Dawn to Decadence: The Decadent Society- With Varn Vlog (Part I)

0:00Hello and welcome to a incredible century and bar and blog together and our captain planet team of pessimism with our powers combined and yeah yeah you know I had a thesis that inconsistently conservatives really do actually believe in the tenies here of the rate of profit the fall because most of them believe in secular stagnation but they'll never admit that that's what they believe in because

1:01they would have to admit that Marx was right although I don't know why because they could get it from Aristotle, Ibn Kundun, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Aquinas. I can go through people who mentioned the tenies of the rate of profits to fall in markets throughout early history and yet they don't believe in it and yet all of them selectively, selectively because one of the things I'm gonna talk about when we talk about Ross Dunhatt here is how frustrating he is because he's inconsistent there's another conservativeist libertarian Tyler Cohen who was super super big on secular stagnation and then like the moment AI came out he just dropped it like a rock and pretend he never believed in it and then you know so people are super selective but we we're gonna cover part one of this book the Decadence Society so you guys want to know what we're deploying from

2:02and it is inspired by the namesake of this series I guess we should probably talk about this book but it's really long yeah from Don the Decadence that's why we called it from Don the Decadence it's a famous book that I read probably at 1999 by the conservativeist but brilliant scholar Jocke Barzom is it Dauphat or Douthat or Douthat or whatever yeah I don't know I'm gonna come I used to call him Donut but Dauphat or Douthat but he references he references that book like a lot in this book yeah correct this book is highly pulling from that book you know what screw it we should actually talk about that book eventually it's just long but it's history that's our field well yeah and we and we should should yeah yeah I mean if we're gonna name if we're gonna name a series after somebody and then not cover his book on the topic

3:04that we're talking about that is a little weird yeah I just haven't looked at that book in like 20 years and it's long it's like 700 pages but it's not hard to read if I remember correctly I read it in like a month as undergrad and in college so okay what's that about who Ross Dauhat is I mean there's controversy's about him because apparently he's a you know he's a vaguely fascioid he's a big Franco fan apparently yeah he's a isn't he a Catholic sort of social conservative but not economic conservative which is stepping into some dicey territory to most people they think about it they don't think about it enough right well I mean he he comes from what I can tell from a

4:05distributious tradition that is a type of Catholic quasi corporatist not quasi yeah straight up or it is yeah it was it was the first corporatism I think right yeah he comes from that sort of like economic theory however I'm just gonna say if you read him in the New York Times he's remarkably inconsistent so sometimes he's a post-liberal you know Roman Catholic who's who's advocating for distributed and sometimes he's just a blowhard conservative it depends on his mood that day he's also gets bogged down in a lot of silly culture warden nonsense to sometimes yeah I mean he suffers from the what is quite typical and standard for American conservatives which is that they are liberals they

5:09don't want to be but they just are he's interesting though because I think the his defense I think he's more aware of that than a lot of the other conservatives and one of the things I'll get the post liberals is like they're aware that they are liberals they're also aware that they don't want to be hints by their post and not something else I see this movement was really popular during Trump one Trump too is really discredited it and a lot of these people have either your turn tail have been very quiet do hot's not one of them are done hot or whatever we're gonna fight up we're gonna try to figure out I should listen like for a guy who's a famous New York Times pilot you think I would have listened to an interview with him to some of him else this is naming it I haven't I've heard the the cha po guys refer to him as dao fat and then of course they also call him donut or whatever they just when if they're

6:09making fun of them they'll fuck his name up on purpose but I think it's dao fat all right so dao fat we're gonna go with dao fat if anyone actually knows feel free to phonetically spell it in the show notes are in the comments so he's heavily influenced by G.K. Chester Chen C. S. Lewis and Jack Brezon he offers you know the standard critique of the of the Western secularism I mean I can go through his books privilege Harvard and the education of the ruling class proving that even as early as 2005 conservatives realize that you could use liberal tropes to make conservative points although that's hardly new grand new party in 20 and 2008 bad religion how we became a nation of heretics a crystal like this it's basically a call for for people becoming

7:21Catholic and not and to get all this and ran shit out of the GOP and which you know I guess he was right about that that happened bad religion I don't know already mentioned that one to change the church Pope Francis in the future of Catholicism whining about how the Pope is too woke before it was cool the decadent society the deep places a memoir of his illness and believe what everyone should be religious so you know that's a good example of what I mean like Francis Pope Francis is way more in line with traditional Catholic social teaching which Ross Douthet is is normally he is that that's what it means to be a conservative Catholic but whatever also I just listen to just now interview with him in the interviewer calls him Douthet Douthet okay Douthet yeah all

8:24right there we go I like donut hat better so most of what he's written about is like cultural stuff that I mean to me he's like a slightly more intellectually serious rondrier yeah the Benedict option dude yeah Benedict option crunchy conservatives editor of the American conservative magazine he went he could also hasn't got two wokes so he became orthodox that guy yep yeah at he went through the religions because at one time he was an evangelical you know yeah there's a lot of those guys now he lives now he lives and he's divorced from his wife and lives in Romania with a bunch of strapping young lads I'm like writing if writing a not gay critical commentary of the United States from Romania listen if you if you don't have a parade and you

9:27don't dress like a person at a parade then you're not really culturally homosexual the decadent thing is the celebration of gay of being gay not so much being gay you know what's funny is even though we're joking I do think that's an argument I've really heard oh yeah definitely so this book that we're talking about today is the Deccan society how we became a victim of our own success aka strawman make good times good times make weak men we make make bad times the book but slightly more serious than that like there was I think there's a lot to agree with in here but yeah that is essentially the book I was really frustrated with the fact that of the you know except for that literary piece where we went through the different theories of decadence historically that this was my favorite thing we've read so far yeah actually it's very it was a

10:34very enjoyable read yeah there's nothing about like that that formulations you know the with the the good times in the week minimum it's like fine that's true I guess I don't I don't think it means very much that doesn't say very much it's like yeah fine that's true I mean it's it's it's it's it's Minkung Dune for for a meme is what that is yeah if we like for those of you who don't know the first Muslim North African sociologist also probably the first person who invented biological racism that's actually I know that makes a lot of people uncomfortable because we like to attribute it to Europeans but it probably wasn't yeah we don't like to think about people from North Africa or people who are Muslims is ever doing anything bad but but other than that the book that he wrote which is a pro prologamine in English and I can't I'm not

