 4: Yes, and comma, comma, we we haven't even okay, I
Speaker 4: just I just described to sister where these people are
Speaker 4: promising the same house to moustiple people. This isn't even
Speaker 4: the extremely unfathomably reckless and greedy shit. No it is,
Speaker 4: oh it is, but it's not the worst of it.
Speaker 4: Oh good, Okay, So do you remember that quote from
Speaker 4: when I was fiving the first definition of shadow banking, right,
Speaker 4: like I gave I gave, I gave this quote from
Speaker 4: the guy who invented the term where he called it
Speaker 4: quote the whole alphabet soup of leveraged up investment, conduits, vehicles,
Speaker 4: and structures. Right, So we've kind of talked about the
Speaker 4: conduits vehicles, and structures. Right, those are all of the
Speaker 4: shadow banks that like make the things right. I love
Speaker 4: the conduits, vehicles, and structures. Yeah, all the acronyms. But
Speaker 4: what does leveraged up mean?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 4: Okay? In this case, it means that a bunch of
Speaker 4: these banks have taken out a shit ton of like risky,
Speaker 4: high interest loans in order to buy more of these
Speaker 4: fucking mortgages because they think they can make more money
Speaker 4: off of it.
Speaker 21: So they took out they took out loans to buy
Speaker 21: these unsecured securities.
Speaker 4: The regular ass banks were doing this. Yeah, they went
Speaker 4: into debt to buy more of these shitty mortgages.
Speaker 21: So they took out loans to buy what are essentially
Speaker 21: unsecured loans.
Speaker 4: Yep, because I thought it would make them more money.
Speaker 21: But there's no money involved. Money.
Speaker 4: It is about to get so much worse, right, So okay,
Speaker 4: So sticking with leveraging for a second. Right, you might
Speaker 4: have actually heard something called a leveraged buyout.
Speaker 21: I have heard those words, and then I stopped listening.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so here's the thing. Leverage buyouts are something that
Speaker 4: actually happens in the real world that does fuck you directly,
Speaker 4: which is a whole bunch of companies that used to
Speaker 4: be like normalized companies like died because venture capital firms, you,
Speaker 4: by the way, are also shadow banks. Oh did this right?
Speaker 4: They came in Technically speaking, they did it through like
Speaker 4: risky bond purchases, but basically they did a bunch of
Speaker 4: high interest loans and then they go buy a company
Speaker 4: and then they like strip it for parts, and then
Speaker 4: they try to raise the stock price of the company. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and the s Hriver parts, sell everything and get out right.
Speaker 4: That's what a leverage buyout is. These people are sort
Speaker 4: of are doing kind of a version of that, but
Speaker 4: like they're taking on this debt in order to like
Speaker 4: buy fucking shitty underwater mortgages because they look like they're
Speaker 4: making so much money.
Speaker 21: They're taking on real debt to buy high pathetical debt.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's about to get so much worse.
Speaker 21: That doesn't seem like a good idea, so.
Speaker 4: Not to get so much worse. So that's what like
Speaker 4: the leveraged part of that.
Speaker 21: I don't even know how you do that in burgers.
Speaker 4: I don't know You're you're going into debt to like
Speaker 4: buy the promise of burgers in the future.
Speaker 21: So you can sell those future burgers. Yeah, but burgers
Speaker 21: are real. The thing we're not talking about it really
Speaker 21: at all.
Speaker 4: Well, the technically, technically speaking, Somewhere at the bottom of
Speaker 4: this is mortgages. However, Comma, we're about to get into
Speaker 4: a kind of asset where there isn't anything behind it.
Speaker 4: This is where the really really truly unhinged shit starts.
Speaker 4: It hasn't, which is that these companies figured out a
Speaker 4: way to bet on whether these mortgages were going to
Speaker 4: fail or not.
Speaker 21: That's so tight mea, I fucking love that. I love it.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, By the way, I kinnatsize enough. How unhinged.
Speaker 4: This is the mechanism they're using to do this. It's
Speaker 4: called a credit default swap. Oh, I've heard that phrase.
Speaker 4: This was supposed to be how they did insurance. Their
Speaker 4: mechanism for doing insurance on all of these insane loans
Speaker 4: they were doing was originally like, Okay, I'm gonna you're
Speaker 4: I don't know, so you have a you have a bank, right,
Speaker 4: the bank has given out a risky loan. So this
Speaker 4: bank goes to another bank. They shouldn't do that, and
Speaker 4: they say, hey, if this person actually pays the loan back,
Speaker 4: I will pay you money.
Speaker 21: Okay, So the other so the other bank is like
Speaker 21: taking a gamble here.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So so the other bank that's giving out the
Speaker 4: loan right gets money if the loan goes under. So
Speaker 4: in theory, they're sort of like insured against the risk.
Speaker 4: They call it like hedging. They're like so like it's
Speaker 4: like so theoretically it's less bad from them because now
Speaker 4: even if the loan goes under, they still get money
Speaker 4: back from that other bank.
Speaker 21: So the other bank is just a bookie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the other bank is betting that they are
Speaker 4: going to get it. So then and if the loan
Speaker 4: does get paid, then that bank makes money.
Speaker 21: And this is legal for everyone to do. Yep, this
Speaker 21: is real banking or shadow bank. This is real bank.
Speaker 4: Didn't know this is techniically actually no, this is actually
Speaker 4: both both of them do this. Technically speaking, the instrument
Speaker 4: like like the actual like credit default swap or whatever,
Speaker 4: is made by the shadow banks, but then they're brought
Speaker 4: by the regular banks.
Speaker 21: I'm started to think that the bank starts the shadow
Speaker 21: banks and then all of this is just fake and bad.
Speaker 4: Like here's the here's the thing about these systems, right,
Speaker 4: is that like a lot of the original literature on
Speaker 4: it was considering them separate. But it's like, no, like
Speaker 4: the regular banks are making their own shadow banks do
Speaker 4: these things. They're all involved in these assets. They're also
Speaker 4: investing in the shadow banks, which is the problem we're
Speaker 4: having right now.
Speaker 21: It's like it's the same guy. He just like turns
Speaker 21: his chair around at his desk and he's like, now
Speaker 21: I'm shadow bank Todd.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, and sometimes it's that sometimes there I legitimately
Speaker 4: is just other entities they work with.
Speaker 21: But yeah, but there's still it's still a bank engaging.
Speaker 21: So it's like all these are non banking practices, Yeah,
Speaker 21: but the bank is doing it well.
Speaker 4: But here's the thing. The important part for that though,
Speaker 4: is that like the non bank also can do this
Speaker 4: with other non banks.
Speaker 21: Even better even Yeah. Right, Still, like I just feel
Speaker 21: like once we're once we're talking about chadow banking, like
Speaker 21: the real bank should not be in the room, Like
Speaker 21: go home, Wells Fargo, you don't belong here, you're drunk.
Speaker 4: No, But like they're funding all of this, right, If
Speaker 4: the real.
Speaker 21: Bank is involved with the shadow banking, that means like
Speaker 21: I can't opt out of being involved in this because
Speaker 21: they get my money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know what we were talking about that at
Speaker 4: the top, that like so some of these like fank
Speaker 4: banks had to like stop their withdrawals. Oh yeah, one
Speaker 4: of those, by the way, was JP Morgan.
Speaker 21: But that's a real bank.
Speaker 4: Yep. They're involved in the shadow banking shit, so they
Speaker 4: they are exposed to when they're like fucking seven hundred
Speaker 4: million dollar loan to like a fucking actually went home.
Speaker 4: Which one was the seven hundred million dollar I think
Speaker 4: a seven hundred million dollar loan that went under was
Speaker 4: the one that was to a subprime auto loan company.
Speaker 21: That's a bad investment. It's oh yeah, it's so evil.
Speaker 21: So why am I trusting all of my money that
Speaker 21: I have in this world? I'm letting this guy hold
Speaker 21: on to it, who's obviously not good with fucking money.
Speaker 4: Well, because the FDIC is ensuring it.
Speaker 21: Why are you in charge of it? Why are you
Speaker 21: in charge of having the money? You obviously don't make
Speaker 21: great financial decisions because you invested seven hundred million dollars
Speaker 21: in subprime auto loans.
Speaker 4: So, Mollie, this, this is the this is the point
Speaker 4: where we need to bring debt. The first five thousand
Speaker 4: years back into this and emphasize the extent to which
Speaker 4: the financial class has always been deeply connected to the
Speaker 4: of the military and why it's always been deconnected to
Speaker 4: war financing.
Speaker 21: I'm starting to realize that this is all very bad.
Speaker 4: It's very bad. It's all very bad. And this is
Speaker 4: this is to some extent why right Like part part
Speaker 4: of what right wing conspiracism about the financial system is
Speaker 4: is that like these people are like like the right wingers,
Speaker 4: like these people are there's like a baseline level of
Speaker 4: anti Semitism, like in the US right because it is
Speaker 4: a is a Christian society that is just like what
Speaker 4: fucking happens there? And these people are like, okay, we
Speaker 4: can channel all of the anger at like, oh my god,
Speaker 4: by fucking house got stolen by the bank because because
Speaker 4: they were betting on the mortgage to fail.
Speaker 21: And I still understand why that seagull.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, all these right wing conspiracits do is they
Speaker 4: look at that shit and they go, oh, well it
Speaker 4: was the Jews, and it's like but no, like fuck off,
Speaker 4: like these are all no it was the band and
Speaker 4: the other thing. And this is actually a really important
Speaker 4: thing that's not well understood here is that like the
Speaker 4: actual people who run these fucking banks and the people
Speaker 4: who work at them are all fucking white Christian dipshits.
Speaker 4: This is like a really, really like persistent issue that
Speaker 4: everyone fucking has, which is that, like one of one
Speaker 4: of the great successes of anti Semitism was like creating
Speaker 4: the image of the banker as a Jewish person. And no,
Speaker 4: they're not the Bay Like I fucking went to school
Speaker 4: with these people. They're all a bunch of fucking white
Speaker 4: frat bros. They're fucking white Christian frat ros. Oh right,
Speaker 4: you University of Chicago.
Speaker 21: You have a degree in economics in the University of Chicago.
Speaker 4: No freaking I have an anthropology degree, Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: I took a not a fucking fake degree, like the
Speaker 4: stupid econ bullshit.
Speaker 21: I would say, that's actually so evil to study economics.
Speaker 21: It's Chicago. You probably met some of the most evil people.
Speaker 4: Armed fact, I was just like in a dorm with them. Okay,
Speaker 4: so but you saw that I know all these people. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and like it is not it is not a bunch
Speaker 4: of Jewish people. It's it's a bunch of Christian frat bros.
Speaker 4: Like that's like the thing that's actually going on. There's
Speaker 4: actually a whole One day I will write behind the
Speaker 4: Bastard's episode about leverage buyouts and about how like there
Speaker 4: was like a Jewish guy who kind of like like
Speaker 4: did a lot of the inventing stuff, but him breaking
Speaker 4: into the banking thing was like a whole thing because
Speaker 4: there was so much anti Semitism because all of the
Speaker 4: banking sector was run by all of the fucking like
Speaker 4: weird dipshit like CIA, like like wasp motherfuckers.
Speaker 21: I mean, the Mormons have a huge hedge fund.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 21: Yeah, so like the what I said, I read an
Speaker 21: article about it, the hedge Fund, that the Mormons operate
Speaker 21: like they have their like best and brightest finance bros.
Speaker 21: Like you know, Mormons do their to your mission. If
Speaker 21: you're really good at finance your mission, that you don't
Speaker 21: have to go to South America and like tell people
Speaker 21: about the Book of Mormon. You can work at the
Speaker 21: hedge fund as your mission.
Speaker 4: It's it's a nightmare.
Speaker 21: I'm doing a hedge funds for God. Yep.
Speaker 4: That's a Satis Shatto bank by the way. Yep, it's great.
Speaker 4: So okay, okay, coming back to this again, right, so
Speaker 4: we're talking about like what what causes two thousand and
Speaker 4: eight and how did these shadow banks like do this?
Speaker 4: And the answer is that they've turned all of these
Speaker 4: mortgages into these like fake securities they can trade, right,
Speaker 4: they package them all together, and they find out something
Speaker 4: really crucial, which is that if they throw a bunch
Speaker 4: of loans that they obviously know are going to fail
Speaker 4: together and send them to a regulatory agency. And by
Speaker 4: the way, all of these like bonds that they're issuing
Speaker 4: have like grades based on supposed to be like how
Speaker 4: safe they are. And they figure out, yeah, and they
Speaker 4: figure out that they can send a bunch of really
Speaker 4: shitty bonds, but if they package enough shitty bonds together,
Speaker 4: they could send them to the regulators and the regulators
Speaker 4: would have would evaluate some of them as being good,
Speaker 4: and then you could sell the good ones to your
Speaker 4: pension fund because I thought it was a good bond
Speaker 4: and it made money. Lie and then and then yes,
Speaker 4: and yes, and then and then behind the scene, right,
Speaker 4: all of these fucking companies, all these shadow banks, all
Speaker 4: the regular banks, they're all doing these they're all doing
Speaker 4: these credit default swaps, right, So they're all betting on
Speaker 4: which ones of these are going to fail.
Speaker 21: I'm putting all of these boys in time out. I'm
Speaker 21: gonna put them in the bottom.
Speaker 4: Of a hip so evil, and they start they start
Speaker 4: doing these, making these like even more complicated instruments right where,
Speaker 4: Now what they're what they're selling to you isn't just
Speaker 4: the package of mortgages. They're also selling you the credit
Speaker 4: default swaps with the loan. So theoretically, what's happening is
Speaker 4: like they've created an instrument that, regardless of what happens
Speaker 4: to the loan, you make money.
Speaker 21: That's not how anything works.
Speaker 4: No, it's bullshit.
Speaker 21: It's so obviously bullshit. I made up this fake thing
Speaker 21: where no matter what happens, I get rich. That's cool.
Speaker 21: I would love to do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and nobody was like wait, well, I mean some
Speaker 4: a couple of people were, but like, like people didn't
Speaker 4: just be like wait, hold on, no, obviously you can't
Speaker 4: make an asset that makes money regardless of whether the
Speaker 4: thing fails or not.
Speaker 21: I invented a money machine, Like that's fucking ridiculous.
Speaker 4: And then eventually yeah, it was like no, they ran
Speaker 4: out of fucking mortgages. You know. One of the ways
Speaker 4: that the blame for this was deflected onto regular people
Speaker 4: was that they blamed the banks or like they blamed
Speaker 4: regular people for like not being able to pay the mortgages.
Speaker 4: But the thing is, by the time you get to
Speaker 4: the point where you're like packaging all that, you're betting
Speaker 4: on the mortgages. Right if you're a bank, even if
Speaker 4: you're the regular bank, you don't make money off of
Speaker 4: like someone paying their mortgage back. You make money on
Speaker 4: betting on the mortgages. So you're incentivized to just keep
Speaker 4: giving out loans you know won't happen because you can
Speaker 4: sell those loans off to some other dipshit and then
Speaker 4: you and then you can bet on those loans that
Speaker 4: they're going to fail and you can make money. And
Speaker 4: that's how you make your money because you're.
Speaker 21: You're not a bank anymore. You're a bookie who's cheating. Yep,
Speaker 21: I don't think that's good.
Speaker 4: Mia, No, this was the entire fucking financial system, and
Speaker 4: we just let these people stay in power.
Speaker 21: And I'm just supposed to just continue living my life
Speaker 21: like this.
Speaker 2: I don't know, like.
Speaker 4: Looking at this and then and then learning that all
Speaker 4: of these people got fucking bailed up by the government
Speaker 4: and none of them went to prison.
Speaker 21: And do they know they're cheating liars who are faking
Speaker 21: and making it up? Or are they like so high
Speaker 21: on their own supply they're like, they're like, no, bro, no,
Speaker 21: but this is totally gonna work. It's totally gonna work.
Speaker 4: Well, here's the thing. Some of them know and some
Speaker 4: of them don't.
Speaker 21: Because some of them believe that this is cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like some some of them legitimately thought that this
Speaker 4: was just going to work forever.
Speaker 21: Like do they believe their negative money, backed by other
Speaker 21: fake money, backed by the idea of promises of fake money?
Speaker 21: They think that's money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yep, Well thought was gonna work. It's not, it's not. Nope,
Speaker 4: And it turned out to not be any fucking money,
Speaker 4: and it blew up again, Like entire countries, countries were
Speaker 4: buying these, they went bankrupt.
Speaker 21: So like this is less real than a board epe nft.
Speaker 21: And that's really saying something. It's it's astonishing because at
Speaker 21: least the at least I can look at least I
Speaker 21: can look at the picture of the monkey. I can't
Speaker 21: look at this.
Speaker 4: No, like it like you can't look at the bet
Speaker 4: you're making on whether and whether monkey go down, Like it's.
Speaker 21: Like like all my apes gone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it's suppresiing because the entire world is just this.
Speaker 4: Now it's a shit the banks were doing where you're
Speaker 4: betting on whether mortgage gould to fail, but now it's
Speaker 4: your betting on whether like what day we're going to
Speaker 4: drop a bomb on a run?