11:36gonna try to say what it is in Arabic is really great as far as like I mean it's sociology before the Renaissance it's it's kind of a brilliant book I read I read a short form of it in English and then I read I read an English translation of the entire thing a few years ago but this this is a book we another thing about it I'm just gonna point this out I do sometimes think man what why do conservative sometimes take our ideas more seriously than we do I mean like I that is not true for the economics of Karl Marx where like every conservative intrigues like if you had read more than three pages in capital volume one you would shut the hell off like you're just very generous it's more like if you had read even one page of capital volume one right but when

12:37they're not writing about socialism or Marx but tend to take us seriously which I mean we are talking about a different group of people like Ross Dunham wouldn't write like that Michael Levin's book that was you know blamed at billion Marxism for everything from like his stub toe to area on a grande but anyway what needs to pay for a grande I just want to read the first two damn epigrams in this book the crisis consists precisely in the fact the oldest dying and you cannot be born in this interregrable a great variety of morbid symptoms appear who says that who is he quoting his quoting grom she he's quoting grom she positively I may have yeah and then I was like we're not dealing with a normal conservative here he's not mocking grom she's

13:37actually like quoting him positively right and then pity this busy monster minimum kind not progress is a comfortable disease eE coming and we start off in the book with the introduction and an anecdote about Norman may or talking about the assassination of the 60s and 70s then he goes through challenger explosion and we get this line resignation haunts our president civilization across human history the most dynamic and creative societies have always been almost inevitably that almost is actually quite interesting it's spanish and airy going outward from tribes and cities and nations to put their stamp on a large world sometimes this is meant settlement and sometimes conquest sometimes is meant missionary sale sometimes simply exploration for the sake of commerce

14:37and curiosity in the case in the modern west the first the first world civilization and it meant all of them god and golden glory settler societies and fraud for unimperial rules races to the polls into the peaks the sprawls of roads and red roads and seam ships and airline routes and communication networks that are bound the world peripheries into a universal web now I could put that beginning with the with the with the trans historical generalization in this and the second sentence removed and almost any damn book written by Marxist yeah I could like the thing is that show people uncomfortable what it should do is it should tell them that like hey some of the stuff is worth actually engaging with which is like think yeah big part of the logic behind the series actually yeah right I would even say fascism is gonna get in you and make you bad

15:39if you read it that's true yeah instead of instead of Hitler particles it's it's it's Mussolini Masma is what we're gonna be dealing with what's his name damn shit if I was smarter I would remember the French guy that came up with the the radical integralism Charles Marra no he was he was the Axial François guy the oh the other yeah he was a priest and he's the one who came up with radical intro is and like which isn't necessarily fascist but it sure did inspire a lot of fascists yeah and and a lot of post fascists go back to it to actually yeah like like fascist and Latin America often almost never called themselves fascists either for long just our integrals that's usually yeah that Brazilians were integrals and what's interesting about the Brazilians is they were like explicitly like multicultural Brazilian like black and native Americans and then Portuguese yeah I'm sure they were probably racist

16:41against somebody that I don't know about yet because I don't understand Brazilian unassimulated indigenous I believe probably that makes sense but anyway skip a paragraph and then I'm gonna read this indeed because of deep forces of modern history industrialization political centralization secularization so often disrupted the realms of life live instability in place and continuity the ideology of exploration discovery has been much more necessary than in many past civilizations offering a new form of consolidation to replace what faith and tribe and family and hierarchy once applied now having just read Alexander Dugan's four political theory and rereading a bunch of Christopher last since I recently wrote a book with Daniel Todd that mentioned Christopher last just changed in the 1980s I feel like I've read that line in a bunch of places now I would also say that it's a little bit broad and vague but not

17:44incrementally so what I find very interesting about this book I'm gonna go through I'm not gonna go through all this beginning line by line but is one and this is something I like about conservative theory even if it's also a problem they are actually very good at using anecdotes to make their point as opposed to verbiage and two I find it quite interesting his four hersmen here in these first four chapters so we have the introduction and basically it is pulled from Jarba's on although interestingly I could have taken Christopher Lash's 88 book the true and only heaven and also but have gotten a lot of the same things and

18:48but the definition of decadence for uh doffat doffat yeah uh yeah doffat doffat yeah I was right the first time is Jarba's on's definition which is part of why we're going to have to read that book that a decadence society is a state of society where society is wealthy off of past advancement and technologically proficient off of prior development Marxist dead labor Marxist dead labor um but is not able to advance anymore scientifically spiritually economically etc um and um you know this is the whole frontiers are closed which you know we could go into the if we wanted to be really good leftist we could talk about uh the settler will chroma and

19:49the only one nature of frontiers but i'm going to spare you for that um institutions are are frozen stagnated and overbearing critic and culture is in a repetition compulsion because it has run out of any of new ideas even by combining old ones right that's it definitely so he's uh basically quoting David Graber there when talking about technology also yeah yeah yeah and he uh he's side scraver also earlier in the introduction which i thought it's interesting and also Thomas Piccadine is less interesting because that's like a a normy leftist that conservatives picture you're seeing yeah i just thought it was interesting uh not so much interesting but like it's refreshing that um there's like a smattering across the spectrum of uh influential ideas like these thinkers these are people who are worth you know whatever this is just kind of nice like oh there's good conservative book and in the introduction he says including people like

20:50Piccadine and Graber it's like oh those are people that i would i would suggest or i would mention yeah although my secret my secret contention that Graber is actually not it is actually way way more conservative than Graber himself realized is probably not helped by this kind of stuff no no you're right about that it's just like how Piccadine is also not really um i would mention Piccadine if i was talking to somebody who uh i wouldn't be able to mention marks too otherwise we just say you know he's a social ad yeah there we go yeah he's a and he's a social Democrat not from a Marxist even a reformist Marxist tradition he's a social Democrat from a Keynesian tradition yeah he's he's a post-second international social Democrat right yeah well a post 1940 social Democrat he's a post he's a post war social Democrat yeah but the social democracy that was allowed to coexist with gollism yeah because that he's French I believe yeah that book is uh two damn long but

21:53actually not terrible even though I toured up uh when it came out from a Marxist perspective and I also don't feel totally i'm gonna be honest i read that book i did finish it but i read it like a marathon sprint because it was so damn long and there are whole sections that i'm like uh i don't remember what that was because i just kept plowing through um so stagnation is our first chapter and i find this interesting um because one oh hold on there was a quick bit i wanted to read from the entry from the entity intro before he moved on uh and this you know this brings us back to square one of collaboration here what fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash wrote w h odd and of the last world empire and it's endless autumn but rather that it managed to last for four centuries without creativity warmth or hope there was nothing left that could conquer Rome gk chesterton wrote on the same theme but there was also nothing left that