Speaker 21: Like nothing is real and everything is gambling.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, And this is you know, what I would
Speaker 4: call a sort of terminal crisis stage of capitalism, where like.
Speaker 21: Because everything is so divorced from any material reality, from
Speaker 21: any good or service.
Speaker 4: Like there is a limit to which you can run
Speaker 4: an entire economy that is purely based on gambling. Like
Speaker 4: they're just there's a limit and we're going to hit it. Really,
Speaker 4: so that's that's got to break, right, Yeah, Yeah, it's
Speaker 4: going to break. It's going to break spectacularly. However, Comma,
Speaker 4: I do have good news for you, don't I do?
Speaker 4: I have good news? You now actually understand what non
Speaker 4: bank financial intermediation is. No, I don't. I'm going to
Speaker 4: walk through through it. You actually do. So I'm going
Speaker 4: to quote the IMS definition of non bank financial intermediation
Speaker 4: quote all entities outside the regulated banking system that perform
Speaker 4: the core banking functions credit intermediation, that is taking money
Speaker 4: from savers and letting it to borrowers. The four key
Speaker 4: aspects of intermediation are maturity transformation. We know this one, right,
Speaker 4: This is this is what the bank does.
Speaker 21: The loan gets older. Yeah, yeah, he gets paid back
Speaker 21: over time.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well it's you you turn your short term thing into
Speaker 4: a long term investment, or you do the opposite.
Speaker 21: Opposite, it's not good.
Speaker 4: They're both kind of a disaster, but like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: the no, the opposite is kind of how we got
Speaker 4: into this mess.
Speaker 21: There's liquidity transformation, which we know this too. It's turning
Speaker 21: money into a thing that's not money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or turning not money into a thing you can
Speaker 4: buy burger with.
Speaker 21: Okay, yeah, we got this.
Speaker 4: Leverage We also know this, which is you go into
Speaker 4: a bunch of debt to buy something else. And then
Speaker 4: there's credit risk transfer, which we know that one too.
Speaker 4: It's the betting market. We're supposedly swapping the risk by
Speaker 4: both of you two are now betting on whether this
Speaker 4: thing is going to fail.
Speaker 21: So it sounds like even just like regular banking is
Speaker 21: kind of just gambling now.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep, yep. Well, and it's fun too, So this
Speaker 4: is the thing that you used to be talked about
Speaker 4: more and isn't now. But like most of like, like
Speaker 4: the world's corporations are also basically this now, like this
Speaker 4: has been a thing for a while. But it's like
Speaker 4: the auto manufacturers don't make their money off of cars.
Speaker 4: I mean they sort of do. They make some money
Speaker 4: of cars, or like, most of what they make their
Speaker 4: money off of is like the forward finance company, which
Speaker 4: is like the auto loans thing. Oh and then the
Speaker 4: auto loans thing trades a bunch of like does all
Speaker 4: of this other financial bullshit to make money?
Speaker 21: So, like, I don't think that's a good idea.
Speaker 4: That's that's what capitalism is.
Speaker 21: So everything, everything is fully reliant on this.
Speaker 4: Like stupid gambling bullshit.
Speaker 21: Emperor is wearing no clothes economy yep. And if anybody,
Speaker 21: if anybody points out that none of this is connected
Speaker 21: to a material reality, everything falls apart.
Speaker 4: Well, here's the thing. The thing that stops everything for
Speaker 4: falling apart is that the one thing you can do
Speaker 4: with your money is turn it into gun.
Speaker 21: Now I'm listening, and.
Speaker 4: That's what stops it falling apart, right because.
Speaker 21: Now I'm listening.
Speaker 4: And this is also a sort of graverism. But it's
Speaker 4: like behind every bank is a man with a gun,
Speaker 4: because the reason that this money is even sort of
Speaker 4: real is that the bank can, like you, like the
Speaker 4: police will come get you, right, like men with guns
Speaker 4: will appear and coerce you to pay shit.
Speaker 21: Right, But what if what if instead of burger we
Speaker 21: bought gun?
Speaker 4: You know, like this is what is broadly referred to
Speaker 4: as the social revolution. It is it is broadly considered
Speaker 4: a negative by the financial sector. It is broadly considered
Speaker 4: a positive by everyone the fuck else. Okay, that's not true.
Speaker 4: It's not considered it a positive by like, I guess
Speaker 4: the people who own regular businesses. And this is like
Speaker 4: this shit that like, you know, it kind of less
Speaker 4: unhinged back then. But like if you go read the
Speaker 4: people who were like doing this shit in like the
Speaker 4: early nineteen hundreds, if you read their writing, it's all
Speaker 4: them being like, oh yeah, no, by the way, like
Speaker 4: a bunch of banks just like turned the entire Ottoman
Speaker 4: Empire into like a debt peon. And now their entire
Speaker 4: economy is just dedicated to paying off these fucking loans.
Speaker 4: And this is like hideously fucking evil, Like they're all
Speaker 4: complaining about the same shit.
Speaker 21: And the important lesson we learned from that, the important
Speaker 21: lesson we learned from that was to do it more more.
Speaker 21: Oh yeah, yeah yeah, to invent increasingly more complicated ways
Speaker 21: of doing that.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And like this, this is why the term third World
Speaker 4: is a slur becauseuse instead of being a political movement,
Speaker 4: because those the countries in the political movement that was
Speaker 4: called the Third World movement, all of their economies got
Speaker 4: fucking annihilated because they had these like loans whose interest
Speaker 4: rate could change, and the US jacked up all the
Speaker 4: interest rates and so suddenly their loans were like like
Speaker 4: the amount you had to like pay on the loan
Speaker 4: it went from like twenty percent or something to like
Speaker 4: fifty or one hundred or some shit. And you know,
Speaker 4: and like in these countries have never recovered, like Nigeria
Speaker 4: has never really economically recovered from the shit that happened
Speaker 4: to them with this. This is why a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of Latin America is like this too, Like it was
Speaker 4: like why there's so much sort of like writing systemic poverty,
Speaker 4: is that there were economies were entirely transformed into machines
Speaker 4: to like pay back these fucking debts taken out by
Speaker 4: these dictators. This is the whole fucking economy now. And
Speaker 4: you know there's other shadow banks that do other kind
Speaker 4: of completely unhand shit, right And I've been focusing this
Speaker 4: week on like specifically the kind that blew up the
Speaker 4: economy in two thousand and eight, But there's another kind
Speaker 4: that's like blowing up the economy right now, which is
Speaker 4: called private credit, which is I mentioned this briefly earlier,
Speaker 4: but private credit is when these like unregulated companies that
Speaker 4: are not banks, give out unregulated loans with unknown terms
Speaker 4: to other companies, and then those loans go to shit.
Speaker 4: And there's a whole bunch of ways that can blow up,
Speaker 4: including by the way, these companies are funding a bunch
Speaker 4: of the AI bubble.
Speaker 21: Oh and that's a great in depth, it's great, you
Speaker 21: know because much much like a mortgage, there's a real
Speaker 21: physical thing like a house involved, Right, it's not just vibes.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, oh molly, molly, they those motherfuckers. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: talk about this a bit. I might have had just
Speaker 4: run on for this part of it too, just because
Speaker 4: like ED does this all the time. But like those
Speaker 4: motherfuckers out there selling securities that are backed by fucking
Speaker 4: graphics cards, like at least the more I can't believe
Speaker 4: I'm fucking saying this, but like at least the mortgage
Speaker 4: backed securities, like there was a house you could steal
Speaker 4: to get your money back graphics cards ball.
Speaker 21: All my apes are, all my apes are gone. Like
Speaker 21: there's other ones that like it's it's so bad, it's just.
Speaker 4: But that that's for another time because it is late
Speaker 4: as fuck and we are out of here. Mollie. Thank you,
Speaker 4: Thank you for sitting and enduring an hour of you
Speaker 4: knowing what a shadow bank is.
Speaker 21: Now I almost know what a bank is. I'm still
Speaker 21: working on the rest of it, but I think I'm
Speaker 21: getting closer.
Speaker 4: I believe in you. I think we've made for progress today.
Speaker 4: I don't know. Now you can kind of understand what's
Speaker 4: going on. When this sting sector explodes again in like two.
Speaker 21: Weeks, you'll have to explain it to me again.
Speaker 4: Then I will be happy.
Speaker 9: To oh.
Speaker 24: Demo crazy words.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty, millions of Americans took to the streets
Speaker 1: to protest police violence. They were met with police violence
Speaker 1: on a massive scale. Shootings, vehicle attacks, and assassinations occurred
Speaker 1: alongside these protests, often into fas of the police, and
Speaker 1: in total, at least twenty five Americans died. We now
Speaker 1: know that President Trump repeatedly urged General Mark Milly to
Speaker 1: deploy US military forces to crack down violently on demonstrations.
Speaker 1: Milly claims that Trump told him to have his soldiers
Speaker 1: crack skulls, beat the fuck out of and just shoot protesters.
Speaker 1: In the end, we were all lucky. Military leaders, including
Speaker 1: General Milly, resisted calls to use their men to suppress
Speaker 1: domestic descent. National Guard were called in to police several
Speaker 1: major cities, but in many cases their behavior was tame
Speaker 1: compared to the militarized police who were reliably shot and
Speaker 1: beat protesters. For millions of Americans, twenty twenty was their
Speaker 1: first exposure to the violence the state will do to
Speaker 1: avoid change. And then Trump lost the election. He and
Speaker 1: his followers tried to carry out a coupe, but failed
Speaker 1: for now and millions of Americans who'd taken to the
Speaker 1: streets mostly went back to their lives. Some were satisfied
Speaker 1: just as had been done. Others were furious to have
Speaker 1: stopped short of instituting real change, but at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, business went on as usual. A version
Speaker 1: of normal prevailed. In twenty twenty one, the military of Myanmar,
Speaker 1: known as the tout Mada, overthrew the elected government in
Speaker 1: a coup. Hundreds of thousands of citizens, most of them young,
Speaker 1: gin z and millennial men and women, took to the streets.
Speaker 1: Police responded with tear gas, water cannons, and eventually bullets.
Speaker 1: The international community expressed its horror at the brutality of
Speaker 1: the TOTMDA, but that's all they did. Over the course
Speaker 1: of several months, the military pushed protesters mostly out of
Speaker 1: the cities, and a protest movement against the military coup
Speaker 1: turned into a civil war. Now those same protesters, mostly
Speaker 1: kids who wanted nothing more than a normal life, have
Speaker 1: become revolutionaries. With home made guns, three D printed rockets,
Speaker 1: and stolen rifles, they battled the taut Mada. Some of
Speaker 1: them fight in the jungles, some of them fight in
Speaker 1: the cities, and some of them on the internet. This
Speaker 1: is their story. We're sitting in a large suburban home
Speaker 1: in Mysot, Thailand, a small city on the border of
Speaker 1: Me and Mar. The boys singing and playing music around
Speaker 1: us range in age from seventeen to twenty two. Their
Speaker 1: existence in Thailand is a crime. If they are caught here,
Speaker 1: they'll be forced across the border into Me and Mar,
Speaker 1: whose government executed their friends and sold the organs for profit.
Speaker 1: But tonight they're playing music. We're drinking beer. Later, James
Speaker 1: Stout and I will play pool with them and get
Speaker 1: our asses just catastrophically wrecked.
Speaker 3: We met Andy, aged twenty two and head of the
Speaker 3: family for his Instagram page. That's not his real name,
Speaker 3: but for obvious reasons, we can't identify him. We first
Speaker 3: met when I send him a DM asking if we
Speaker 3: could buy one of his photos for our first series
Speaker 3: on Me and Ma. He was a bit skeptical, but
Speaker 3: I tried my best to get him to see we
Speaker 3: just wanted to give him money and from his work.
Speaker 3: Over the next six months or so, we weren't from
Speaker 3: talking on the phone to messaging almost every day, to
Speaker 3: Robert and I booking tickets to Thailand, to sitting on
Speaker 3: the top floor of their house. It used to be
Speaker 3: his landlord's office, but now it's home to Andy and
Speaker 3: his partner Sarah. That's also not her real name, because
Speaker 3: she's a citizen of a Western nation working in Thailand.
Speaker 3: The boys we talk about are the brothers, his cousin
Speaker 3: and friends. They live at a small building across the garden,
Speaker 3: and in the daytime they sit under a gazeba and
Speaker 3: play their guitars. The first night we met Andy and Sarah,
Speaker 3: we sat behind a bar in an unpaved alleyway. We
Speaker 3: drank beer out of sippy cups because selling beer is
Speaker 3: still banned at the local COVID regulations, but apparently the
Speaker 3: cops don't check sippy cups. We drank far too much,
Speaker 3: in fact, and the next day I work up with
Speaker 3: a headache and a blurry photo of me, Robert and
Speaker 3: Andy engaged in a post which was half hug and
Speaker 3: half mutual support structure. We walked home and according to
Speaker 3: my phone, at some point we took photos of a
Speaker 3: and and hopefully unrelated incident. At some point I started bleeding.
Speaker 3: It was immediately obvious that Andy needed the chance to
Speaker 3: blow off some steam. Over the last year and change.
Speaker 3: He is chronicled every stage of the coup in its aftermath,
Speaker 3: In early videos, we see joyous protests, moments of resistance,
Speaker 3: and splendor in the streets of cities like Miawiti. Later
Speaker 3: we see violence, death, and guerrilla warfare. Andy didn't have
Speaker 3: what you would call an easy childhood, thanks in part
Speaker 3: to me and Mar's long history of revolutions being crushed
Speaker 3: by the army. People there, like people everywhere, want to
Speaker 3: be free and determine their own futures. And so each
Speaker 3: generation has its own uprising, and each generation has its
Speaker 3: own massacre and very little progress to show for it.
Speaker 8: I was born in two thousand, so when I was seven,
Speaker 8: two thousand and seven, there was a revolution. It's called
Speaker 8: Saffron Revolution. It's it wasn't it wasn't like this, you know,
Speaker 8: it wasn't like what happened now. But like, they were
Speaker 8: a lot of people that were involved in it, a
Speaker 8: lot of people that killed, a lot of people left
Speaker 8: Miamar and came to the refugee counts in here, and
Speaker 8: we were one of the families that came to the
Speaker 8: refugee counts.
Speaker 1: And yeah, inta, Yeah, Andy's mother is Bumah, the dominant
Speaker 1: ethnic group in Myanmar, due to their decades long control
Speaker 1: of the military and government. His father is Karin, the
Speaker 1: ethnic group once used by the British government as soldiers.
Speaker 1: Since nineteen forty nine, the Karin have fought a war
Speaker 1: in the mountains against the Totmada. Their name is often
Speaker 1: anglicized to be spelled just like the English name Karen, which,
Speaker 1: given present Internet trends, makes explaining the conflict sometimes awkward.
Speaker 1: Andy primarily identifies as and was raised Bumah. His family
Speaker 1: left after the Saffron Revolution. They did not flee to
Speaker 1: escape political repression, but because the economy had collapsed. This
Speaker 1: put them in an awkward position in the camps, which
Speaker 1: were filled mostly with Karin people who had fled state violence.
Speaker 8: We weren't refugees. We were more like, how do you say,
Speaker 8: like economic refugees. You know, we go because not because
Speaker 8: our village has been burned down and our family has
Speaker 8: been killed, you know. So then if we were to
Speaker 8: go back to Yangon, we still could find a job.
Speaker 8: We still could find you know. But then for these
Speaker 8: current people, like this place is the only place that
Speaker 8: they could exist at that moment, right and probably still
Speaker 8: now too. So uh yeah, so they said that, but
Speaker 8: that education wasn't very good. There is the life wasn't good,
Speaker 8: you know, it wasn't It wasn't.
Speaker 25: It was very bad.
Speaker 8: Honestly, it was very bad. It was a lot of violence,
Speaker 8: a lot of hate, a lot of understandable, you know,
Speaker 8: like these people have gone through so much shit and
Speaker 8: so much trauma that and nothing. No one is coming
Speaker 8: there too, but fix that. So they had a lot
Speaker 8: of anger, They had a lot of problems. But my
Speaker 8: mom said, yeah, we're going back because the education he
Speaker 8: is very bad. And if you go back to Meamar,
Speaker 8: at least, you know, if you do like the thing
Speaker 8: that people or do, maybe you'll get somewhere. Yeah, in
Speaker 8: the future. Here there's no future, so she said, So
Speaker 8: we went back and I stayed in yourmar for like
Speaker 8: four years.
Speaker 1: Andy had never been very political. His family was more
Speaker 1: or less neutral, tending to side with the military more
Speaker 1: often than not out of a sense of inertia. Me
Speaker 1: and martended to cartwheel between attempts at democracy and military dictatorship.
Speaker 1: So when the world media celebrated their first democratic elections
Speaker 1: in twenty five years in twenty fifteen, Andy was not
Speaker 1: particularly excited.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So, I mean, we did realize that there was
Speaker 8: a change in the country, right, because we grew up
Speaker 8: in the military to take your ship. But then one
Speaker 8: contents did you take over?
Speaker 25: Took over.