22:53could improve it it was the end of the world and the worst of it was that it would never end yeah and of course that is he's talking about the united states there yeah but yeah this is this is something that i found really really really fascinating i've been i was reading um john uh john michael grier who's this weird like druid who's also was in the peak world in the odds and he's like a burky and conservative quasi-socialist who also like doesn't really like the republic you know one of those weird types and um here at this book called the long descent uh about collapse but like collapse for most societies is not quick and it's put it's uneven and it's punctuated so there'll be periods where there seems like a lot's falling apart at once and then there'll be decades where it seems like nothing does but what i find fascinating about these conservatives versus

23:56i'm not gonna pin them against liberals i mean we can talk about the optimistic wiggish liberals who are optimistic until their political opponents are in or in office and then they're apocalyptic until they until they go back in charge of the state do the same things and a more rational and and less spectacular fashion than their conservative counterparts but continue on the same trajectory of the cline you know uh but call it progress we can talk about that uh we also talk about like the postmodernist liberals who also don't believe in progress but also don't know what we mean by that and they just seem to think stuff is sometimes bad and maybe the enlightenment was a bad idea and uh animal spirits or something um we can talk about those guys um but i actually find it interesting to talk about marxist who have lost any sense of long deray development um like and i'm gonna be an asshole here david harvey who seems to flip

25:04his entire conception of like development in the past depending on the trends and the current moment on the left so now china's good 15 years ago china was near liberal and he just like oh i was wrong does he explain why i was wrong not really like or what's really unfortunate about that is he could just say yeah that's because the period of uh market reforms under dung shopping and hu jintao and jang jiaman began to be uh transcended or overcome and left behind by the Xi Jinping administration which is actually the chinese communist party's own perspective right you could just do with that if you wanted to yeah right because uh she is a dialect little synthesis of yeah of left and and right tendencies and and socialism when chinese characteristic i know the lines i mean like and and the thing is there's a little bit truth to him

26:05sure because china is now establishing a 1930s us welfare state to undo some of what dung did oh um yeah it really is a uh the idea is uh one step backward so that we can go two steps two steps forward kind of reasoning and it's it there's a certain degree of a wish makes some sense it but you know whether you call it marxism and especially because the highest developed form of marxism is another another story yeah many people have heard me debate this i i uh my answer is on china to make everybody man because i'm neither like china is a dirty capitalist just like everyone else in nor am i like it's socialist and already there and great which which they don't even say except in the 1982 constitution which anyway i'm not going to get into it uh yeah i think that they're they're in their third the officially they're in the third phase of the building of socialism which

27:06is still in the lower uh form of socialism and that they're achieving a moderate moderately prosperous society by 2030 and that will enter into the next phase whatever it's like in 2050 which will be which will they have achieved necessary socialist reforms to meet a higher stage of socialism i don't know where they get their stages of socialism from um um you know because when i i mean i know where they get it like an an outline which is from critique of the growth of program but like i don't know how they demarcate them really and it seems to change depending on who's the polo brewer the general secretary of the polo brewer I think it's like um uh but anyway back to the the dingo swing would have been happy to just continue on that trajectory forever yeah um so stagnation right now i have been uh this is another area where it pisses people off because i am generally anti overuse of a i i'm not

28:12anti at the technology actually and in theory if we engineered it like the Chinese are doing with certain limits and and both what it is deployed to do and how much energy and compute and water we're willing to put towards it this is why the Chinese models are more efficient than ours um they have like underwater um like uh data centers that they build so they could just like cool it with seawater and then use like c currents for power yeah yeah you know smart shit as it takes a massive investment and it probably is not going to be profitable for a really long time but you can do that sort of thing if you're the Chinese fucking state whereas where like you can you can do this sort of thing if you're any state the question that's true what that you have the political will well and the productive capacity well yeah i mean productive capacity yeah we can't even build fucking roads yeah okay okay that's true we could have if it was 1970 we still could have but now we

29:16couldn't but this actually gets to some of the points where where um not that is actually helpful um one i find it fascinating because usually when we deal with any of these conservative figures they take political economy and they throw it somewhere else like they're like they're like they're like they they they might care you know they might be libertarian capitalist or whatever or i don't know what the hell doogan was and uh i don't think doogan believes in political economy yeah i don't think he believes in economics at all yeah uh he believes he believes in will and sorcery yeah will sorcery and and civilizations that's what we got yes civilization on the first count on the first count i'm sympathetic to dogans overall picture the paints and then the further on you go the more i just get super frustrated with where by the end i'm just like varnrums like i hate this this is dumb um whereas this book didn't do that to me i was

30:17actually like uh this is actually fairly accurate why am i having trouble getting anyone on left are right to take this seriously because it's transparently obvious and i know people go oh ai but ai is a problem because it's not profitable right um it's it it creates a lot of revenue in people confuse that but there's no ai company that is getting anything but but large amounts revenue from investment that they're burning and they realizing they're burning it and as we're recording there's all these i b o's opening up which are clearly them trying to get passive investments that get their last bit of recoup back so they can get out of the market um you know which happened in the dot com bubble too uh and yet it's hard to tell people like the economy has been stagnant since the 70s because people people think oh no the 90s the 90s were great

31:20the 90s had a recession in 91 which we all forget happened because it wasn't as bad as the recessions in 82 are the recession in in 2001 because we had the double whammy of the dot com bubble burst and then 9-11 yeah uh the the mega recession of 2007 the long and massive amount of people being thrown off welfare in the 90s that caused a massive yeah economic problem at the lower end of society that people just kind of co-awes over because it didn't really register uh on the on the dour or whatever yeah well and if not for the massive increase in available areas for investment in the you know basically if there were east of uh Berlin which the 90s would have been really really bad the the reason why people they you know in the IS tradition uh economists said things like the 1990s will be like the 1930s in slow motion the reason why they said that is because they thought

32:21that the USSR and the Warsaw Factory were just going to exist forever which didn't happen to be true right well i mean this is the problem that everyone has the everything seems to last forever until it doesn't i will say one of the reasons why i think people think collapse is more is more quick is that their experience of collapse is the political collapse of the USSR but not not the 20 year social freefall that happened afterwards wait you know things didn't start to stabilize in russia until like Putin three uh yeah uh so he had to throw some oligarchs out the window nationalize their nationalize and monopolize their companies and yeah and they really had those right the givin of a bunch of liberals uh yeah um he really didn't consolidate everything quite honestly