Speaker 8: There were some changes, like the phones got cheaper, the
Speaker 8: internet got cheaper, and if you look back then you
Speaker 8: can see big, big changes. But the thing is it
Speaker 8: was never real democracy. And I think a lot of
Speaker 8: people in and the western countries thought that it was
Speaker 8: democracy when al Sansugi took over.
Speaker 1: Asong Suci came to prominence during a nineteen eighty eight
Speaker 1: uprising against the military, which ended in bloodshed in the
Speaker 1: streets of Yangon, and she'd been a long time democratic activist.
Speaker 1: As Andy noted, westerners celebrated her election as the first
Speaker 1: democratic head of state for mianmar She even won a
Speaker 1: Nobel prize, but the agreement her party had made with
Speaker 1: the military gave the general significant permanent control over the government.
Speaker 8: But I think most of the people in the country
Speaker 8: knew it wasn't real democracy because you know, the military
Speaker 8: always had twenty five percent twenty fight seats in the parliament,
Speaker 8: right like they were always they were in charge of
Speaker 8: electricity and all these all these big things, a weapons
Speaker 8: army like the military itself. They are in charge of
Speaker 8: all these things and they make it very clear.
Speaker 1: And even with a Nobel Prize on song, Suci did
Speaker 1: not fight to stop the top Mada from pursuing their
Speaker 1: decades long wars against the ethnic armed organizations in the Hills,
Speaker 1: nor did she act to stop their ethnic cleansing of
Speaker 1: the Rohinga people. In fact, she and others in her
Speaker 1: party didn't even call them Rohinga. They called them Bengali
Speaker 1: and insisted they were illegally residing in Myanmar, despite mountains
Speaker 1: of evidence documenting a group by that name living in
Speaker 1: what is now the Rakian State. I think most Americans
Speaker 1: and Westerners in general can empathize with the feeling of
Speaker 1: electing someone who promises change and then getting very little
Speaker 1: of what you'd expected.
Speaker 8: I think Alsensuci used to be this hope that that
Speaker 8: was like the opposition against the military. But I think
Speaker 8: when she got power, she couldn't do all the things
Speaker 8: that she promised to do or like, you know, we
Speaker 8: looked at her before, we looked at her as something,
Speaker 8: you know, something hope for everyone, you know, for all
Speaker 8: the ethnic groups and for everyone in the country. But
Speaker 8: then when she became empower, she mainly focused all these
Speaker 8: changes for the but my people, well, you know, the
Speaker 8: mainland people, like the military was still fucking killing people
Speaker 8: and killing ethnic groups. Did they do something, you know,
Speaker 8: like so then for the athnic groups, what's the difference?
Speaker 1: And so while Andy was hopeful that his country might
Speaker 1: take a better path, he was not exactly convinced that
Speaker 1: things were going to get better. Conflict within his family
Speaker 1: eventually pushed him to make the decision to leave.
Speaker 8: My dad was very abusive, right, he would be the
Speaker 8: shit out of my mouth every day like that. It
Speaker 8: was fine, Like it was fine when we were younger.
Speaker 8: We couldn't do anything, you know, we just kind of
Speaker 8: watched it, right, But the older we got, the more
Speaker 8: we involved, the more we try to stop it. But
Speaker 8: then we were fight with him too, you know. And
Speaker 8: so at some point it became too much, and so
Speaker 8: I left my home I think in twenty sixteen, just
Speaker 8: by myself, and I was like, I've been to messat,
Speaker 8: I will go back here, you know.
Speaker 1: So Andy lived across the border on his own for
Speaker 1: more than five years. He'd fallen in love, gotten a
Speaker 1: home with his own and set him himself up and
Speaker 1: the sort of odd jobs you can do without papers
Speaker 1: or legal residency and that's where things were for him
Speaker 1: when the top Madag carried out their coup in early
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one.
Speaker 8: Twenty twenty one February. First, I was a messout I
Speaker 8: was here, and yeah, in the morning, I woke up,
Speaker 8: called me my girlfriend and as she said, the military
Speaker 8: just did a coup in your country. You should call
Speaker 8: your family.
Speaker 1: The military claimed voter fraud and used that as the
Speaker 1: pretext to stay in power. It's a situation that should
Speaker 1: be unsettlingly familiar to most of our audience. For a while,
Speaker 1: Safe in Maysat, Andy watched it in horror as he
Speaker 1: texted with friends and family across the border.
Speaker 8: The arrested Ansensujin, all the big leaders right at the top,
Speaker 8: So we were kind of like, okay, is someone going
Speaker 8: to tell us what to do? And especially for us,
Speaker 8: we didn't have any experiences. We didn't know anything about
Speaker 8: any of this that I'm talking about right now. I
Speaker 8: didn't have any knowledge of that. But yeah, so after
Speaker 8: I think six day, the military cut off the internet
Speaker 8: for like two days, and I've lost our contact with
Speaker 8: everyone inside, my family, my friends, And that's the night
Speaker 8: I started playing it, like I started thinking, oh fuck,
Speaker 8: I should go back. And I saw the protest photos
Speaker 8: from Yangon. They looked amazing, right, and I'm like, I'm
Speaker 8: a photographer. I should be there and you know, document that.
Speaker 3: While Andy was staring at the protest photos from the
Speaker 3: capital of Mianmar Napo door, as well as Miawity and
Speaker 3: the largest city, Yang Gone, wondering he should take his
Speaker 3: camera and document yet another rising for democracy in his
Speaker 3: home country. A young woman named a Mirror was in
Speaker 3: the thick of those protests and Yang Gone when the
Speaker 3: coup started. A Mirror Age, seventeen, had just finished high school.
Speaker 3: She was looking forward to university and more pressingly, looking
Speaker 3: forward to playing futsal with her friends. She liked to
Speaker 3: spend a day's crafting, she says, making little things to
Speaker 3: gift or to keep, Like every other day. When she
Speaker 3: woke up, she spent ten minutes in medication before facing
Speaker 3: the world on the first February Long Sam Stukey was
Speaker 3: her hero, she says in our interview. Her boyfriend translated
Speaker 3: for her. We'll get to their story later, but when
Speaker 3: the coup began, they lived the world apart, but they
Speaker 3: joined the whole generation in feeling enraged by Tatmador, trying
Speaker 3: to rip the freedom their parents had fought for from them.
Speaker 3: A mirror took her rage into the street. Someone gave
Speaker 3: her a bullhorn.
Speaker 5: Because of her voice, and then she became the leader,
Speaker 5: you know with the bullhorn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what kind of stuff would you say to the
Speaker 1: boat through the bullhorn?
Speaker 5: Hello, you don't want you She's saying, uh, this is
Speaker 5: and fell and then uh uh that the erascuing that
Speaker 5: Succi is a anfel not fair.
Speaker 3: Okay, got yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 5: And then she believed that, Uh, she believed in what
Speaker 5: Dar Sansuci said, like everything is possible, and we haven't
Speaker 5: do anything. We haven't studied yet, and then but when
Speaker 5: we study it and then we can finish it, so
Speaker 5: everything is possible.
Speaker 4: So that's what she believed in.
Speaker 5: So she went on the road and then she protests.
Speaker 3: Across the city from a mirror on Coude. Miowk's girlfriend
Speaker 3: woke him up with the news that the government they'd
Speaker 3: voted for had been arrested. We're calling him Yauk here
Speaker 3: because that's his name. In the revolution, everyone has one.
Speaker 3: A mirror's his baby, because she's so young yet so fierce.
Speaker 3: If you're wondering means monkey. These revolutionaries who have risked
Speaker 3: life and limb for each other didn't know the legal
Speaker 3: names of the people they call their revolution family because
Speaker 3: it's safer that way, and we don't either. Me, I
Speaker 3: could spend the night. Well, I'll let you hear Harry
Speaker 3: phrase it.
Speaker 6: Actually, I was just like I was chilling with my
Speaker 6: scare friend, you know, our jailing, and we were you know,
Speaker 6: Netflix and chare generary Neflis and I think it's a Sunday.
Speaker 6: I think it's Sunday Nephla and Cha, and we we
Speaker 6: slid together.
Speaker 2: If you didn't catch that there were Netflix and chilling.
Speaker 6: You know, I was literally not wakere but any louder show.
Speaker 6: I was so sleep but at the full am there's
Speaker 6: a whole poe rings and I certainly wake here the
Speaker 6: phone ring from my girlfriend, her anti call call called
Speaker 6: cald Heart, and she said there's a cool of fish. Oh,
Speaker 6: and she wake her and she told me there's a
Speaker 6: cool of I didn't, you know, I don't believe it.
Speaker 2: I believe it.
Speaker 6: I didn't believe it. So other than I chat the
Speaker 6: social media, oh ship or may I actually do this?
Speaker 6: I'm so angry and I'm so angry, you know. I
Speaker 6: was god to doll downstairs, and I told to my family,
Speaker 6: difficult of everyone's angry at those times. The internet they
Speaker 6: cut off.
Speaker 3: The next revolutionary we're going to mean is a fellow
Speaker 3: will call doctor Wonder because that's his revolution name. When
Speaker 3: the coups started, he was just waking up after a
Speaker 3: twenty four hour shift at the hospital and Yangon where
Speaker 3: he worked. Doctors were some of the earliest and most
Speaker 3: visible dissidents in the protests. Their rarity and therefore their
Speaker 3: relative value to the regime made them a potent symbol
Speaker 3: of the pro democracy movement, but, as Dr Wonder made clear,
Speaker 3: many older medical professionals, I'm not at all certain that
Speaker 3: resistance was a right move here.
Speaker 9: At the morning I saw the news that bad news,
Speaker 9: really really bad news for us. It was how would
Speaker 9: I say that day? Pro You know, yeah, they broke future.
Speaker 3: Doctors were some of the earliest, most visible dissidents in
Speaker 3: the pro democracy protests. Their rarity and relative value to
Speaker 3: the regime made them a potent symbol of the pro
Speaker 3: democracy movement, but as doctor Wonder made clear, many older
Speaker 3: medical professionals were not at all certain that resistance was
Speaker 3: a right move.
Speaker 9: On that money. We go back to our ah, our society,
Speaker 9: our hospital. We are shen guys, you know, all professors
Speaker 9: or conceranders. They not much interest about that. It was.
Speaker 9: They told us, you know, whoever rules our camfe, this
Speaker 9: is not our business. It is one of our seniors,
Speaker 9: doctors from our society for our department pool us like that.
Speaker 9: But we reply him, no, it should be the last time.
Speaker 3: If didn't care, he said it should be the last time,
Speaker 3: the last time kids had to die in the streets.
Speaker 3: They didn't want another generation to have to go through
Speaker 3: the same thing. So they got together a proposal, a
Speaker 3: sort of manifesto for peaceful, nonviolent resistance, and they submitted
Speaker 3: it to their seniors.
Speaker 9: We negotiated with our you know, young resident, our society,
Speaker 9: and we discussed about that and we plan to start
Speaker 9: with one of our prior movement before save a disagreement.
Speaker 9: We have got our red ribbon movement because we want
Speaker 9: not right peacefully on the media. Okay. We started like that,
Speaker 9: and then some of our seniors from our society, they
Speaker 9: were from Mandally Hospital. Okay, they accept our proposal. Yes,
Speaker 9: because our generation has already passed that difficulties before, but
Speaker 9: not your generation shouldn't accept that.
Speaker 3: Three days before the queue, TK got off a plane
Speaker 3: in San Francisco. He's from Me and Ma, but he
Speaker 3: lives in the Bay Area. Now, before you ask, he
Speaker 3: says that the Burmese restaurant there is not as good
Speaker 3: as stuff back home.
Speaker 5: It's only three days three days before, three days before
Speaker 5: I went back to the to the United States, and
Speaker 5: I wish I'm staying a youngle and doing the revolution
Speaker 5: and a participate in a everywhere that I can, but
Speaker 5: that I couldn't do from the long distance, you know.
Speaker 5: So that's all I can do for now.
Speaker 3: TK had just been in Me and Ma. He had
Speaker 3: connections to many people on the ground there, his friends
Speaker 3: with it, his family with it. When the government cut
Speaker 3: off into the access, he remained able to get good
Speaker 3: international reporting on the situation in his home country. Slowly
Speaker 3: he found ways to communicate with his friends and a
Speaker 3: growing core of the protesters taking to the streets.
Speaker 5: I was a keyboard fighter. I have no idea about
Speaker 5: a politics. I have no idea about the military stuff.
Speaker 3: This is a single most common sentiment we've heard across
Speaker 3: all the revolutionaries we've met. None of them considered themselves
Speaker 3: to be very political. Prior to the coup. They started
Speaker 3: marching in the street because a military coup was obviously bad,
Speaker 3: but they stayed there because the violence dished out by
Speaker 3: the state was so horrific. Save at their house in Masok.
Speaker 3: We talked to the boys and his brothers and cousins,
Speaker 3: all of whom were living in Napo door when the
Speaker 3: coup kicked off. It didn't take him long to try
Speaker 3: and join them.
Speaker 8: Then I went in. I went to Nyawiti, which is
Speaker 8: across the border in your marside, and I was there
Speaker 8: for a week and it was it was something else,
Speaker 8: like I've never been to protests now, I've never been
Speaker 8: involved in any of this thing, and I never thought
Speaker 8: I would be, you know, like I don't know. I
Speaker 8: always thought like I wasn't going to be a part
Speaker 8: of it. But when I went there the first day,
Speaker 8: I write there were two hundred thousand people on the
Speaker 8: street protesting. And then it's like, and if this big
Speaker 8: group of people walk in streets after street and everyone
Speaker 8: coming out of their house and we have this symbol
Speaker 8: like three fingers from Hangergang, I think, yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 8: that's like our symbol for democracy now or our movement now,
Speaker 8: and everyone come out of their house doing that and
Speaker 8: you know, like giving us water, food, everything. It was beautiful,
Speaker 8: like it was something else. It was something else. And
Speaker 8: then from that day I was like hook. I was like, Okay,
Speaker 8: this is what I'm going to do.
Speaker 12: Now.
Speaker 8: I'm going to be a photographer and I'm gonna in this,
Speaker 8: you know, and I'm gonna I'm going to take photo
Speaker 8: of these people and their stories and I'm gonna share
Speaker 8: it and that's.
Speaker 2: My part, that's my rule.
Speaker 3: Soon he found friends among the protesters. Within a few days,
Speaker 3: he was feeling a feeling that so many people felt
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty. It's a feeling you felt if you've
Speaker 3: ever been in the thick of a crowd of people
Speaker 3: filled with righteous anger and facing down overwhelmed police or soldiers.
Speaker 3: It's a sensation. I can't really described you you haven't
Speaker 3: experienced it, but I can say that there's no time
Speaker 3: that I've ever felt more empowered than the times I've
Speaker 3: been crushed shoulder with strangers, toe to toe with state
Speaker 3: violence and watch cops break and retreat. It's incredible. It's addictive,
Speaker 3: and if I'm monaged It's probably why Robert and I
Speaker 3: booked a flight to visit a stranger I've been dming
Speaker 3: on the ground.
Speaker 8: I think after three days, I met this group of people,
Speaker 8: young people like students trying to be lawyers and souf
Speaker 8: and I figured out that they were the ones trying
Speaker 8: to organize these big protests, like two hundred people, one
Speaker 8: hundred thousand people. They were the ones that's making that happen.
Speaker 8: So I started kind of following them, trying to get
Speaker 8: close because I wanted to get stories from them. And
Speaker 8: then they became they and they realize what I've been doing,
Speaker 8: They've been watching like and so they were like very welcome,
Speaker 8: and they took me to this hide out that they
Speaker 8: go to and then we will have discussions and meetings
Speaker 8: about what we should do the next day.
Speaker 25: Da da da da.
Speaker 8: But then kind of it's because it's a small town.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 8: Slowly, I think police and military started realizing that we
Speaker 8: are that group too.
Speaker 24: Oh yeah, demo crazy wondering my josh oh do.
Speaker 3: So by now you're probably wondering what that coverage dust
Speaker 3: to do. It's a song that boys learned when we
Speaker 3: first took to the streets, but it tells the story
Speaker 3: of a previous revelation, one that didn't succeed.
Speaker 24: That's pretty good, guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you tell us what that song's about, like,
Speaker 1: you know what the lyrics are and stuff in English?
Speaker 18: Yeah, yeah, we can try.
Speaker 1: I heard the word democracy in there.
Speaker 18: I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 23: Yeah, it's like all the.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do people use it for the Spring Revolution as
Speaker 3: well as Ida, Yeah.
Speaker 24: Because it's the same thing.
Speaker 8: Tell the world, and that's the.
Speaker 2: Name of the song, tell the world.
Speaker 18: It's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I tell the world.
Speaker 8: So basically the song is like, yeah, they sang it
Speaker 8: in the back in the eighty eight and then it's
Speaker 8: like we used it quite a lot when when we
Speaker 8: were in the protest to.