33:29uh enough to even start building back a domestic economy sporadically and not really greatly even now until the Ukraine war forced them into to having to start to make their own a consumer goods yeah for the literally the first time in the history of russian society they were like oh i guess we might as well have a consumer good in goods industry and they just laid hands on the ready made machinery that was like left behind by all the western companies and turned McDonald's into McDougals or whatever and then and now you have a russian consumer economy it's right i know i don't remember what it's called it's called like with the russian McDonald's is i don't know something incredibly slobic yeah max bug nicks or whatever no um um no you can actually look it up i won't make lame jokes um so vikusno itočka tasty period okay that's not it uh let's just call it a period so the one thing he he actually highlights is

34:36he he actually restates a thesis that was picked up by tyler coen until again ai costs in the losers fucking mind um that we have had massive investment in only one form of technology and we have increasingly centralized our society in one form of technology that is a smartphone that is communications technology which ironically if you know anything about communications technologies in the past they're not profitable and i know people are gonna go yes they are barn no they're not the reason why they're not the only reason they make a profit and the reason why everything got turned into intellectual property rights is because this is massive infrastructure that's once it built doesn't require commodity production everything involved around it rotates around a rent however it is a centralized infrastructure that we now use for every damn thing

35:43i was talking to somebody wanted to get rid of their smartphone and they're like you know you can't like go to a baseball game now without it because you can't get tickets um you can't go to this so as a centralized structure and we're seeing this with AI and cars too so there's this bill that the conservatives and actually now some liberals are freaking out about it was passed by the democrats that with some but not a lot of republican opposition to they want to put in this monitoring system that's AI based that they don't have they it does not exist yet they they're inventing they want the technology invented to monitor every car in the planet to turn it off if it thinks you're drunk off of your eye movement or to pull you over um etc etc etc that's not fucking ominous at all i think it's funny because i've been pointing out that like you know all these liberals rediscovered free speech in the trump administration and all the people

36:45like uh enemy of the show deglein who like used to believe in free speech but i've dropped it now it's now there's the trump administration um because no one believes any of this shit anymore because really i pointed out anything actually right um but i i have pointed out that like you know it was it was progressives who pushed for tech censorship like crazy um uh to fight the alt-right and to fight russian disinformation yeah yeah right so and like i saw i saw i saw a happy election with uh memes i saw the the reach that this like serbian cyber like uh disinformation farmed that the russians were funding that supposedly turned the election for Hillary Clinton reached literally hundreds of boomers and that was it yeah i mean this is this is a problem like um

37:47information warfare exists between all nations the biggest one in per pop who propagates it on osm it's israel people are finally noticing that yep um and are becoming very anti-submitted in the process right unfortunately yeah um but uh but at the same time i mean it's real he's yeah but here's the other thing every fucking country even our stupid allies do it yeah i mean like i mean the ones that don't like latin american countries because they just have better things to do yeah what most of the better things they have to do is make trade deals or avoid us um so and i mean you say that israel is the biggest and only probably second to israel which would be would be us on ourselves then the british yeah then the EU uh then russia probably yeah china does it china weirdly seems to either not care or not do it very well though

38:50like they do some of it but um i think russia is really bad though um i think they try to do it but like the the the place where they put their emphasis for information warfare is never on things that americans are going to care about right yeah never never fight back against the the just ridiculous claims that are made about russia by the western media they always try to like uh go after things that no one's going to ever believe them on anyway you know who's actually remarkably good at it surprise me how good it they were are on oh yeah no shit i wish i was like y'all are this good at this why have you been doing this before well yeah you should have been doing this since like 1979 like you're actually remarkably good at this well yeah um but anyway um i guess they were hoping sending us doctors would make us more

39:52copacetic or something i don't know oh we don't care about people that like add value to society at all the thing is i think that they really were just trying really hard to get along with us just like russia was for like very long time very very long time yes well i mean russia still trying to join NATO yeah i mean putin putin was putin is trying to get a lot of trouble for sure trying to be the the more rational nationalistic version of yeltsin right so only in the last year or a couple of years that really since 2014 the putin has finally started to shift away from the the very conciliatory position that the russian ruling classes had for a very long time so he hasn't indicated that once did she crane stuff is over he would love to go back to being conciliatory yeah and like even though it is very clear that ukraine could not do anything that they do

40:54without targeting data and tellage and other intelligence from the united states weapons that they are getting from the united states through european intermediaries and stuff like that he still refuses to name the united states when lambasting the the western forces that are arrayed against him because he's still trying to to trying to maintain a relationship with trump and he knows that if he starts calling trump out for duplicitousness or helping the the Ukrainians get assassination targeting data then uh trump will do something oh you never never mind fine i'm gonna fund you crane with all this money that we don't have we're gonna go trillion more dollars into debt to fund you crane well i mean this is beyond the scope of this but yeah we do that i i i wouldn't say that like i mean like our opinions on rachard are close but slightly divergent one of the things i think that really baffles people with me is i've actually always thought that we were our aggression towards russia was

42:00actually a concession towards our european allies um which i think makes people uncomfortable um i mean i can i can see that yeah well like for example my dawn uh if you look at the american posture towards my dawn versus the EU positive to my dawn who made that shit worse it was actually it was merkle specifically and i don't think she was acting on our behalf i think we were just like and whatever like and once it once it happened though we were on the ground oh i don't take it over yeah immediately but but picking their leaders for them but that is the that is what we have done forever yeah like we we are flies to shit the chaos whenever this chaos legitimate or otherwise and this is what this is why like some of our more or less sophisticated friends can claim that everything is a c a because if you really look as soon as something happens the c a is fucking there like like like shit but i'm like that's a job is to

43:01i wouldn't try to take advantage of everything and they're actually remarkably bad at it sometimes i don't really are like yeah the flies don't cause the shit well not all yeah i mean sometimes they do like i think yeah there's a dialectic between shit and flies and sometimes the shit uh sometimes the shit is you know like like when i tried to explain my opinion on the on what happened with Ukraine i'm like well uh russia felt pinned in by NATO legitimately he decided to ignore that we had no reason to go any further though because we because it would trick article five so he went in um accelerating the situation blah blah blah blah blah and as long as he could keep uh Ukraine divided it could never internato right because it was always an unstable