Speaker 25: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The lyris are We'll keep fighting until the end of
Speaker 8: the world for the sake of history and revolution in
Speaker 8: our blood and of the fallen heroes who fought for
Speaker 8: the democracy. Oh, our dearest heroes. This is the learne
Speaker 8: of like heroes. Yeah and yeah. It goes on and yeah,
Speaker 8: basically saying like something like the history went wrong along
Speaker 8: the way, but we have to fix it. Yeah, like
Speaker 8: the country has shut its blood and how could they
Speaker 8: commit such violence to its own people, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 8: and yeah, like they say, like the blood on the
Speaker 8: rows and the streets are not dried yet. And for
Speaker 8: the sake of these people who die for the democracy,
Speaker 8: for fighting for democracy, for the sake of them, we.
Speaker 18: Have to keep fighting basically.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now in their exile, they keep singing it to remember
Speaker 3: the first day of the revolution, when the fights are
Speaker 3: in the street, not the jungle, before they lost so
Speaker 3: many of their comrade.
Speaker 26: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And then there was the night protest in front of
Speaker 8: the police station.
Speaker 2: Attends.
Speaker 8: Yeah, oh this is they're singing.
Speaker 2: The song is the same.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it got very very heated.
Speaker 3: The protest friends were just talking about occurred in reality,
Speaker 3: but the song popped up all across the country.
Speaker 25: When you played it in Yangon, you will sing it, uh, yeah,
Speaker 25: they and yeah though it wasn't one guitar, it was
Speaker 25: a whole band. Well you have like protesters sitting down
Speaker 25: and then there's a group of people who were playing
Speaker 25: this and repeatedly there are a bunch of songs that
Speaker 25: will play and then there's like words that we would
Speaker 25: say and yeah, like slot.
Speaker 24: Myself, Yeah I not beam down.
Speaker 8: And you'll see from the footage how it's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how did it make you feel singing it out.
Speaker 24: It's scary, you know.
Speaker 8: It's like the song, the song is very real. So
Speaker 8: like at first we didn't want to play the song.
Speaker 8: It's too dark, it's too it's too intense, right yeah,
Speaker 8: like yeah, but it's not like the lyrics are there,
Speaker 8: like you can see it.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 8: It's like because we've been through it too, so it's
Speaker 8: very intense. And yeah, I think the first time I
Speaker 8: heard it, like I heard the song, I remember that
Speaker 8: we are feeling of yeah, I still have it like
Speaker 8: every time we're saying it now, like this is not
Speaker 8: one of the songs that we usually sing like. It's
Speaker 8: not a fun song.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the album lou.
Speaker 24: Bedia de Moore Crazy.
Speaker 3: On the next episode, which you'll be able to download tomorrow,
Speaker 3: we'll talk about how the Hunter began to clamp down
Speaker 3: on the protests. Now the protesters decided this struggle was
Speaker 3: too important to abandon and decided to fight back. Hi everyone,
Speaker 3: it's James here. I just wanted to note that lots
Speaker 3: of the words in this script are Burmese or Karen
Speaker 3: or Thai, and we've made every effort to make sure
Speaker 3: that we pronounce them correctly, but we're sure We've obviously
Speaker 3: made some mistakes along the way. That's not out of
Speaker 3: a lack of respect or I have a lack of
Speaker 3: re recording on my part, but we did want to
Speaker 3: note that what we've made a mistake, we're very sorry
Speaker 3: for doing.
Speaker 12: So this is it could happen here in Executive Disorder,
Speaker 12: our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House,
Speaker 12: the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm
Speaker 12: Garrison Davis today and joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans,
Speaker 12: with a special sign by James Stout. This episode, we're
Speaker 12: covering the week of July fifteenth to July twenty second.
Speaker 12: On Monday morning, someone poured gasoline in front of an
Speaker 12: entrance to the Federal Immigration Court in New York City
Speaker 12: and lit the gasoline on fire. A forty three year
Speaker 12: old Army vet was arrested outside the building that has
Speaker 12: been charged with arson. The man brought a sign reading
Speaker 12: ice off our streets and also allegedly launched a bundle
Speaker 12: of fireworks and fired pellets from an air soft rifle.
Speaker 12: Three US service members were killed this week on an
Speaker 12: air base in Jordan as a result of Trump's war
Speaker 12: with Ron The New York Times, Sames reported that the
Speaker 12: Trump administration has tried to obtain phone and text records
Speaker 12: from New York Times journalists and their families to uncover
Speaker 12: the source of leaks regarding the security capabilities of the
Speaker 12: new Air Force one courtesy of the Qatari government. Cash
Speaker 12: Hotel's overseeing this investigation. This is a huge First Amendment breach.
Speaker 12: After multiple failed election campaigns, Katie Porter has announced she
Speaker 12: is leaving politics to become a book influencer Oh God,
Speaker 12: and has rebranded her Instagram account to Katie Porter turns
Speaker 12: the page.
Speaker 1: What okay? I mean bold move to be like, you
Speaker 1: know what, the growth industry of the future is books.
Speaker 1: I can't fault the desire there, but I just don't
Speaker 1: think history is going to really work that way, Katie.
Speaker 12: Secretary Kennedy has announced the Trump administration is pausing more
Speaker 12: than one billion dollars in medicaid payments to California and
Speaker 12: Minnesota due to quote societ dected fraud and non compliance.
Speaker 12: Play a short clip here.
Speaker 23: That includes more than eight hundred and sixty seven million
Speaker 23: dollars for California and over two hundred million dollars for Minnesota.
Speaker 23: If those states want that money. They need to provide
Speaker 23: documentation that these payments are legitimate.
Speaker 12: This will seriously harm, if not kill people, huge numbers
Speaker 12: of people. This is just a billion dollar cut to
Speaker 12: medicaid citing quote unquote fraud.
Speaker 1: It's aimed at blue states that the administration sees as enemies.
Speaker 12: You know, let's move on to our first main story
Speaker 12: and it'll be kind of a through line this episode.
Speaker 12: As I briefly mentioned last week, on Thursday, July sixteenth,
Speaker 12: Mark Rubio and the State Department held an international conference
Speaker 12: on the Scourge of Left Wing violence and Antifa Terrorism.
Speaker 12: This is just the latest escalation following Trump's designation of
Speaker 12: Antifa as a quote unquote terrorist group last year and
Speaker 12: the emboldening of law enforcements targeting of left wing groups
Speaker 12: the National Security Presidential Memorandum Number seven. According to the
Speaker 12: State Departments, this international conference was attended by representatives from
Speaker 12: sixty six countries. Over sixty senior ministers were invited, but
Speaker 12: only seventeen ministers actually were in attendance, though other quote
Speaker 12: political leaders and experts and law enforcement officials traveled to
Speaker 12: DC for the event, including the senior chief of the
Speaker 12: Hellenic Police from Greece. According to a reporter from the
Speaker 12: lahrnta newspaper, Mexico was invited to the summit, but the
Speaker 12: president declined to attend because the conference seemed quote more
Speaker 12: political than really related to combating criminal groups.
Speaker 1: Yeah, amazing, imagine that.
Speaker 12: And before the conference, Washington Post reported that many senior
Speaker 12: ministers were confused as to the purpose of the event
Speaker 12: and why they were invited to the conference, with two
Speaker 12: European diplomats telling the Post quote, we don't have Antifa
Speaker 12: end quote. Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on
Speaker 12: left wing terrorism because this is not considered a high
Speaker 12: priority threat in our countries.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really exist, yeah to us.
Speaker 12: So this international summit put on by Mark Rubio was
Speaker 12: titled the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.
Speaker 1: Come very serious, completely leaving out the right, and also,
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about later, blaming a lot basically the
Speaker 1: entire modern left on Cuba because it's a mix of
Speaker 1: Marco and everyone trying to panter to Trump. A lot
Speaker 1: of these are grievances either rooted in the seventies or
Speaker 1: like a four month period in twenty twenty. Yes, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's their entire conception of the left.
Speaker 12: To open the summit, Rubio told this story of a
Speaker 12: civilizational threat posed by leftists, Marxists, and anarchist political violence,
Speaker 12: the violence that has laid dormant since the seventies but
Speaker 12: has now awoken. Rubio applauded our counter terrorism strategies in
Speaker 12: taking down quote unquote radical Islamist extremism. But while our
Speaker 12: focus has been on Isis and jihadism, law enforcement and
Speaker 12: the counter terrorism mapparatus has been unable or unwilling to
Speaker 12: go after left wing violence, let's hear from Rubio.
Speaker 27: For far too long, however, our counter terrorism doctrine has
Speaker 27: had a blind spot, a blind spot when it comes
Speaker 27: to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the
Speaker 27: very idea that far left terrorism could be a serious
Speaker 27: threat is treated as a right wing fever dream, or worse,
Speaker 27: as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It's treated this way by
Speaker 27: many in the press, by many an academia and our universities,
Speaker 27: and by many of.
Speaker 18: Our legacy institutions.
Speaker 27: You will, no doubt see the dogma rear its head
Speaker 27: in the coverage of this very conference, in spite of
Speaker 27: the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the
Speaker 27: objective numbers and statistics.
Speaker 12: One of the main tactics employed by Rubio, Stephen Miller,
Speaker 12: and others throughout this conference was the subtle conflation of
Speaker 12: mass casualty incidents from the far right with instances of
Speaker 12: property damage or, in the most extreme cases, targeted assassination
Speaker 12: attempts against political figures attributed to the far left, which
Speaker 12: people on the far right also do, by the way.
Speaker 1: Much more often.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Rubio said quote. A whole industry grew up in
Speaker 12: our countries around the study of extremism. We have think
Speaker 12: tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken
Speaker 12: understanding among them that only one kind of political violence
Speaker 12: was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted
Speaker 12: by a neo Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous
Speaker 12: act of evil, it is, But a bomb planted by
Speaker 12: a Marxist revolutionary, well, that's just merely a tragic excess
Speaker 12: of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or over zealous,
Speaker 12: but it's ends were virtuous and just unquote.
Speaker 1: No one's ever said that, Mark, no one, no one
Speaker 1: in US politics has ever said that. You can find
Speaker 1: some maniacs have said anything about anything. But like, that's
Speaker 1: simply not a discourse in America.
Speaker 12: CVE researchers generally would not describe Marxist bombing plots as virtuous, and.
Speaker 1: Just I've never heard a bombing plot described as virtuous.
Speaker 1: The only act of what you could call terrorism I've
Speaker 1: ever seen in the recent days people call virtuous is
Speaker 1: you know what happened to that healthcare executive.
Speaker 21: Which Rubio does talk about, Yes, and that is definitely a.
Speaker 1: Lot of people cheered that on. But I can't think
Speaker 1: of a single instance in which a bombing has ever
Speaker 1: been cheered on. So and Marxist.
Speaker 4: Bombings, it's like, wait, when was the last time that
Speaker 4: Marxist like actually said like, this is not a real thing.
Speaker 1: It isn't that What Rubio was talking about is a
Speaker 1: spate of left wing affiliated bombings that occurred from nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one to seventy two. He talks about this in
Speaker 1: the Cube of.
Speaker 4: Pity, and that's what he's said that hasn't happened, Like
Speaker 4: no weather underground has been above ground for like.
Speaker 1: That's entirely what all this is based on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and it's like it's not a thing.
Speaker 1: Now, Yeah, is what old people remember about the left
Speaker 1: in the seventies.
Speaker 12: Yeah, you know, it's not directly referenced, but I know
Speaker 12: the DJ did make a big hubbub about foiling a
Speaker 12: quote unquote far left or it's kind of like an
Speaker 12: anti imperials like maoist bombing plot in California late last year. Also,
Speaker 12: a confidential human source who was working with law enforcement
Speaker 12: was involved in the planning of this operation, which was
Speaker 12: stopped by law enforcement before they could ever carry out
Speaker 12: the attack.
Speaker 4: And that's the closest thing to like an actual like
Speaker 4: Mark City. That is the closest recent thing. Yes, Like
Speaker 4: that's it, like in the last like very long number
Speaker 4: of years now.
Speaker 12: Rubio claimed that quote an extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded
Speaker 12: in the way we talk about political violence and extremism,
Speaker 12: to the point that this prejudice has become the neutral
Speaker 12: and objective baseline quote so entrenched in the mainstream conventional
Speaker 12: wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact.
Speaker 12: For an example of this, Rubio mentions the protests against
Speaker 12: the murder of George Floyd.
Speaker 27: Many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts
Speaker 27: of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression,
Speaker 27: so long as they served a left wing cause.
Speaker 18: It is why during.
Speaker 27: Those George Floyd so called George Floyd Riots in the
Speaker 27: summer of twenty twenty, as criminals and extremists burned and
Speaker 27: looted their way through American America's great cities and nearly
Speaker 27: brought the country to its knees, city governments all across
Speaker 27: the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these
Speaker 27: acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for
Speaker 27: the now infamous image. Maybe you all recall this of
Speaker 27: a news anchor from a very prominent agency, a news
Speaker 27: anchor standing in the neighborhood consumed in flames. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 27: cryon on the bottom red that the protests were mostly peaceful.
Speaker 1: Can even say cairon right, My god.
Speaker 27: This was something worse than a double standard. Left Wing
Speaker 27: violence was not just excused, It was treated as sacricinct,
Speaker 27: a protected class unto itself.
Speaker 12: A protected class unto itself, protecting their ability to light
Speaker 12: trash on in the middle of a street.
Speaker 1: That's what happened. There weren't thousands of arrests and prosecutions.
Speaker 12: That is the Other thing is that the Trump administration
Speaker 12: did that a little bit, but this was at the
Speaker 12: end of twenty twenty. The Biden administration did tons and
Speaker 12: tons of like federal arrests, yes, with people involved in
Speaker 12: these protests, people who are still in jail. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 12: January six people are out of jail and have had pardons.
Speaker 12: Rubio referenced instances of political violence in Europe from recent time,
Speaker 12: like a firebomb attack on the home of a Greek
Speaker 12: politician that killed that politician's mother earlier this month. Rubio
Speaker 12: did not mention that four suspects have already been arrested
Speaker 12: and that this fire bombing was the first time in
Speaker 12: over a decade that someone was killed in an attack
Speaker 12: targeting a politician in Greece. Rubio also referenced a five
Speaker 12: day blackout in Berlin last winter caused by a power
Speaker 12: line sabotage. People claiming to be responsible for the attack
Speaker 12: associate to themselves with a far left eco extremist group Leslie.
Speaker 12: Rubio mentioned that in February of this year, quote a
Speaker 12: French twenty three year old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries
Speaker 12: beaten to death on the streets of Leone by a
Speaker 12: group of far left militant thugs. This twenty three year
Speaker 12: old was a neo fascist qute unquote activist, that's what
Speaker 12: he's referred to in local news coverage, who died two
Speaker 12: days after being brutalized in a large street brawl during
Speaker 12: a far right protest outside of a university event featuring
Speaker 12: a Palestinian lawmaker. Eleven anti fascists were arrested for this.
Speaker 2: Rubio tried to.
Speaker 12: Connect the current emerging threat of far left political terrorism
Speaker 12: to historical Marxist struggles in the twentieth century and particularly
Speaker 12: the nineteen seventies. Rubio name dropped to urban grilla groups
Speaker 12: in Central South America, FARC, the National Liberation Army, the
Speaker 12: Shining Path, Maoist guerrillas in Peru, as well as European
Speaker 12: groups like Italy's Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction in Germany,
Speaker 12: Marxist extreamists in Greece and in the US, the Weather Underground,
Speaker 12: the Black Liberation Army, and the Symbonese Liberation Army.
Speaker 27: And today we face a new wave of this old
Speaker 27: evil here in the United States. The share of left
Speaker 27: wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not
Speaker 27: seen in decades. In Germany, far left violence has jumped
Speaker 27: by more than forty percent in just the last year alone.
Speaker 27: In Greece, more than eighty percent of radical violence is
Speaker 27: now driven by far left and anarchist actors.
Speaker 18: These these are not abstract statistics.
Speaker 27: Americans have seen what those numbers mean, and all out
Speaker 27: of assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes,
Speaker 27: a transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students
Speaker 27: as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like where
Speaker 27: is your God now? A healthcare executive executed in cold
Speaker 27: blood in the streets, multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president,
Speaker 27: and the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation.
Speaker 12: So there's a lot there. Anarchist violence certainly isn't new
Speaker 12: in Greece. No, and again in the American context, this
Speaker 12: little speech by Rubio conflates mass casualty events with property
Speaker 12: damage and isolated targeted violence. He references vague quote unquote
Speaker 12: all out assaults on immigration officers as in big protests
Speaker 12: in Minneapolis. He references a one sniper attack by a
Speaker 12: suicidal man who was not very political and leaned libertarian
Speaker 12: in Texas, here references a transgender shooter who also was
Speaker 12: not politically motivated in the traditional sense and initially planned
Speaker 12: to shoot up an LGBTQ music venue. The United Healthcare
Speaker 12: CEO assassination is arguably the closest thing here to like
Speaker 12: left wing motivated violence.
Speaker 1: It's definitely politically motivated, even.
Speaker 12: That suspect wasn't particularly like left wing politically, no belief
Speaker 12: in some political ideology was not the driving force behind
Speaker 12: that assassination. It wasn't ideologically motivated, but rather materially motivated
Speaker 12: based on interactions with our inhumane healthcare system. Trying to
Speaker 12: understand every public act of violence, whether that's a shooting
Speaker 12: or an assassination, just as existing in between this left
Speaker 12: right binary is a very limited way to actually try
Speaker 12: to understand public acts of violence, because not all shootings
Speaker 12: have an obvious ideological driver. Public acts of violence can
Speaker 12: be downs dream of someone's personal experiences and material conditions.
Speaker 12: As for the Trump assassinations, two have been from people
Speaker 12: who were largely moderate liberals, not leftists, and the first
Speaker 12: attempt assassination did not appear to have what we would
Speaker 12: originally consider to be a political motive. Again, from someone
Speaker 12: with a conservative background who was closer to what we
Speaker 12: would describe as having like a school shooter mentality. I'll
Speaker 12: talk about this a little bit later, but I think
Speaker 12: it's really important to understand that just because the target
Speaker 12: is a political figure does not mean it is political violence.
Speaker 12: The attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan is a key example
Speaker 12: of this, and investigations into the first Trump assassination found
Speaker 12: that the shooter, Thomas Crooks, searched online for a variety
Speaker 12: of events to commit a shooting at. In the month
Speaker 12: prior to the shooting, he did more than sixty ounite
Speaker 12: searches related to Biden Trump and information about the upcoming
Speaker 12: DNC and RNC conventions. Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania
Speaker 12: just happened to take place in the right place at
Speaker 12: the right time, And for someone who's just trying to
Speaker 12: do a high profile shooting, it might not even matter
Speaker 12: what the outcome of that attempted shooting is. These public
Speaker 12: acts of violence usually have a suicidal component, a driver
Speaker 12: self annihilation, while simultaneously gaining some final sense of meaning
Speaker 12: or purpose by crudely emblazoning yourself in history through a
Speaker 12: violent act. This kind of public suicidal violence can be
Speaker 12: a sort of final attempt of communing with the world.
Speaker 12: The AP summarized report published last year by the Center
Speaker 12: for Strategic and International Studies that found that left wing
Speaker 12: terrorist attacks as of July of last year had surpassed
Speaker 12: those from the far right for the first time in
Speaker 12: more than thirty years, But a closer look at that
Speaker 12: data showed that the uptick reflects a very low starting
Speaker 12: level and a concurrent drop on the far right. Quote,
Speaker 12: there was an average of zero point six left wing
Speaker 12: incidents annually from nineteen ninety four through two thousand, compared
Speaker 12: with an average of twenty point six on the right.
Speaker 4: The report shows from.
Speaker 12: Twenty sixteen to twenty twenty four, they were an average
Speaker 12: of four per year on the left and twenty two
Speaker 12: point seven per year on the right. Those numbers have
Speaker 12: dropped dramatically on the right as of early July twenty
Speaker 12: twenty five, with only one incident. Meanwhile, there had been
Speaker 12: five from the left. So yes, left wing attacks in
Speaker 12: twenty twenty five did outpace what that report as of
Speaker 12: July categorized as right wing attacks, but that was because
Speaker 12: there was a big drop off in right wing attacks
Speaker 12: once Trump came into office and a very small increase
Speaker 12: in attacks attributed to the left. And that is the
Speaker 12: sort of statistics that Rubio is using to make this push.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, like it's worth noting. It's like, okay,
Speaker 4: so why have there been less of these sort of
Speaker 4: like right wing political terrorism events And it's like, well,
Speaker 4: because ICE is just doing them instead.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the states doing the violence for them.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Like it's the same reason that you can look
Speaker 4: at the period in which sort of like jailhouse lynching
Speaker 4: suddenly like collapses, and the reason they collapse is that,
Speaker 4: you know, the US government starts executing those people, and
Speaker 4: you know, this is like a very explicit deal that's
Speaker 4: made between the state and you know, the specific kind
Speaker 4: of lynch mob is like we'll just carry out death
Speaker 4: like penalty sentences against these people if you stop storming
Speaker 4: prisons and lynching them in there. So you know, that's
Speaker 4: like what's happening here, right, is like you have people
Speaker 4: with mass shooter profiles. Who are you know, ICE officers
Speaker 4: shooting like immigrants in the streets.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 12: Yeah, One thing that was really common throughout Rubio's whole
Speaker 12: speech and some of the follow up remarks by like
Speaker 12: Miller and Bessett is like a big thing that was
Speaker 12: undergirding their rhetoric was this assumption that if the target
Speaker 12: of violence is viewed as a right wing then the
Speaker 12: attacker must be left wing, and any attack that goes
Speaker 12: against what they would consider like a right wing symbol,
Speaker 12: whether that's Ice, whether that's the President, whatever, then whoever
Speaker 12: is attacking that symbol must be from the left wing
Speaker 12: or have some left wing motivation, And that's the way
Speaker 12: that they're trying to frame a lot of this. One
Speaker 12: of the old categories of violent extremism is called anti
Speaker 12: government violent extremism, which is a very broad category which
Speaker 12: can encompass some people who have explicit ideological drivers, but
Speaker 12: also can include people who are doing public suicidal violence,
Speaker 12: who will target the government or political figures as an
Speaker 12: expression of their own political and societal alienation. Someone who
Speaker 12: does this kind of public suicidal violence can often lack
Speaker 12: a recognizably coherent political philosophy that can be easily grafted
Speaker 12: on to our Democrat Republican binary, with there sometimes being
Speaker 12: a mix of political beliefs across the left right spectrum.
Speaker 12: But now that Trump is in office, any attack against
Speaker 12: the federal government can be used by the Trump administration
Speaker 12: as an example of left wing terrorism attacking a right
Speaker 12: wing government. Take, for instance, the sniper attack in Texas
Speaker 12: targeting and ice fisacility and vehicles. Although actually shooting multiple immigrants,
Speaker 12: this shooter was described by his friends as being largely
Speaker 12: a political but leaned libertarian. This shooting also had a
Speaker 12: suicidal aspect in that he did kill himself after the shooting.
Speaker 12: With Trump in charge of the federal government, nihilistic and
Speaker 12: self destructive attacks against American society may take a form
Speaker 12: which can be characterized as left wing violence. Another example
Speaker 12: of this is the plot against the UFC Freedom two
Speaker 12: fifty event, where self described Christian patriots who saw themselves
Speaker 12: as aspiring revolutionaries tried to start the Second American Revolutionary
Speaker 12: War by targeting high level politicians and public figures at
Speaker 12: the UFC White House event. These people are not on
Speaker 12: what I would consider the left wing, but in the
Speaker 12: conservative coverage of this attack, this was framed as an
Speaker 12: anti capitalist attack targeting Trump's cabinet. Towards the end of
Speaker 12: Rubio's speech, he started talking about this like international strategy
Speaker 12: that they want to develop to handle this emerging threat quote.
Speaker 12: This is an international conference because we are facing an
Speaker 12: international transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells.
Speaker 12: They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders.
Speaker 12: They do not believe, in fact in the nation state itself.
Speaker 12: They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they
Speaker 12: act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies,
Speaker 12: sharing the same mission. And I'll play one more clip
Speaker 12: from Rubio here.
Speaker 27: ANTIFAM militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and
Speaker 27: to the Americas to participate in each other's attacks, to
Speaker 27: funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared
Speaker 27: encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safehouses and finance,
Speaker 27: and sustain their operations through transnational funds. And they work
Speaker 27: alongside lost all foreign states that share their mission, like
Speaker 27: a Rocks Iranian proxy networks, who are increasing increasingly intimately
Speaker 27: tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban
Speaker 27: regimes sprawling intelligence and ideological network help to build the
Speaker 27: far left in our country and in our hemisphere, and
Speaker 27: it remains inextricably linked to the far left groups and
Speaker 27: movements across and beyond the West. Today's far left terrorists
Speaker 27: can raise money in one country, they can host their
Speaker 27: communications in a second country.
Speaker 18: They can receive training in a third country.
Speaker 27: They can recruit militants in a fourth country and then
Speaker 27: together strike a target in a fifth country.
Speaker 1: A thing that we've never seen happen. This is complete
Speaker 1: section that's never ever happened. This is not once. Where
Speaker 1: are they training, Marco? This is like a Tom Clancy
Speaker 1: novel that's he does think they're training in Cuba. Actually
Speaker 1: I shouldn't ask that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the only thing that functions like this is the
Speaker 4: central intelligence agents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but nothing else works like this. That's not entirely true,
Speaker 1: like the global far right does to a degree work
Speaker 1: that's true, right, Like, yeah, there's an element now. Now
Speaker 1: I wouldn't even describe it that way because that's more
Speaker 1: elaborate than I've ever seen the global far right do, honestly.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they're versions of that do occur where people
Speaker 1: are like traveling to one country for armed training or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess you could look back at the old
Speaker 4: like world anti communist networks exactly like League networks, where
Speaker 4: they would do that, but like.
Speaker 12: This, I mean, I wonder if they would consider stuff
Speaker 12: like traveling to like Rojava, right a leftist traveling to Rojava,
Speaker 12: or traveling to like you know, see like Zapatista's right.
Speaker 12: If that's kind of what he's thinking of, or if
Speaker 12: he's even thinking about it in like a real literal way.
Speaker 1: I can tell you specifically what he's thinking about in this.
Speaker 1: I mean he's thinking about two things. He's trying to
Speaker 1: directly draw a comparison for political purposes to the influencers
Speaker 1: who went out of to Cuba recently. But the thing
Speaker 1: that he is actually thinking about is the way a
Speaker 1: chunk of the global far left worked in like the
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies. Kadafi trained the IRA right Like there
Speaker 1: were a lot of like web not all of them,
Speaker 1: but like there was people did travel from left wing
Speaker 1: groups to other places and then carried out attacks in
Speaker 1: other countries. That was a thing that occurred during what
Speaker 1: is often called the Golden Age of terrorism. This is
Speaker 1: a lot of this is just more Marco not leaving
Speaker 1: the seventies behind. Like even though again it's fifty years
Speaker 1: since that kind of shit's been going on almost and
Speaker 1: Kadafi's dead, like the IRA isn't exactly active anymore either.
Speaker 12: We'll return to talk more about far left transnational terrorism
Speaker 12: after this at break.
Speaker 4: We are back.
Speaker 12: There's one last part about this antifa far left terrorism
Speaker 12: summit that happened at the State Department that I want
Speaker 12: to hone in on, and that is the remarks made
Speaker 12: by Stephen Miller. So brace yourself for a short clip
Speaker 12: of Miller here.
Speaker 28: President Trump issued it directive. In our parlance, it's called
Speaker 28: a National Security Presidential Memorandum or NSPN NSPM seven to
Speaker 28: be exact. That directs, for the first time in American history,
Speaker 28: all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work
Speaker 28: together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these
Speaker 28: political terrorists that are operating in our country. There's no
Speaker 28: point at which the left wing terrorist is satisfied with
Speaker 28: his gains and ceases progressing inevitably left to run its course,
Speaker 28: it always becomes a gulag. It always becomes the mass
Speaker 28: imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms,
Speaker 28: inflicting immense pain, humiliation, suffering. In order to establish complete
Speaker 28: and total control control through psychological and physical and actual terror.
Speaker 12: We must disrupt, identify, defund dbank, arrest and prosecute these
Speaker 12: political terrorists, or else they will turn the country into
Speaker 12: a goolage and conduct the mass imprisonment of political enemies
Speaker 12: and establish total psychological control.
Speaker 4: It's just that we must do the genocide before they
Speaker 4: do the genocide against us thing.
Speaker 12: And that is a lot of how Miller and the
Speaker 12: Ambassador for the Counter Terrorist and Bureau talk about this,
Speaker 12: So like, we need to stop this before it gets bigger.
Speaker 12: We know it seems kind of small right now, but
Speaker 12: by the time that everyone realizes this is a huge threat,
Speaker 12: then it's already too late.
Speaker 4: Then we've already lost.
Speaker 12: We have to end this thing right now as it
Speaker 12: still is like an infant, like we cannot let this
Speaker 12: thing grow up. That is very much how he talks
Speaker 12: about it. And he is really frustrated about the way
Speaker 12: that attempts by the rep administration to do this have
Speaker 12: been curtailed or I've not been able to really be
Speaker 12: followed through on to the extent that he wants. And
Speaker 12: she has a specific thing that's been happening that he's
Speaker 12: really upset about. And that's a little term some people
Speaker 12: in the audience might be familiar with called jury nullification.
Speaker 28: There's a real threat that those who are not themselves terrorists,
Speaker 28: but who support left wing violence will create the conditions
Speaker 28: that allow that violence to go on without any meaningful inhibition.
Speaker 28: So to be specific, we've seen some of our nation's
Speaker 28: cities in America, like Washington, d C. In New York City.
Speaker 28: Something is gain as an American term, but it's known
Speaker 28: as jury nullification. This is when a person is obviously
Speaker 28: guilty of a crime, but the jury, because they're ideologically
Speaker 28: sympathetical sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not sentence them to
Speaker 28: the crime which have obviously committed. We've seen in the
Speaker 28: United States again and again individuals who are part of
Speaker 28: lefting organizations who've committed the saults against ice officers or
Speaker 28: federal law enforcement, who have been brought to court where
Speaker 28: clear evidence has been presented against them, that the jury
Speaker 28: has refused to convict for purely political reasons. When you've
Speaker 28: reached that point, it demonstrates how deeply the cancer has
Speaker 28: begun to infest your society.
Speaker 12: According to a new report in Just Security, quote, nearly
Speaker 12: half the cases nationwide brought against protesters and immigrants for
Speaker 12: assault against a law enforcement officer or dismissed by judges,
Speaker 12: with drawn by prosecutors, or resulted in jury acquittals, and
Speaker 12: at least eighteen publicly reported instances grand juries have refused
Speaker 12: to indict, at least sixteen grand jury subpoenas have been
Speaker 12: blocked or withdrawn, and judges have dismissed or prosecutors have
Speaker 12: dropped at least seventy nine cases relating to ice protests
Speaker 12: or federal law enforcement surgis across DC, Chicago, Minnesota, and
Speaker 12: Los Angeles. In a period of two months, the US
Speaker 12: Attorney's Office in DC dropped more cases than it had
Speaker 12: in the previous ten years combined, unquote. And that also
Speaker 12: shows the scale in which they're bringing these cases against protesters.
Speaker 12: This is something that Miller is really upset about. This
Speaker 12: is something that is severely prohibiting the administration's ability to
Speaker 12: go after quote unquote left wing terrorism, what they view
Speaker 12: as left wing terrorism, and he's really frustrated about this.
Speaker 12: Here's one last quote from him.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 12: One of the hallmarks of left wing violence and terrorism
Speaker 12: is it's completely protectual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties
Speaker 12: in an effort to shield its own violence. This is
Speaker 12: the tactic that the left always uses to try to
Speaker 12: protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that
Speaker 12: we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that
Speaker 12: these appeals must fall on deaf ears. We must say
Speaker 12: the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of
Speaker 12: justice against these enemies of civilization. Unquote, and Miller and
Speaker 12: Rubio went on pretty lengthy rants about how the threat
Speaker 12: of left wing violence really is this civilizational threat against
Speaker 12: what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural.
Speaker 12: It's a quote from Miller against this like ugly hatred
Speaker 12: that fuels the left, this sort of like you know,
Speaker 12: like resentment for like failing at life, and now they
Speaker 12: want to attack those of us who like succeed, those
Speaker 12: of us who like build very fascistic like stuff. At
Speaker 12: the end of both their.
Speaker 1: Speeches, very and also very Bin Shapiro stuff. To be honest,
Speaker 1: the whole builders and takers thing. I mean, he didn't
Speaker 1: start that, but it is interesting to see there's so
Speaker 1: many old throwbacks to this because you can tell these
Speaker 1: these are guys who get started in writing politics before
Speaker 1: the current era, because they keep hearkening back to stuff
Speaker 1: that's just like not as big a part of like
Speaker 1: the modern vernacular, which is always interesting to me, like
Speaker 1: how stuck a lot of these guys are in the past.
Speaker 12: At a post conference press conference for Foreign Press, the
Speaker 12: Coordinator and ambassad at Large for the Bureau kinter Terrorism
Speaker 12: reiterated that the us kinter Terrism strategy is still focusing
Speaker 12: on three main types of threat groups Narco terrorists, Islamic
Speaker 12: corgiatis terrorists, and far left terrorists, and that they need
Speaker 12: to quote identify terror actors and plots before they happen.
Speaker 12: He calls far left terrorism a resurgent threat with a
Speaker 12: clear upward trend and that they are quote committed to
Speaker 12: addressing it before it metastasizes that they want to halt
Speaker 12: this scourge before it grows into something larger, more unified,
Speaker 12: and more deadly. The Ambassador outlined three concrete outcomes from
Speaker 12: this conference. The first was on designations and accountability, and
Speaker 12: like Rubio, he promised that additional foreign terrorist organizations and
Speaker 12: specially designated global terrorist designations for quote unquote far left
Speaker 12: groups are under active review and are going to be
Speaker 12: incoming soon, following the four designations of europe based groups
Speaker 12: last year. So there's going to be more left wing
Speaker 12: or Antifa related groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations. UH
Speaker 12: Secretary Besent talked about how legitimate nonprofit and charitable structures
Speaker 12: are being quote exploited as a mechanism to conceal the
Speaker 12: movement of illicit funds to support political terrorism, and the
Speaker 12: ambassador talked about how international partners are discussing prospects quote
Speaker 12: allowing their own legal frameworks to ensure that these networks
Speaker 12: cannot simply relocate across borders. As a part of these
Speaker 12: terrorist designations, the Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence
Speaker 12: will take steps to dismantle the funding which sustains these groups,
Speaker 12: and the state departments also offering payments it up to
Speaker 12: ten million dollars for information disrupting far left terrorist financing.