44:05situation that's part of the NATO charter rules right which is why john marchimer and myself did not think he was actually going to go anywhere beyond the dawnbass neither neither did the Ukrainians yeah pretty much nobody takes it weirdly jobited and this one time in the in the history of the world he was right about something um well and also um this we'll it will never know for sure but the question really should be whether or not the would have if not for the way that the that the war is actually played out who knows i don't i think they would have Joe Biden might have known because Anthony Blinken told love revolve um when love revolve said it can i get a commitment that you're not going to put nuclear missiles in Ukraine if they join NATO and Blinken said we're gonna fucking put our missiles wherever we want to great yeah so Biden knew that Blinken said that and that's uh that recently came out as having happened because i think that um

45:08what's his name uh the harvard not harvard yeah the the harvard guy that was part of restructuring Russia that's like a big uh like sort of multi polarity guy now uh i don't know but he he was talking about that for years until the like just recently that it was actually acknowledged that that conversation happened and it was in like the guardian and every sex you mean yeah there we go yes sex for sure Jeffrey Saxony yeah yeah yeah yeah um so we get back to stagnation uh all right although it's i will tie it in um uh so one of the things we're seeing today is that our our overhead costs and our supply chain cost are obscene uh so for example and trying to deal with either the Russians or the iranians the the ability to produce enough munitions has been a major issue not because we don't have the technology to do it but because our supply chain costs and our unwillingness to revert back to earlier technology and probably our inability to do so

46:13because we no longer have the factories and stuff um to go back to earlier technology means that our missiles and shit are like they're they're super effective but they're like 60 million dollars to build two of them or something right something crazy like that and this is part of a highly stagnated economy um i find it interesting that this came out in 2020 because he was writing about the economy when everybody thought it was hot and and 2016 to to 2020 are from about 2014 to 2020 um right and you have all these economists saying GDP is great blah blah blah blah blah but when you look at what we got for GDP like a GDP what where GDP per a front the only major thing I can think of intact that happened was the invention of the of the smartphone and then when you think about that until AI there was no significant new infrastructure investment beyond just tweaking smart

47:21phone tech for almost 15 years yeah that's not normal um if you think about to the 80s are the 90s when we first got internet technology how quickly were there advances like if you got a um a uh a Commodore like in 1984 and then you looked at like a Dell from 2002 they were light years up past yes right um big difference between computers now and 10 years ago is that they're way more expensive right and and and they need a lot more RAM for all the AI bullshit in every program that doesn't be exactly it isn't needed to be done there and AI bullshit's only there and this is a net that going back to those IPOs because investors were subsidizing their use so when we have to

48:22start paying for the actual cost of a power and production as Microsoft found out with Anthropic this very month it's cheaper to go back to using people yep um that is hold on I'm forgetting this is the section that where he talks about uh Uber's business model in this chapter yep it is the stuff I can look at straight at it okay over so far this is from 20 this is from like 2019 yeah it isn't a pure integrand fantasy like the firefresh festival or naked fraud which is hilarious the rainhouse and I think we forget during the hot economy most of the major inventions were like we work in the rainhouse and just like literal scams Patrick Boyle the financial economists have talked about how are even what let's uh or even let's look at like space nets right now um Elon Musk is a richest man in the world now

49:24trillionaire although I'm going to remind people that's mostly off of equity promises and and uh debt holdings that means that until he goes to valorize that trillion dollars we don't know if it's suspicious or not right uh but anyway uh I mean we don't really know but I think we could say it probably is yeah probably is um well the question is is he gonna suck enough enough money out of people's pensions and dumbass retail investors you didn't notice it it's easy to get in and very hard to get out of the trade for at least a month yeah until at least after the first uh profitability reports come in um but even a functional uh I brought this up on a live stream yesterday uh well I guess when this comes out it will be months ago but like anthropic was valued at 780 billion it's revenues the one time it turned to profit at all was 20 billion

50:24um Walmart is valued at 720 billion it's revenues are like 740 billion what does that tell you when you're looking at like these AI companies there is a 760 billion dollar difference between between valuation and on the one AI company that's ever turned to profit at all um we're not talking about Nvidia we're not talking about the data centers doesn't have been profitable we're talking about the actual product the only one that is ever turned to profit is anthropic and as soon as they started turning a profit and pricing correctly what happened enterprise scale users started dropping them and now they're in conflict with the united states government so who knows again so who knows how any of this is going to work um now what I find funny is uh doffitt won't admit that Donald Trump is basically proof of the extent of the

51:30decadence this is my big problem with these posts with these post liberals is like who they think fixes the problem exacerbates all the problems that they're complaining about like every single one of them yeah um but still so let's go to uber the store at uber so far isn't pure fantasy it managed to go public and maintain its outsized valuation for a while unlike its fellow Monday losing unicorn we work who's recently attempt at an IPO hurled it into crisis I think we're going to see this with a lot of these tech with these tech companies they're going to go on a crisis again but why why can't it it is for now an example of a major 21st century company invented entirely out of surplus less economically efficient so far than its rivals they're supposed to leap frog sustained by investors to believe its promises and the finance of existing evidence floated by the hope that with enough money and market share it will be profitable it will be a profitable company company will be into existence and go watch by an internet company identity obscures the weakness of real world fundamentals aka you can only really rationalize labor so much

52:34and it'd be profitable um i also think that's why we uh things like ubers why we're not showing up in a recession right now it's three reasons uh gigrification still pays slightly better than unemployment insurance which has been weakened um we have a third of the the male economy have no form employment that we can tell it off there were working aids i think the key thing is a working need i was trying to explain it with retirees because we also have to remember the baby boomers have now finally left the workforce that's the huge loss um and you had a million people die during government that's another huge loss um and so all these things all together it means that like you know you know we had good we had decent job numbers this last go around although they're all low in jobs um um uh so but the funny thing is as soon as as soon as we had a decent job numbers what happened to

53:34tech stocks they tank hey man i'm trying to find a part-time job over the summer you know until school starts up again and i get my like funding back and i gotta tell you man i don't know if it's just because i maybe i shouldn't put that i'm as credentialless i am on my on my applications but i don't i haven't got a single callback yet it is fucking tough to get a job right now i maybe i should just yeah put that i don't have any degrees or something i don't think it would help you the job market uh the job market right now is most growth is internal that's why there's also like people have jobs if they already have jobs but they're not they're not hiring that many new people and when they are getting hired it's in good work or i'm like services so maybe hide your credential and then but even that like yeah there's not a ton of it uh because uh the consumer economy for things like low-end fast food and whatnot has just tanked because the prices are so high