Speaker 12: The second outcome of the conference was on operational coordination,
Speaker 12: like deepening information sharing between partner agencies and coordinating on
Speaker 12: travel restrictions and strengthening the protection of critical infrastructure like
Speaker 12: transportation and energy systems. It was also announced that Germany
Speaker 12: would host the next quote unquote counter Terrorism Workshop. The
Speaker 12: last concrete outcome of this event was new visa restrictions
Speaker 12: quote targeting members of far left terrorists and aligned groups.
Speaker 12: For more on that, Let's throw to our colleague James
Speaker 12: Stout Hi one.
Speaker 3: It's James coming at you with the second attempt to
Speaker 3: record this. Find myself traveling every Wednesday at the moment,
Speaker 3: so apologies for missing out on According to everyone else,
Speaker 3: will be back next week a promise, and we will
Speaker 3: return to our usual shared conversation. But I did want
Speaker 3: to check in with everyone this week because I want
Speaker 3: to talk about a couple of things. Last week, for
Speaker 3: the first time in its history, the United States government
Speaker 3: attempted to remove someone through the use of the Alien
Speaker 3: Terrorist Removal Court. This is something that was first published
Speaker 3: by Shamus Hues at Court Works, and I want to
Speaker 3: give credit Bok credits you Shame of Spenser on godly
Speaker 3: amount of time looking at PACER and other court documents
Speaker 3: have found this, so.
Speaker 2: Background Ond's court right.
Speaker 3: It's established in nineteen ninety six by the Anti Terrorism
Speaker 3: and Effective Death Penalty Act. That law allows the Attorney
Speaker 3: General to designate some of the terrorists and use this
Speaker 3: process if Title two removal will be a threat to
Speaker 3: national security. Now the hearings in the ATRC, I will
Speaker 3: say they fly extremely close to the sun with regards
Speaker 3: to constitutional rights and the concept of a fair trial.
Speaker 2: There are lots of.
Speaker 3: Provisions in this law for classified evidence, for restrictions on
Speaker 3: the things that the deffect and can obtained by discovery.
Speaker 3: The law also says, quote, an alien subject to removal
Speaker 3: under this Title shall not be entitled to suppress evidence
Speaker 3: that the alien alleges was unlawfully obtained. That's great stuff.
Speaker 3: It's just worth noting nineteen ninety six is before the
Speaker 3: start of the Global War on Terror, and it therefore
Speaker 3: pre dates the existence of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
Speaker 3: At the United States had a base at Guantanamo Bay,
Speaker 3: but the large scale extra judicial torturing of people, what
Speaker 3: they called enhanced interrogation at Guantanamobe, had not begun in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 25: Right.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying that they were not doing extra judicial
Speaker 3: things in nineteen ninety six. I'm just saying that the
Speaker 3: GITMO as we understand it today, for those of us
Speaker 3: who have grown up with it as a political reality
Speaker 3: for most a adult lives, didn't exist in that sense.
Speaker 25: Then.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying that they were not people detained there.
Speaker 2: They probably were.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying they did not do extra judicial things
Speaker 3: in pursuit of quote, unquite aity terrorism.
Speaker 2: I believe they did.
Speaker 3: Boseberg mentioned this court Judge Boseburg remember him from the
Speaker 3: El Salwardore Sicott cases, when he told the government that
Speaker 3: there was a procedure for someone accused of terrorism because
Speaker 3: the government basically said, oh, well, these people are terrorists.
Speaker 2: Look at that.
Speaker 3: We put them on a plane, send them to a
Speaker 3: death camp in ensemble or essentially right a prison that
Speaker 3: very few people leave. Eventually, most of these people did
Speaker 3: leave in this case, but it was very unusual for
Speaker 3: someone to leave that camp. And what he said was
Speaker 3: quote so if there's a national security concern with having
Speaker 3: these hearings, whether via Habeis or otherwise, you can always
Speaker 3: go to the ATRC, which will be a first but
Speaker 3: that's what it's there for.
Speaker 21: Right.
Speaker 3: So at the time he's pointing to it, saying, if
Speaker 3: you can't put the evidence for these people's the need
Speaker 3: to remove these people out in public.
Speaker 2: That's why we have the ATRC. When't use that.
Speaker 3: Trump administration said we can use that, that does.
Speaker 2: Not mean we have to use that, And that was
Speaker 2: their argument, right.
Speaker 3: The court is of not just people engage in terrorism.
Speaker 3: It's also their families. It's also people accused of things
Speaker 3: like soliciting others to engage in actus terrorism or raising funds.
Speaker 3: It also is that once a person they've submitted an
Speaker 3: application for removal through this court, they can detain a person.
Speaker 3: The court has this crazy website. It looks like it
Speaker 3: was very hastily created. It's not a usual website for
Speaker 3: a court at all. Usually court websites that they were
Speaker 3: made in the late nineteen nineties. They are very difficult
Speaker 3: to navigate and they have a huge amount of data
Speaker 3: that it's hard to find. That's why a lot of
Speaker 3: us like to use court Listener or some other website
Speaker 3: rather than going directly to the court pages, which can
Speaker 3: be very hard to navigate. This page lists of judges,
Speaker 3: where each of the judges comes from a different US circuit,
Speaker 3: and it has the two documents that the court has
Speaker 3: made available so far. One is pretty much all blanked out.
Speaker 3: The other one is a court order in which Court
Speaker 3: Chief Judge asserts, quote, the government could benefit from an
Speaker 3: opportunity for more thoughtful consideration, So they've made an application
Speaker 3: to remove someone by this court. And that is a
Speaker 3: response of the court at this time right. Obviously, this
Speaker 3: is very concerning right. Immigration court, to begin with, I
Speaker 3: think is getting closer and closer to being something that
Speaker 3: is sort of openly flouting the Constitution and people's rights.
Speaker 3: There immigration judges are not judges in the sense that
Speaker 3: you understand judges to be, even though some of them
Speaker 3: have worked hard to give people due process and many
Speaker 3: of them are now being removed wanted demise because of them.
Speaker 3: But if we look at this in addition to the
Speaker 3: United States adding groups in Mexico and Europe to the
Speaker 3: FTO list Foreign Terrorist Organizations for those who aren't familiar,
Speaker 3: it's especially concerning right. And it's especially concerning when we
Speaker 3: look another announcement this week which explicitly cited NSPM seven,
Speaker 3: which we've spoken about lengths on this show, limiting visas
Speaker 3: for people it calls anti fascist and far left terrorist groups.
Speaker 3: The announcement began going to quote from extensively here, right,
Speaker 3: far left terrorists and aligned groups do sophisticated organized networks
Speaker 3: to perpetrate violence as a political tool, seeking to implement
Speaker 3: an extreme political vision through intimidation and coordinated campaigns of terror.
Speaker 3: It is a strategy that explicitly aims to undermine the
Speaker 3: political foundations of free and self governing societies, utilizing bombings, assassinations,
Speaker 3: and other forms of terrorism to silence speech, limit political opposition,
Speaker 3: change policy outcomes, and sabotage political processes. This announcement also
Speaker 3: said that it's quote targets members of far left terrorists
Speaker 3: and other aligned groups who have supported or incited acts
Speaker 3: of terrorism, supported violent criminal activity, participated in economic sabotage,
Speaker 3: financial recruited or provide logistical support for violent or criminal actions,
Speaker 3: cremated by far left terrorists and other aligning groups, and
Speaker 3: or facilitated the convergence of far left terrorists and other
Speaker 3: aligned networks for the purposes of violent action. Some of
Speaker 3: these are pretty broad right economic sabotage normally altso Ludicris
Speaker 3: suggests that like that could include bds. But I think
Speaker 3: given where we are, it's not crazy to think that, right,
Speaker 3: some of these facilitating the conversions. Right, is that like
Speaker 3: holding a big summit, is like the logistical support for
Speaker 3: violent criminal actions? Does that mean bail funds all of
Speaker 3: these things ash bail? I guess it's less of a
Speaker 3: thing outside the US. Does that mean people who have
Speaker 3: done jail support, right? That kind of thing. This is
Speaker 3: super concerning. The State Department explicitly cites Section two twelve,
Speaker 3: Subsection A, Part three, Subsection C of the Immigration and
Speaker 3: Nationality Act, which deals with the inadmissibility of aliens. This
Speaker 3: section begins quote, an alien whose entry or proposed activities
Speaker 3: in the United States Secretary of State has reasonable ground
Speaker 3: to believe have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for
Speaker 3: the United States is inadmissible.
Speaker 1: So that's a very very broad category.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Notably, it is not sub section B, which deals specifically
Speaker 3: with terrorism or which terrorists are admissible. This is a
Speaker 3: different one which deals with this very broad power given
Speaker 3: to the Secretary of State to decide whose admission would
Speaker 3: be bad for the United States foreign policy consequences they've
Speaker 3: used just before. Right, this is a favorite of this administration.
Speaker 3: But again, right, this is an example of a law
Speaker 3: which gives massive leeway to in this case part of
Speaker 3: the executive branch, Secretary of State, and it is therefore
Speaker 3: he's using that leeway right to do this. I think
Speaker 3: that we should be especially concerned when we combine this
Speaker 3: with some of the other things that we're seeing. Right,
Speaker 3: we are seeing social media surveys of applicants right, people
Speaker 3: have to submit their whole social media before they apply.
Speaker 3: We are seeing phone searches at the border more and
Speaker 3: more frequently, right, famously the JD Vance meme, but it's
Speaker 3: not uncommon to see these phone searches at the border now.
Speaker 3: We have also seen this week the elimination of duration
Speaker 3: of status for a number of visas, F ones being
Speaker 3: probably the most numerous, F one being a student visa right.
Speaker 3: Also some foreign journalists visas. Other visa types as well
Speaker 3: included there, but I want to focus on the F
Speaker 3: one because I think that will be the one that
Speaker 3: impacts the most people. So generally, with a F one visa,
Speaker 3: once you maintained status are once you are still in school,
Speaker 3: you could keep your student visa right now, These include
Speaker 3: like a time limit on the duration of the visa.
Speaker 3: For some people, this will be a serious issue if
Speaker 3: you are entering, For example, to speaking from experience here,
Speaker 3: if you are entering a program in the United States
Speaker 3: in the humanities, and you are entering with a bachelor's
Speaker 3: degree right, not a master's degree.
Speaker 2: You will then have to.
Speaker 3: Advance to candidacy right, complete the requirements for your master's degree,
Speaker 3: and demonstrate competency in two languages.
Speaker 2: Let's assume you are not someone who is multilingual. That
Speaker 2: could take a while.
Speaker 3: Right Like, depending on how strict the testing is at
Speaker 3: the particular university you go to, then you will have
Speaker 3: to research, then you will have to write, then you
Speaker 3: will have to do a dissertation. These time limits on
Speaker 3: the F one and visa are less than the nominal
Speaker 3: time to degree at some institutions, and that means that
Speaker 3: it's going to be very hard for graduate students, especially
Speaker 3: to come to the United States to do those degrees.
Speaker 3: That combined with this denial of visa's thing is going
Speaker 3: to have an impact on the way campuses look in
Speaker 3: the United States, and it's going to have a broader impact.
Speaker 2: And that, of course it is. But this is a
Speaker 2: thing that I have direct experience with. Right.
Speaker 3: F one student visas are numerous. I've taught dozens, if
Speaker 3: not hundreds of F one students. I came on a
Speaker 3: student visa when I did my PhD. And like, one
Speaker 3: of the reasons that people come here, and this is
Speaker 3: something that I've heard from so many people, is that, like,
Speaker 3: this country has a Bill of rights, and the very
Speaker 3: first amendment to the Constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, and
Speaker 3: that isn't the case everywhere. That is a thing that
Speaker 3: is good, but it is more and more and more
Speaker 3: under attack, especially for foreign students.
Speaker 25: Right.
Speaker 3: We've seen this right from the very beginning of a
Speaker 3: Trump administration, and I believe that this will be part
Speaker 3: of that same attack. Right, when we look at all
Speaker 3: these things together, these are the clearest signposts we have
Speaker 3: seen yet to the new McCarthyism.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: We can talk about what Rubio said about Cuba, we
Speaker 3: can talk about this Antifa summit, which I will talk
Speaker 3: about soon in more depth, but it is not hard
Speaker 3: to draw a line, for instance, the prosecution and the
Speaker 3: persecution outside the legal system of Lincoln Brigadiers, right, people
Speaker 3: who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain, to what is
Speaker 3: happening today. And it is sad but not shocking to
Speaker 3: see yet another shameful aspect of this country's history resurfacing
Speaker 3: and becoming policy again. So I guess I'll just finish
Speaker 3: up by saying, if this has impacted you, if you
Speaker 3: are someone who's recently had a visa refused, if you
Speaker 3: are somebody who was trying to get in an if
Speaker 3: one visa and it's now finding shit. I don't think
Speaker 3: I can do my degree in that much time.
Speaker 2: What do I do here? I always want to.
Speaker 3: Tell stories about people, not just about government announcements. So
Speaker 3: you can hit us up cool Zone tips at proton
Speaker 3: dot me if you'd like to talk about that. Thanks,
Speaker 3: and I'll be back with everybody next week.
Speaker 12: We will discuss tariffs and even more far left terrorism
Speaker 12: after this ad break.
Speaker 1: We're back. So earlier this week, the US State Department
Speaker 1: put out a one hundred page report this would be
Speaker 1: on Monday, about Cuba's history of trying to overthrow or
Speaker 1: manipulate US politics via left wing activists and quote unquote
Speaker 1: left wing militants going back to the sixties. When they
Speaker 1: say going back to the sixties, basically what I mean
Speaker 1: is pretty much exclusively the sixties and seventies. Is almost
Speaker 1: everything in this document that relates to the US directly
Speaker 1: in any way. The document, which is basically this is
Speaker 1: just to give you a little bit of background. This
Speaker 1: is all Rubio, right, not just what Gerre has been
Speaker 1: talking about, but particularly trying to drum up fear and
Speaker 1: panic around Cuba and justify an invasion or regime change
Speaker 1: in Cuba. That's been his whole fucking life goal for
Speaker 1: a very long time. There's a pretty good Guardian article
Speaker 1: from last year with the title Marco Rubio Niar's goal
Speaker 1: of toppling Cuba's government, and I want to read a
Speaker 1: brief quote from that. The campaign against Cuba's government is
Speaker 1: the culmination of a personal pursuit spanning decades. In a
Speaker 1: video released on Cuban Independence Day this week, Rubio said
Speaker 1: in Spanish that a US embargo was not the reason
Speaker 1: for the country's privations, telling Cubans that currently the only
Speaker 1: thing standing in the way of a better future are
Speaker 1: those who control your country. All roads have been leading
Speaker 1: to Cuba for Rubio. Set a person who has known
Speaker 1: Rubio since his time as a local politician in South Florida.
Speaker 1: He has wanted this for a long time, and now
Speaker 1: he finally has the authority to reach that goal. Now.
Speaker 1: Trump has made a couple of comments that make people
Speaker 1: believe he is in the process of planning to try
Speaker 1: and force the government of Cuba out one way or another.
Speaker 1: Last Thursday, he told reporters other presidents have looked at
Speaker 1: this for fifty sixty years, doing something about Cuba, and
Speaker 1: it looks like I'll be the one that does it,
Speaker 1: so I would be happy to do it. Now hard
Speaker 1: to say is that actually means anything. Trump says a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that doesn't come true, but there's been
Speaker 1: real world reasons to believe that he seriously intends to
Speaker 1: do this. I mean, first off, what happened in Venezuela, right,
Speaker 1: where we used our special operations forces to take out
Speaker 1: and extradite a legally elect it well, to extrite the
Speaker 1: president of a sovereign country. Right. This is something that
Speaker 1: like you've had like a lot of planners and depending
Speaker 1: on talking about for years, is like, well, we could
Speaker 1: use these guys to just deal with problems at the top, right.
Speaker 1: And for Rubio, there's a lot of speculation that Venezuela
Speaker 1: was kind of a proof of concept for him, right,
Speaker 1: that we could in fact use a very small footprint
Speaker 1: force get the current ruling regime out of there, or
Speaker 1: enough of them that they're not willing to fight back anymore.
Speaker 1: And that might be something that the US military is
Speaker 1: capable of doing. I don't have a great sense as
Speaker 1: to Cuba's defensive capacity or how functional they would be
Speaker 1: at doing this, or how much support the regime would
Speaker 1: enjoy in the event that the US try this, or
Speaker 1: how much that support would matter. It kind of depends
Speaker 1: on the weapons systems they use at the moment. We
Speaker 1: know that the US Nimics and its strike Group have
Speaker 1: recently been brought into the South Caribbean c as part
Speaker 1: of an ongoing military build up, and there have been
Speaker 1: some other signs that the regime is planning to act.
Speaker 1: Axios recently published an article that cited administration estimates that
Speaker 1: Cuba now has some three hundred military drones quote, and
Speaker 1: was considering using them to attack a US base at
Speaker 1: Guantanamo Bay, US ships or even targets in Florida, Miami.
Speaker 1: Your days are numbered now, folks. I'm going to walk
Speaker 1: you through some stuff. First off, we don't actually have
Speaker 1: hard evidence that they bought any of these drums. There
Speaker 1: was some earlier reporting, and I'm sure they have been
Speaker 1: talking with Iran, and I know that they have ongoing
Speaker 1: defense agreements with Russia, and I wouldn't be shocked if
Speaker 1: they had bought like three hundred of these, like Shihed
Speaker 1: style cheaper suicide drones. Here's the thing. The night before
Speaker 1: we recorded this, Ukraine launched a major attack on Moscow
Speaker 1: using four hundred drones. If Cuba does have three hundred
Speaker 1: Iranian drones, that is roughly enough to carry out an
Speaker 1: offensive against US forces for two to three seconds, perhaps
Speaker 1: a little more, maybe more like fifteen to twenty, you know,
Speaker 1: But it's not an invasion force. It's not really a
Speaker 1: defensive force. And we also don't know that they even
Speaker 1: have them, right, it wouldn't be weird if they did.
Speaker 1: But this isn't any reason to believe there's any kind
Speaker 1: of a threat coming from Cuba. The fact that they're
Speaker 1: trying to really hype up three hundred drones. It's twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six. You can run through that in an afternoon.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And also, like I just want to be very clear,
Speaker 4: Cuba is not planning to launch strikes in the United States.
Speaker 1: Come on, Like, you look at the last sixty years
Speaker 1: of history, right. We had one big dust up with
Speaker 1: them over the fucking Bay of Pigs, And obviously the
Speaker 1: Cuban government funded and sent soldiers and doctors and other
Speaker 1: stuff into a variety of countries, and that led to
Speaker 1: conflicts in places like Africa with the US. But there's
Speaker 1: never been any direct aggression from Cuba towards the United States. No,
Speaker 1: we're not in danger from them. One of the most
Speaker 1: ridiculous things you could do today is watch the celebrated
Speaker 1: Aaron Sorkin movie A Few Good Men, which is entirely
Speaker 1: about how well, you know, you don't understand how difficult
Speaker 1: it is protecting America from Cuba.
Speaker 2: You know, we really we got to be extra.
Speaker 1: Crazy to keep the Cubans off the walls of the
Speaker 1: United States. Like, it's fucking nonsense, And it's Marco is
Speaker 1: number one. Marco comes from a Cuban American background. His
Speaker 1: whole family hates the Castro government. He has wanted and
Speaker 1: seen himself as ordained to destroy the communist government in
Speaker 1: Cuba for his entire life. That doesn't mean that there's
Speaker 1: any kind of realistic threat here, or any real reason
Speaker 1: to feel like any kind of actual danger. And you
Speaker 1: can see that in the report itself. Right, there's even
Speaker 1: some bits here where they almost admit it. Right, I'm
Speaker 1: going to read one segment. The Cuban campaign against America
Speaker 1: is unique. It is a regular and covert Even at
Speaker 1: the peak of its military power, Havana never possessed the
Speaker 1: capacity to defeat the United States at a conventional armed conflict. Instead,
Speaker 1: the Cuban's perfected a new model for a long war
Speaker 1: of attrition organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and
Speaker 1: a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.
Speaker 18: Did Cuba do that?
Speaker 1: Did Cuba turn America against itself? And also, if they've
Speaker 1: perfected a war of attrition, why are they out of gas?
Speaker 1: And like, the United States is the healthiest economy in
Speaker 1: the world. I mean, it's because we stole a bunch
Speaker 1: of shit, But there's no evidence that Cuban has done
Speaker 1: some sort of horrible damage to the US, and in fact,
Speaker 1: all of the damage says otherwise that we've continued to
Speaker 1: fuck over the Cubans for goddamn no reason for decades.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly frustrating. And again, the more you read this,
Speaker 1: the more you realize unless he's talking about like shit
Speaker 1: that because he does periodically talk about like fucking South
Speaker 1: America and some of the different like Cuban like state
Speaker 1: involvement there. But when he's talking about acts that can
Speaker 1: be traced to Cuba that involve violence in the US
Speaker 1: at all, it's just shit from the sixties and seventies, right,
Speaker 1: which is like back when Cuba's economy was functional, and
Speaker 1: they're the backing of the USSR. And also like none
Speaker 1: of it ever came close to doing serious damage to
Speaker 1: the United States as like a national like as a nation. Right,
Speaker 1: none of that was never in the fucking cards. You know,
Speaker 1: it's very frustrating to have to even take any of
Speaker 1: this serious, but you do because they are going to
Speaker 1: try to blame and try to punish and imprison people
Speaker 1: based on this fucking fantasy.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And one of the things you've seen a lot of quotes,
Speaker 1: like when Marco came up to talk and give a
Speaker 1: speech about this report, he accused Iron and cues Uba
Speaker 1: of funding both Antifa and the DSA. Right, Like, come on,
Speaker 1: and he'll make these comments in his speeches. The actual
Speaker 1: report isn't even willing to go that far, because when
Speaker 1: you get to the meat of the report, Marcito doesn't
Speaker 1: even have the guts to call the DSA a Cuban
Speaker 1: op quote. The DSA was not founded as a Cuban
Speaker 1: intelligence or influence front. It was born in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: two as a fusion of socialist organizations and movements for
Speaker 1: both the Old Left and New Left. Factions, and you know,
Speaker 1: like they're right that people in the DSA are very
Speaker 1: angry about what the US is doing into Cuba because
Speaker 1: they're out of fuel and starving and being continually harmed
Speaker 1: by our completely pointless boycotts and trade fucking wars. Like,
Speaker 1: there's not much more than that for most people to it.
Speaker 1: There's some weirdos out there, But.
Speaker 12: It is really interesting how carefully the report talks about DSA,
Speaker 12: because like DSA's mentioned a lot, DSA is mentioned very frequently.
Speaker 1: But there's no direct connection.
Speaker 12: DSA's mentioned twenty four times in a one hundred page document,
Speaker 12: but they're very careful to be like DSA's could be
Speaker 12: sympathetic to the human government, but DSA is not a
Speaker 12: result of Cuban influence necessarily, No.
Speaker 1: And I think the argument they are making is that
Speaker 1: you had a split between the old left and the
Speaker 1: new Left, and the Cuban government founded a bunch of
Speaker 1: new left factions, and because the DSA is a fusion
Speaker 1: of old Left and new left factions, that means that
Speaker 1: they're partly a result of Cuban operation. Sure, that's what
Speaker 1: they're trying to argue, right, It's build some sort of
Speaker 1: historical justification to if they go after DSA people or
Speaker 1: activists who have gone to Cuba to delivery miditarian ade,
Speaker 1: that build some sort of framework to criminalize people who
Speaker 1: are sympathetic to people living in Cuba. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's precisely what's happening. And one thing that's kind of
Speaker 1: telling is even among news sources that are like sympathetic
Speaker 1: to the right and to the administration, no one's pretending
Speaker 1: that this paper isn't just Marco like pushing out his
Speaker 1: own personal vendettas. Like I found a Washington Examiner article
Speaker 1: summarized the report as Marco Rubio accusing the Cuban government.
Speaker 1: Here's an exact quote from the Washington Examiner. Secretary of
Speaker 1: State Marco Rubio accused the Cuban government of running one
Speaker 1: of the most sophisticated infiltrations of US politics, in part
Speaker 1: using the Democratic Socialists of America. So even with a
Speaker 1: lot of these articles, they're like, yeah, this is just
Speaker 1: Rubio fucking spouting off right, like this is mostly oh Marco,
Speaker 1: And among some of like the crazy like anti communist
Speaker 1: sites I've been reading, they're still like, well, there's nothing
Speaker 1: new in this. They didn't because they are reading like, well,
Speaker 1: nothing passed like the seventies involves the US directly.
Speaker 12: Which is going to say there's not real danger here, right,
Speaker 12: there was no huge danger. One of the main activists
Speaker 12: that Code Pink, which was this organization that that co
Speaker 12: organized some of those ad trips to Cuba, is under
Speaker 12: federal investigation right now. And this indicates that despite how
Speaker 12: much of this is just Rubio having fun with his
Speaker 12: little pet project, this does show where the targets of
Speaker 12: the administration are. Oh yeah, and that can be the
Speaker 12: DSA and people doing humanitarian aid trips.
Speaker 1: And it's specifically because of that humanitarian aid trip, right,
Speaker 1: like that gave Rubio a really good like you know,
Speaker 1: honestly wasn't anything. I think just pissed him off because
Speaker 1: he hates the Cuban government more than anything, and the
Speaker 1: idea that anyone would want to like bring aid to
Speaker 1: the people in Cuba is like infuriating to him. Now again,
Speaker 1: we know that Trump is in the process of planning
Speaker 1: to try and force the government of Cuba out one
Speaker 1: way or another. That doesn't mean he actually will, right
Speaker 1: he hasn't committed fully to that yet. But given what
Speaker 1: happened in Venezuela, and given what's going on in Iran,
Speaker 1: I think it would be foolish to say I don't
Speaker 1: think he's going to try, right, Like, I think that's
Speaker 1: not the smart if I'm making a bet. I certainly
Speaker 1: hope he doesn't. I hope they get scared. I hope
Speaker 1: shit with Iran is bad enough that they chicken out.
Speaker 1: But I think it would be foolish to assume they're
Speaker 1: not going to try and unseat the government of Cuba. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's the rational way to look at this,
Speaker 1: right And whether this is all bluster or not, you know,
Speaker 1: is going to be seen. But as I said, the
Speaker 1: US Nimits and Strike Group have moved into the South Caribbean,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of talk about, like, oh, we
Speaker 1: think the Cubans are planning an attack on Gwando. Last Thursday,
Speaker 1: Marco Ruby repeated his claim that Havana has weapons they
Speaker 1: acquired from quote Russia and China, and that they host
Speaker 1: Russian and in Chinese intelligence in country, which is also
Speaker 1: interesting that he's so stuck in the Cold War he
Speaker 1: has to keep bringing Russia into it. Now. There's a
Speaker 1: big debate as to like how can it It is Trump
Speaker 1: actually to unseating the Cuban government, And that's always hard
Speaker 1: to tell because when he does talk about it, it
Speaker 1: sounds like, oh, he wants that feather in his cap.
Speaker 1: But you also get the feeling this is a thing
Speaker 1: where whoever he talks to last as in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases, going to heavily set his agenda. And Senator
Speaker 1: Chris Murphy, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, said
Speaker 1: something like that quote. I do think that as Trump
Speaker 1: gets older and he spends his day sleeping and worrying
Speaker 1: only about his ballroom, he's increasingly susceptible to dangerous people
Speaker 1: around him with dangerous agendas. And there is a crowd
Speaker 1: of Cuba hawks who have always wanted us to invade,
Speaker 1: and who think they might be able to take advantage
Speaker 1: of it increasingly checked out old man, and I just
Speaker 1: think we have to be prepared for that. And honestly,
Speaker 1: I think Chris pretty much like that. Yeah, it's more
Speaker 1: or less right, Chris. I think that's that's basically the accurate.
Speaker 4: Is sanest man in the room? Yeah, that sounds right
Speaker 4: to me.
Speaker 12: Let's turn to the midterm elections before we close in Florida,
Speaker 12: the Groper candidate for Governor, James Fishback, who I did
Speaker 12: an episode about a few months ago, is not going
Speaker 12: to win that election, but he is pulling double digits,
Speaker 12: which is bad. And worse, he is dominating youth polls.
Speaker 12: He has fifty one percent in youth polls. That's ages
Speaker 12: eighteen to thirty four. Really really dark look at a
Speaker 12: future of the Republican Party. Fishback is like barely even
Speaker 12: like a crypto fascist. He's barely even hiding it. I
Speaker 12: mean he plays with dog whistles but also just openly
Speaker 12: says a bunch of anti Semitic stuff and very racist attacks,
Speaker 12: all with a sort of wink wink, nudge nudge in
Speaker 12: that classic Groper charisma style. But there's another aspect of
Speaker 12: the Fishback race to briefly mention, is that there's been
Speaker 12: a lot of AI ads targeted against Fishback, where it
Speaker 12: has like AI generated video deep fake style of Fishback
Speaker 12: with like the Squad and Russia and Putin and Alan
Speaker 12: Omar and Rashida Taalob foreign generals Muslim leaders in the
Speaker 12: Middle East with her jobs. Basically, he's like welcoming all
Speaker 12: of these people into his home and they cut up
Speaker 12: an anti Israel Cake and that's the ad. It looks
Speaker 12: I mean like someone like me can tell it's AI
Speaker 12: A boomer might not be able to. And this is
Speaker 12: something that Thomas Massey, since losing his race, has said
Speaker 12: that he believes, through talking with with voters, specifically older voters,
Speaker 12: that many boomers and older voters believed the ai ads
Speaker 12: against MASSI that Massey was in like a threuple with
Speaker 12: like AOC and someone else Elanomar. I think that he
Speaker 12: actually got called. So There's office got calls to asking
Speaker 12: if this was true. So these sorts of aiads are
Speaker 12: a real problem, obviously, the fact that these are against Fishback.
Speaker 12: I'm not being synthetic to Fishback here, but this is
Speaker 12: a more general societal problem. Moving on to another governor's
Speaker 12: race in Wisconsin, Democratic socialist Francesca Hong is ahead in
Speaker 12: the polls, but many people are still undecided. In a
Speaker 12: Wedgewood poll from mid July, Francesco Hong is up thirty
Speaker 12: eight percent, Mendela Barnes is thirty percent, and David Crowley
Speaker 12: is nine percent, though undecided or supporting another candidate is
Speaker 12: pulling up twenty three percent in that poll, so there
Speaker 12: could still be upwards of like twenty percent of people
Speaker 12: who are undecided. There's been some other polls in the
Speaker 12: past few days that show Francesca Hong about fifteen percent
Speaker 12: above everyone else, so that is a good sign for her.
Speaker 12: I know there's been some organizers from New York and
Speaker 12: across the country going into with Conson right now to
Speaker 12: help with his last leg of the campaign. This is
Speaker 12: a very important race looking at what the future of
Speaker 12: the viability of democratic socialism is going to be in
Speaker 12: swing states. This past week, David Crowley re entered the race,
Speaker 12: which may split the moderate vote, which could help Hong
Speaker 12: win the primary. It's another thing to keep an eye
Speaker 12: on here. In Maine, Troy Jackson is said to be
Speaker 12: the Democratic cent nominee after organizers and volunteers secured the
Speaker 12: vast majority of delegates for the nominee replacement convention. I've
Speaker 12: mentioned Jackson a few times on the show because he
Speaker 12: ran for governor with the endorsement of DSA and Bernie Sanders,
Speaker 12: who was the only person to receive the endorsement of
Speaker 12: DSA Platner did not. Jackson's a former state lawmaker, a
Speaker 12: five generation lagger, very pro labor, like the most like
Speaker 12: legitimate working class, pro labor candidate. He's pulling a little
Speaker 12: bit ahead of Collins right now, like about three percent,
Speaker 12: but this is going to be a very close race.
Speaker 1: This is going to be very tough.
Speaker 12: Another really close race right now is the Democratic send
Speaker 12: primary in Michigan with corporate and APAC backed Hailey Stevens
Speaker 12: going up against left wing populist Abdul l said. There
Speaker 12: has been a ton of outside spending the past few weeks,
Speaker 12: with multiple attack ads smearing L said as quote unquote sexist,
Speaker 12: and these are all just for him, like criticizing female politicians,
Speaker 12: like criticizing Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, like not attacking
Speaker 12: them for being women, but doing very sometimes actually very
Speaker 12: soft criticism of like their ability to improve the world
Speaker 12: as political actors. But the playbook that Stevens and that
Speaker 12: larger campaign has been using has been trying to smear
Speaker 12: L sayid as a quote unquote sexist podcast bro. This
Speaker 12: is the sort of last last light of defense. This
Speaker 12: style of liberalism has had, this going back to this
Speaker 12: sort of identity reductionism. When they are faced with the
Speaker 12: vast actual economic and policy differences between two candidates, the
Speaker 12: only thing they can do is Oh, but Hailey Stevens,
Speaker 12: I am a woman, and this man must hate women.