54:41relative to the bit of the bit of the bit i mean like the difference between a nice dinner out a midwit midbrow dinner out yeah and in mech donals is now about five dollars instead of about twenty dollars yep yeah it's actually pretty wild like uh on road trips and stuff it was always like yeah we'll just stop and get some Taco Bell or Burger King because i've got like that the vegan patty or whatever and getting burgers for me and my my wife it's like we might as well just have like driven down the road and gone to some like local restaurant and gotten like a decent sit sit down dinner yeah yeah that's what i do now because it's really for the for the the difference in cost it like you might as well um uh anyway um i'm actually talking about this in terms of in terms of meat well this actually is related to do fastpoint even in terms of like things like meat are vegetables like good quality meat good quality vegetables right um i used to you know you used

55:41to buy like mid tier stuff because that's what you can afford but now the mid to stuff so expensive that the nicer stuff is not as the the it's still expensive but the price difference between it and the low tier stuff makes it harder to justify not just buying the better cut are the better vegetable quality or whatever um so uh i think all this is very interesting because one thing and it's kept all of this together and doosat's actually right is massive amounts of speculative investment and that was true both in the 2007 and now and i think what do fought with argue and i think he or doffat would argue and i think he might be right about this is that the way we were floating things uh in the 90s was private debt held by individuals and keeping consumption up that way the way we did it uh after the great recession was both private debt by individuals um more and more uh like paid a purchase schemes and then massive amounts of

56:50uh using securities and quantitative easing to make toxic debt not toxic by basically shielding it uh with with reclaimings which put it you know at like negative interest rates so which fl-which flooded uh the global market win investments because between us in between us in japan you could actually leverage debt to to even low profit margins and make your income go away but also still turn a profit which you can't do right now um but you could for about 15 years and that's when everything started really picking up into informs of rents um and you and i talked about why this isn't neo-futalism but there is a real problem here um because these rents uh are dependent on there being some basis for the because when people are like oh it's neo-futalism like okay it's actually futile how are you going to pay for all these rents when there's no jobs and no one has an answer at all

57:57yeah like they might be like oh mmt and i'm like well the thing about mmt is to have your currency as part of the world reserve currency and that's for mmt to work you have to pay out on your bonds and our bonds are getting really goddamn expensive yeah so uh yeah and they're like well you don't really need bonds and i'm like then you're more of a fan assist than i am i mean some people do say uh a ubi ought to take care of this and uh how the ubi the ubi wouldn't play it everything well i mean i don't think those people are serious even if they do seriously believe this i just don't think they are to be taken seriously isn't that like the jacke i've been lying right now or like one of the ones that's prominent yeah yeah yeah it's also ill-al-musks says the same thing yeah so like uh Bernie Sammons and Bernie Sanders and Sam Altman have been together on things too i just i've found this all like we are out of ideas yeah right so uh doubt that or doubt it doofit whatever calls this uh let's pretendism like that's what our economy

59:04runs on his let's pretendism the idea where the cutting edge of capitalism is defined by the promises that by promises that never fully materialize and technologies that have almost arrived or yeah business models that are on the way to profitability well what what amazes me for example Tyler Cohen who's actually mentioned in this chapter when he talks about the limits of neoliberalism and this stagnation it comes from neoliberalism itself uh doffat uh Tyler Cohen immediately abandon for all this AI garbage because they're desperate too but i think doffat is actually correct that that'll follow the same pattern i don't know if he has said that i feel like he's been weirdly quiet on AI but uh but i don't read his column every week so i don't know um but i find it interesting how he kind of um i'm like i want to compare two books let's compare Catherine lose virtue orders to this book

1:00:08which one has a better explanation for why we have such a service driven economy doffat by a lot yeah because Catherine loo makes it sound like it's just the the evil PMC giving themselves jobs yeah that's true as does David Graber uh i mean as do most people who are like you know on the left that's what they say yeah and most people on the right the the thing is one if they if that class of people is so powerful how do Elon Musk defeat them we're just the president letting them fuck around with it in a month and two uh defeat them so thoroughly he almost sent the government in chaos um and two um um i mean because i find this fascinating when people like oh we still have a PMC problem like we do

1:01:08in attitudes and training and habitats but the idea that they're in control you can't have watched the last year i believe that yeah um seems to me like the worst least productive elements of finance capital and technological rintiaism are in control yeah yeah and always we really want to look at the long durea policies who's fault oh does that brocco bomb us yeah i guess not even that long of a dure where did you don't have to look about that but like where did you start like how did Elon Musk right oh yeah i was i was in on musk yeah i was i mean it's you know it was what 16 years ago now but yeah um how did Elon Musk

1:02:11become the richest man in the world government contract contracts with SpaceX which led to his development of starlink all his other companies are just money burners yeah with the exception of Tesla but how was Tesla profitable selling carbon offsets well right and also um uh protectionist measures when it comes to trade because um they're like two different Chinese uh EV uh audio auto manufacturers which are like way more uh they're they're more than way cheaper way cheaper way cheaper way cheaper cheaper than normal cars to be better yeah that's what would would would take overnight if China's Chinese EVs were allowed into American markets right so we have no we our innovation isn't all that innovative because they can't actually stand up to foreign competition which we've seen before that happened in the late 1962 and it's what part of the lead to the 70 stagnation but i think

1:03:12it's interesting that anyone with a brain it's set for certain kinds of progressives and i'm very serious about this because progressives you tell me everything that happened in the 70s was a policy choice and i'm like why did they make the policy choice that would give shit ideology yeah that's not how ideology works it's not just a bad idea uh yeah they actually what what that does is that takes the the basic uh relationship and the inverteous it where like ideas kind of just exist out of nowhere and then because of the ideas the material conditions are transformed around them so i think this is actually quite interesting um to me because what we see here is uh this thing that both relatively smart conservatives realize and Marxists realize or why Marxists get called conservative by mmt here's another heterodox economist because we do not think there was an

1:04:15easy policy out of of the 70 stagnation that it led to neoliberalism and that was a policy choice it was organized but it was not organized even v evick fucking shiver pretends like it was just a fucking political conspiracy i mean that's uh that's basically uh what's the name we were just talking about him Harvey David Harvey Harvey Graber they all they all they all do that and while it was the neoliberalism was a political project and i think it was a political project but it wasn't primarily or even in the first instance is that it was uh the political project was uh neoliberal economic school of management because of the economic necessity which was definitely definitely not a political project right now i do believe there are if we want to get really technical neoliberalism also was not inevitable because there were other policy choices you could have made to restore profitability the problem is all of them would have been also pretty bad

1:05:22like how do we restore profitability in the beginning of the 21st century getting out of the great depression and the long depression war yeah uh hey we just destroy capital and then you can make new capital right permanent arms economy was already in place by uh because of the war so when you have a new when you have a new crisis you can't make a new permanent arms economy because it's already there right so and we have already seen that the permanent arms economy is also now inflated the shit there's broken supply lines um other ways you could have handled it yeah the Chinese they had better play nice because uh we need the the material that we're going to get from them to make the weapons to counter them the other way you could have handled it would have been massive social infrastructure investment but you know well there's also there's another thing also it's not it's not it was not inevitable because we also could have just stopped doing things for profit but that would have meant like you know yeah socialism right but i mean but the thing is like are the

1:06:28bush musk you're going to do most of these things because like if they did massive public sector investment they're probably pushing us closer to the conditions where socialism is somewhat easier to to achieve yeah so you could go back to the kowskir a contention that um we like most of the ways political revolution really that's going to be required here and even then there's no proof that because what makes massive social investment not as good for them in a lot of ways you're like oh well get sort of excess capital so they can restart it it does but here's the problem it also makes the labor force slacker i mean uh so uh uh slacker for them i mean not slacker a tighter uh for for them not for us so so it's slack for us so there's more jobs so we can choose and we have bargaining power um if there's a large public sector jobs uh things that we can go into that can compete or is competing with um with capital um so i think that's true i also think

1:07:39and this this might make a lot of people uncomfortable um the dungas subsidies to us offsetting um service inflation which it really was so the reason why are are after the 1970s we could be reserve currency and have all these advantages and trade is that we were willing to make our production costs go up we didn't quit producing at all we just got rid of the labor because the labor cost received for expensive went to your reserve currency which is why china doesn't like do mnt policy right like you think about it like if if you flirt your currency your production's expensive so people go into services we've had services inflation since the 1970s what is services inflation food not uh food not so much but like education and health care the biggest two services we have yeah cost have skyrocketed they never stopped even the interpairs of low inflation um

1:08:42so basically if you look at the trajectory since the 70s we got commodities under control neoliberalization breaking down monopolies for a while which early neoliberals did outsourcing the china increasing automation so you got commodity production under control um but can i be reduction here which is still been happening us is still in a dash even now uh although less so it's still an industrial productive society just doesn't employ that many people yeah right from us all the time right and and so uh but that offset everyone feeling the services inflation i mean we all felt it but we didn't feel it feel it it didn't cause everything else to go up to that's changing now yeah i don't know how we get out of our inflation cycles easily because if you try to if you try to do production here with massive employment you have to pay the cost and if you don't have that you have a downward spiral with things continue to go up but the service

1:09:47sector that has been providing the ability for people to buy this stuff goes away so you know i guess i'm doing the work for doffat but it's very true that um that we have a problem we also have the expansion of of of rintiais and uh petite rintiais aka the pmc aka whatever a class that's not a class aka whatever yeah i call them the uh but then i call them the post petite bourgeoisie and my and my well i actually didn't end up using that we call them the new petite bourgeoisie but i kind of objected that because they're not new anymore and they're not actually petite bourgeoisie anymore either and i explained that in the book but we kept the category because that's what plants this use in Daniel likes it um i like post petite bourgeoisie better yeah because it's more true uh post petite bourgeoisie i mean Daniel completely agrees with me on what we're describing

1:10:52that was basically most of the professionals who used to be who used to be petite bourgeois are actually now employed for a salary it might be quite a lucrative salary but it's a salary um many of them are no longer paid in stock options so they're basically labor aristocrats but all their institutions are geared towards them being petty bourgeois the universities professional organizations um the NGOs that support them etc even though they're not anymore so they have a petition uh uh a petition bourgeois habitoss and orientation with the one exception that unlike like real petite bourgeois tax rates don't hurt them very much they actually get help by it that's where the revenue comes from um so that's a problem right it is actually a problem um and i mean that like i am all about the the public sector but your public sector has to exist off of profitability somewhere right um and uh otherwise i mean even in mtiers actually believe

1:11:59this is to really read what they say they say you have to have the production capacity to to justify mnt policy which is like they're backed our way of not admitting but admitting that production actually matters um would they focus on is like the circulation of capital the circulation of capital may focus on almost solely um so if you think about all this we have no will way to grow and um doffat goes even further like there's no clear way to handle this even if you have um like austerity the austerity needed to like i don't know get the bond market under control and not have it be like the biggest thing what we have to pay out on servicing the debt and it's not just us there's countries all over the world now getting in this situation um that uh it declines and then he talks about that this actually leads to constraints on all sorts of things such such as education um uh debt servicing debt uh so he he says the weight of

1:13:07their graphics and and Marxism he's we call it social reproduction crises um uh and then he actually even talks about the the depletion in constraints in the environment which i was also kind of surprised at like uh any actual Catholic position yeah what maybe usually um um uh but i mean american catholics are always the exception to the rule of taking an actual Catholic position yeah whatever um some catholic thesis a Catholic position american catholics usually see it as some kind of like communist embassy yeah except when it's done by the most reactionary popes ever who weren't actually all that the reactionary just perceived that way exactly hope Benedict who if you look at his teachings on social stuff are almost identical to frances but no one knows it because the emphasis was different

1:14:09yeah because he was like doubled down on keeping gay people out of the church and women out of the priesthood like extra loudly so people are like oh he's a good pope yeah as opposed to frances who didn't double down and have been in changing about it all thanks thank you uh he was he just used less inflammatory language when talking about uh gay people saying that they needed to be involved in the church because their centers just like anyone else you know what i mean so it's like yeah that's still not accepting gay people guys i find it fast and this this this chapter of stagnation and so there's another david graber quote where he talks about star track and then martyne and he points out that like left and right also both realized that culturally we're stagnating yes um and i do feel like to bring back uh the ghost and christian relash where i'm sympathetic to him lash would say that progressives would gaslight you and then a lot of marxist

1:15:14at the time in the nineteen eighties have become progressives and they would gaslight you by pretending the stagnation was not real uh yeah they still do that yeah well i mean i was literally on a podcast yesterday with someone's like there's no real problem for the american economy was still super innovative in medicine i'm like when's the last major medical innovation we made trying to be such a shit out of us we don't need to be in the church that's an absurd position to have that uh you know that's what we have said is innovative well in any way but especially in medicine all right and not even innovative with killing people anymore yeah the one thing we used to be very innovative and uh exactly right we've got you know we've got the ukrainians or russians are way outpacing us um well to be fair the Ukrainians are testing uh the killing technology for us so yeah in a way in a way the ukrainians are us