Speaker 12: APAC is helping with this. They've already spent at least
Speaker 12: fifteen million dollars, with other corporate packs helping Stevens with
Speaker 12: another twelve million. As of July first, there's already been
Speaker 12: over forty six million in ads spending, seventy four percent
Speaker 12: of which supports Stevens, and there's a lot of money
Speaker 12: going in since that July first date as well. One
Speaker 12: of the pro Stevens ads has manufactured a fake Obama
Speaker 12: endorsement using old clips of Obama talking about Hailey Stevens
Speaker 12: because she worked with him like fifteen years ago. Now,
Speaker 12: Obama has declined to comment on this sort of manufactured
Speaker 12: fake endorsement, which is effectively just letting them do that.
Speaker 12: If he's not going to say no, I haven't actually
Speaker 12: endorsed in this race, then basically he's allowing them to
Speaker 12: lie about him endorsing Stevens in this race. Meanwhile, laid
Speaker 12: is on the news almost every week getting grilled about
Speaker 12: why he doesn't support Israel enough, and Israel has been
Speaker 12: a very important part of this race. This is in Michigan,
Speaker 12: Michigan was a big part of the Uncommitted movement, and
Speaker 12: Stephens is a ridiculously pro Israel candidate who has voted
Speaker 12: to send tens of billions of dollars in unrestricted aid
Speaker 12: to Israel, has stopped the Lebanon War Powers Resolution, has
Speaker 12: banned the State Department from citing Go's the Health Ministry
Speaker 12: death tolls, and Stevens also sees Israel in her dreams.
Speaker 21: And in the United States Congress. I will continue to
Speaker 21: fight for the people of Israel. I will continue to
Speaker 21: fight for Israel's existence. Israel comes to me in my dreams.
Speaker 21: I see Israel's future.
Speaker 12: Meanwhile, Lsaid wants to abolish ice, fight for medicare for all,
Speaker 12: and cut off all aid to Israel. He's certainly running
Speaker 12: a downstream of Zoron Mamdani's style campaign with his videos.
Speaker 12: He has declined to explicitly call himself a Democratic Socialist,
Speaker 12: but there's a lot of similarities in his platform to
Speaker 12: some other DSA candidates like Zoron, though Elsay is not
Speaker 12: endorsed by DSA, but he is running with backing of
Speaker 12: the UAW and the Working Families Party. Speaking of elections,
Speaker 12: let's close out by talking about election security because on
Speaker 12: Thursday night, President Trump delivered what was promised to be
Speaker 12: a very important address to the nation on election security.
Speaker 12: The speech started out as a basically mini version of
Speaker 12: his last State of the Union before he announced the
Speaker 12: release of heavily redacted CIA documents on how China tried
Speaker 12: to influence our past elections, intelligence reports on possible vulnerabilities
Speaker 12: in our election infrastructure, and finally claiming that two hundred
Speaker 12: and fifty thousand non citizens are registered to vote, with
Speaker 12: no further details or evidence of that number. Basically, this
Speaker 12: whole speech was a big ploy to try to pass
Speaker 12: this Safe Act to restrict mail in voting and disenfranchised
Speaker 12: voters with heightened ID requirements.
Speaker 4: Trump also talked about.
Speaker 12: How China had stolen election data. What actually happened was
Speaker 12: China downloaded publicly available voter data in twenty twenty two
Speaker 12: that the Trump Aadmin now claims could be used by
Speaker 12: foreign countries to fraudulently vote in our elections. And of
Speaker 12: course China was looking at possible influence operations as many
Speaker 12: foreign countries do. Russia has done foreign influence operations that's
Speaker 12: not changing vote tallies or hacking into voting machines that's
Speaker 12: doing disinformation campaigns, which, as we've seen with Tenet Media,
Speaker 12: Russia has certainly been involved in recently. And according to
Speaker 12: some of these documents, China was looking into if they
Speaker 12: wanted to run influence operations for the twenty twenty election,
Speaker 12: and they actually declined to. After Trump's address, reporters questioned
Speaker 12: John Solomon, a former right wing journalist who Trump brought
Speaker 12: onto his election task force to investigate possible voter fraud,
Speaker 12: and Solomon clarified that there's no evidence that any foreign
Speaker 12: power tampered with US voting machines or manipulated the vote count.
Speaker 4: Do you acknowledge that there were no votes changed in twenty.
Speaker 26: Twenty I've all I can acknowledge is what the intelligence shows, right.
Speaker 26: I only know the Intelligence Committee has zero evidence that's
Speaker 26: someone's flipped. That a foreign power flip they vote in
Speaker 26: twenty twenty, twenty two or.
Speaker 1: Twenty four, and you have no you're able to work
Speaker 1: after all the documents, you're.
Speaker 20: Able to acknowledge that Venezuela has not tampered with voting
Speaker 20: machines in the United States.
Speaker 5: No, the.
Speaker 26: Intelligence is very clear they did it on their own machines.
Speaker 26: Why is important that they did it on their machines.
Speaker 26: Their machine protocols are the same as America. Why not
Speaker 26: because for a long.
Speaker 4: Time they did it.
Speaker 1: Election was in fact the results as we of the
Speaker 1: American vi researching.
Speaker 2: So let me let me have this is the first one.
Speaker 4: There's no intelligence.
Speaker 2: There's no intelligence at the election. Trumps.
Speaker 12: On Friday, the day following Trump's address, DHS Secretary Mullen
Speaker 12: announced that regardless of if the Save Act passes, he
Speaker 12: will institute mandatory changes to election security, including scrubbing states
Speaker 12: voter rules.
Speaker 29: We are going to make our second our our security
Speaker 29: enhancements mandatory, meaning that if these states want to grant
Speaker 29: and they want to be reimbursed to work or to
Speaker 29: run federal elections, they're going to have to implement security issues,
Speaker 29: just security issues. We're not trying to get into anything else,
Speaker 29: but we're saying the machines had to be secured, and
Speaker 29: that your voter restoration list needs to be scrubbed.
Speaker 12: If this actually happens, this could possibly lead to many
Speaker 12: people thinking they are registered to vote who are actually
Speaker 12: not come election day and then be unable to vote.
Speaker 12: This is a voter disenfranchisement tactic. Second time alone later
Speaker 12: directly contradicted what John Solomon said the night before, saying
Speaker 12: that quote, we know for sure that foreign adversaries have
Speaker 12: vital pieces of our voting machines, and the quote unquote
Speaker 12: key to the back end of these machines.
Speaker 29: We know that they can change voter registration and your vote.
Speaker 29: We know it's possible. There's not a question. It's not
Speaker 29: even for debate.
Speaker 12: Finally, on Wednesday, the House advanced a bill to stop
Speaker 12: insider trading, except Republicans added Save Act style measures into
Speaker 12: this bill to pass new voter ID requirements to please Trump.
Speaker 12: And part of why they put those Save AX style
Speaker 12: measures into this bill is so that they could attack
Speaker 12: Democrats in upcoming elections for voting against a bill to
Speaker 12: stop insider trading. Literally seconds after this bill was voted
Speaker 12: on the White House, rapid response accounts started posting, quote, disgraceful.
Speaker 12: One hundred and ninety eight Democrats just voted against banning
Speaker 12: members of Congress from trading stocks while they're in office.
Speaker 12: They're corrupt, as you can see, very transparent ploy to
Speaker 12: manufacture a vote to be used in elections to attack
Speaker 12: Democrats for being corrupt. This quote unquote insider Trading Bill
Speaker 12: will now go to the Senate with those Save Act
Speaker 12: style voter id measures included.
Speaker 1: All right, thank you for that, gare. And last, but
Speaker 1: certainly not least, we've got one more edition of the
Speaker 1: Tariff Song, and then talking about tariffs after it.
Speaker 4: All right, let's talk tariffs. So long ago, in a
Speaker 4: galaxy far far away, which is to say, really truly
Speaker 4: not that long ago, we did an episode on the
Speaker 4: hideously illegal terrorists Trump imposed under the quote unquote authority
Speaker 4: of Section one twenty two of the Trade Act of
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy four. These are the ones that are based
Speaker 4: on this completely manufactured crisis about the US facing a
Speaker 4: balance of payments crisis, a thing that cannot happen and
Speaker 4: is not happening now. These tariffs, which is just a
Speaker 4: general ten percent tariffnal goods, are set to expire on
Speaker 4: Friday July twenty fourth, quite possibly the day you're listening
Speaker 4: to this. So on Monday, July twentieth, Trump took the
Speaker 4: most dramatic terrorf action he has taken since the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court found he was illegally using the International Emergency Economic
Speaker 4: Powers Act to apply TERRAFS in February by the time
Speaker 4: you are listening to this, presumably he is going to
Speaker 4: have unleashed a wrath. You know, I was originally a raft,
Speaker 4: but wrath actually works too. Of new tariffs, but as
Speaker 4: off to time of recording, the one that has been
Speaker 4: revealed specifically is that he is imposing a fifty percent
Speaker 4: tariff on goods imported from Canada or some goods imported
Speaker 4: from Canada. Now I'm going to get into what that
Speaker 4: tariff is actually going to do in a second. But
Speaker 4: the important thing here is not the specific tariff itself,
Speaker 4: but the legal authority Trump is using to invoke it.
Speaker 4: He is invoking section three thirty eight of the so
Speaker 4: called smoot Holly TERRRIF Act. If the name vaguely rings
Speaker 4: a bell, it's probably because smoot Holly is best known
Speaker 4: for exacerbating the Great Depression, to the extent that it
Speaker 4: is in basically every every history textbook of the United
Speaker 4: States so you will read in high school, will have
Speaker 4: this in it. This Act smoot Holly is the final
Speaker 4: frontier for terriff authority. It is the tariff big red button.
Speaker 4: It is a power that has never been invoked before,
Speaker 4: even by its creative and I genuinely don't know if
Speaker 4: it even still exists. This is the tariff rubicon, and
Speaker 4: Trump has just crossed it. Now, before we get into
Speaker 4: this more, let's talk for a second about Trump's nominal
Speaker 4: fifty percent teriff on Canada, which is actually much less
Speaker 4: of a big deal than it looks. The tariffs are
Speaker 4: supposed to take effect on August nineteenth and has about
Speaker 4: a million carveouts for you know, different kinds of Canadian goods, including,
Speaker 4: for example, things like energy products, which is a huge
Speaker 4: amount of what we import from Canada. So this is
Speaker 4: only going to apply to about five point two percent
Speaker 4: of Canadian trade with the US. I mean, obviously that
Speaker 4: is still kind of a big deal for that five
Speaker 4: percent of trade. But you know, there's a good chance
Speaker 4: that these tariffs aren't going to go into effect at all,
Speaker 4: and that this is sort of a piece of trade
Speaker 4: leverage for negotiations with Canada. These, you know, even if
Speaker 4: they did go into effect, aren't going to be the
Speaker 4: biggest deal. I'm also going to briefly mention that we
Speaker 4: finally got the long awaited pharmaceutical import tariff. And when
Speaker 4: I say long awaited, I have literally been waiting for
Speaker 4: these tariffs to be announced since the beginning of the administration,
Speaker 4: to the point where I literally stopped covering the announcements
Speaker 4: that they were coming because they just never did. Apparently
Speaker 4: they are also kind of a joke. They impose a
Speaker 4: one hundred percent tariff on pharmaceutical imports, which would be
Speaker 4: a massive deal, except it starts in twenty twenty eight,
Speaker 4: it eventually rises at the two hundred percent, and like, Okay, yeah, sure, Donald,
Speaker 4: whatever you say, that's not happening. None of the specifics
Speaker 4: of the tariffs matter at all, or matter much at all.
Speaker 4: What is significantly more important is Trump invoking three thirty
Speaker 4: eight of Smoot Holly. Now, the reason he's doing this
Speaker 4: is pretty clear. All of the other avenues he has
Speaker 4: to impose teriffs legally actually have restrictions attached to them.
Speaker 4: Section one twenty two tariffs, as we've mentioned, are only
Speaker 4: supposed to be when there's a balance of payments crisis,
Speaker 4: and you can only impose a flat rate, and once
Speaker 4: he imposes them, they have to be reviewed by Congress,
Speaker 4: and that's just not happening. So those are expiring on Friday.
Speaker 4: We've talked about the Section three oh one tariffs a
Speaker 4: few weeks ago. Those are the ones that nominally are
Speaker 4: about forced labor. But those also have limits and can
Speaker 4: only be imposed after a long and slow process of
Speaker 4: trade investigations. Now, obviously the way that that Trump has
Speaker 4: used both of them is illegal, but even trying to
Speaker 4: use them illegally, they have definite limits. Section three thirty
Speaker 4: eight of Smooth Holly has basically no limits, and the
Speaker 4: one limit that's relevant for our purposes is a fifty
Speaker 4: percent maximum teriff rate. Otherwise, it lets the president impose
Speaker 4: tariffs on whatever country he wants for the extremely nepulous
Speaker 4: reasoning of that country having placed quote the commerce of
Speaker 4: the United States at a disadvantage compared to the commerce
Speaker 4: of any foreign country. Trump, can you say any country
Speaker 4: is doing this for any reason? We are back to
Speaker 4: Calvinball nonsense. This nominal legal authority allows Trump to do
Speaker 4: whatever he wants trade wise, up to a fifty percent tariff. Now, again,
Speaker 4: it is widely expected that by the time you're reading this,
Speaker 4: we're already going to have seen more tariffs. I'm expecting
Speaker 4: something akin to a smaller scale version of liberation tariffs.
Speaker 4: By the time you're listening, you will know more. Now,
Speaker 4: the reason I'm talking about section three thirty eight of
Speaker 4: Smooth Holly. And the reason I've described it as like
Speaker 4: the big red button of tariffs, like it's the tariff rubicon,
Speaker 4: is because not only has it never been used before, right,
Speaker 4: you know, the Section one twenty two has also never
Speaker 4: been used before, but this one, specifically section three thirty eight,
Speaker 4: there is a real question as to whether it's even
Speaker 4: still in effect now. The argument you will most commonly
Speaker 4: see is that section three thirty eight has never formally
Speaker 4: been repealed and therefore is still on the books. This
Speaker 4: is a law that was passed in nineteen thirty. The
Speaker 4: com administration is making the argument that because it has
Speaker 4: never formally been repealed, it is still on the books. However,
Speaker 4: the problem is that there exists a thing called superseding
Speaker 4: statute or a quote implied repeal. This is the argument
Speaker 4: that I've seen that this law is not still on
Speaker 4: the books. I've seen various versions of it. The one
Speaker 4: that is kind of spreading around now, for better or
Speaker 4: for worse, kind of for worse to some extent, is
Speaker 4: from Philip Zellico, who is a Hoover Institute guy and
Speaker 4: a history professor who's writing in Reason magazine so, like,
Speaker 4: you know, these are not the people I would normally
Speaker 4: turn to in terms of getting legal analysis on everything.
Speaker 4: But I actually think there's a kind of a decent
Speaker 4: argument that they might be right. And their argument is that, okay,
Speaker 4: because of the way that you know, laws can supersede
Speaker 4: other laws. Right, if you write a second law that
Speaker 4: is about the same thing as the first law, and
Speaker 4: it covers explicitly the same thing, it can repeal the
Speaker 4: first law. It's sketchy, the courts don't like it functioning
Speaker 4: like that, but it does technically work like that. And
Speaker 4: you know, zelico Are argues that a whole train of statutes,
Speaker 4: ranging from the Trade Expansion Act of nineteen sixteen to
Speaker 4: our old friend section three oh one, if the Trade
Speaker 4: Act of nineteen seventy four cover exactly the same things
Speaker 4: and therefore have repealed the statute. I think that's actually plausible.
Speaker 4: And this is, you know, part of the reason why
Speaker 4: no one has ever actually tried to use this stuff,
Speaker 4: because there have been subsequent legislation to describe these exact
Speaker 4: powers and describe what you can do with them. So
Speaker 4: whether it even still exists is extremely dubious. Now, this
Speaker 4: is probably not going to survive a challenge in court.
Speaker 4: But until the legal challenge actually winds its way through
Speaker 4: the courts, Trump is going to be free to do
Speaker 4: as Calvin ball nonsense, and we're back to, you know,
Speaker 4: twenty five era. Trump just declaring a tariff is happening
Speaker 4: in a country every morning now. On a broader level, right,
Speaker 4: what's happening here is that the way the Supreme Court
Speaker 4: has been doing shadow docket decisions have allowed Trump to
Speaker 4: simply keep breaking the law and seizing more illegal power
Speaker 4: and then using it until this bereme court gets around
Speaker 4: and taking that power away. Now, obviously this is not
Speaker 4: true of everything he's been trying to do with triffs.
Speaker 4: In particular, he's been extremely successful in simply applying the
Speaker 4: tariffs and then keeping them into effect until the legal
Speaker 4: challenges go through the courts. That looks like what's going
Speaker 4: to happen here, which is going to give him probably
Speaker 4: another I mean, it's going to give him but at
Speaker 4: least half a year probably of the ability to just
Speaker 4: do whatever bullshit tariff policy he wants, which means another
Speaker 4: year of completely unhinged economic instability for the entire global economy.
Speaker 4: It means another year of all you know of supply
Speaker 4: lines being degraded, of prices increasing, and of all of
Speaker 4: us getting absolutely screwed. Okay, put a transgoll on your couch.
Speaker 1: We reported the news.
Speaker 18: We reported the news.
Speaker 1: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
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