1:16:14you know although this this book also convinced me that peter teal is is the vampiric evil version of a marxist because he talks about secular stagnation a lot but i didn't realize that teal did this but like uh and teal uses it to be like no we should be accelerationists and just you know damn if we even save humanity at this point i'm like well what is it even for then if we're just destroying everything um yeah he's like a comic book villain he really is he's now moved to argentina which is a comic but opinion thing to do yeah argentina is like a comic book by itself did what does he have like a like a fortress in the mountains that like looks like a castle on the outside but a super high tech on the inside probably um i want to read this he at least definitely wants to make that castle yeah right so we said we get through four of the horsemen we're going to get through one of the horsemen um uh that's pretty that's pretty us uh which is the stagnation

1:17:21horsemen but of course it'd be the one that we all white because we're damn marxist and we're all obsessed with economics anyway uh the next chapter is about um population um demographic collapse which is less interesting but it is still interesting and this is definitely something we're not supposed to care about as marxist i both do and don't i do actually care about it but i actually don't care about population growth being eternal which is what most these people want um it is a indicator though no it is uh what i would say to some degree a drop in population might be good after the fact but going through it's going to hurt yeah and that's a big problem right now we have we're europe's in a worse place but even china's going to be in a situation where there's more people who don't work than do for a little while

1:18:22and i don't know how that maintains we're also you know if you look at for example the amount of money spent per pupil versus the amount of money spent for retiree i'm not saying like grandma die i'm really not but like we're not a society that believes in a future and i was telling some of the other day when when your last two presidents literally don't have a future more than like 10 years why do you expect them to plan for it yeah that's actually that's the single best argument for age limits on the uh elected office even even uh even though you could also just point a diand find signs last decade in in office as in two decades yeah or two decades but even if for nothing else you could just say you want somebody who has to live with the consequences of their uh decisions yeah i'm well i find it interesting that like you have all these retirees

1:19:23and uh the GOP but they're all young whereas the democrats are like they're bi-modally distributed in um in age so you have a bunch of new young democrats in the thirties and then you have people in their seventies and eighties dying in office um um and uh there's more of the dying in office kind than there is of the other um i find that interesting but he does he brings up the population bomb i do like that people on the last realized the population bomb was also racist yeah um uh it's oh this is interesting um i want to read this chapter because it's people might say it was wrong about this i think he might be right and i think we might be finding out this year um decadence is not universal these promises do at times reflect will break through his interesting research generally promising development but their g-wiss spirit is consistently at odds with the general decelerated pattern of

1:20:25the last few generations let yes there have been strides made in solar wind and other renewables but real energy prices are as high as they were in the crisis atmosphere of the 1970s and the alternative share of the energy pie has barely higher than back then and of course after Trump's gotten a lot worse um yes the greed revolution of the 1970s made the doom and gloom scenario of Paul Ehrlich's the author of the population drum and like mind of the alarmists look ridiculous and enabled uh each uh kind of optimist julien Simon to win the 1980s era famous bet with Ehrlich over whether commodity prices with wiser fall uh but those same prices have risen since the 1990s while the agricultural yield and return to the green revolution have recl- have declined and they're declining faster now yeah um meanwhile travel speeds have dropped transportation innovations have been delayed and delayed except for in China and even then i have been sort of like wondering you know while we make it driverless cars

1:21:29in some form eventually we did and they suck um yeah like it's terrible i'm so stupid like even the i started seeing one ashamed even the most unashamed uh fanboys of the various like Elon Musk uh supporters whatever even the thousands of weird nerds to who like in it from the meme nobody thinks the driverless cars are good right now like nobody yeah the way most suck and there's not any indication they're gonna get a whole lot better i've said like when i was like watching them in la where at the first place i encountered them they they were like they they they drove like morons like yeah uh everybody in la already drives like a moron so like you don't need to make but you don't need to make the artificial right uh indeed beneath the hyphen skirmongering about artificial intelligence oh my god you had know where that was gonna go on six year buddy this is my evidence that we're headed for an AI winter now i actually appointed out that we only we got AI in this after 2019 a lot of

1:22:34this money came in that have been just sitting in the Cayman Islands and it took them forever to figure out how to invest it we have see i will say just covid actually really helped accelerate the the basic plot all of the stops for this for the tendencies to do right i do you think the AI has gotten much better but the thing is it still hasn't gotten better enough to do non-clarical work um and it efficiently really at least the lllm based kind um and it produces a turn of slop um like we're gonna call kinds of downstream effects of that too like uh television sucks now yeah yep and also uh very few people work in the jobs which made it not sucked not too long ago oh yeah we've got friends we've got friends in hollywood and Jason used to work in television

1:23:35and they say that there are there are just no jobs anymore yeah all all of the jobs are out of like the all of the jobs except for the ones that cannot be are just gone they don't exist anymore they're just automated um or they're farmed out because you can pay someone in Nebraska like way less than you can pay uh personally in Los Angeles yeah but but anyway all that is side in all the development and a i aside you will notice where it's useful as in things that are not particularly uh that may be profitable like entertainment was profitable but they don't it doesn't have that many downstream like uh product like it doesn't spur that much new industry itself right right um like there's there's an end of the line and the end of the line is still just the project itself which also is only profitable at scale because of IP protection it's not because of you know

1:24:39commodity production anyway uh this is a point where I think he's right though robots have actually taken some jobs they taken a lot of jobs but the robots that took them weren't AI based they're just old fashioned robots same things are automated in the 80s you know they got in a little better because I have some better computing to help them out but they still there um um would particularly disrupt the consequences in some industries and no doubt they will take more but society being fundamentally transformed by automation would have a sharp productivity growth of the time we used to have and briefly enjoyed in the internet's first flower and and in the beginnings of automation in the 1960s and 70s rather than productivity stagnation I feel like they're both the United States and Europe and by the way we are four we are like 400 percent more productive than we were mid century but that has not been growing much since the odds right um and guess what there's no evidence that AI has dramatically increased productivity

1:25:42because of the layoff offsets slows it down and the amount of hallucinations that you have to correct for and even when you do have a model like like the latest well the most the most advanced model just got shut down by the federal government but the latest uh quad model right before that uh is so expensive the run that like people have just figured out it's cheaper to go back to using uh uh people in certain cases and when they've tried to implement this AI stuff in the meat space world not encoding and and whatnot like at McDonald's or shit it's been a disaster so yeah um where else he also talks about uh secular stagnation and the medical and pharmaceutical this is why i was like this guy mentioned pharmaceutical stuff we haven't had major pharmaceutical innovation i mean we've had pharmaceutical innovation we have well yeah like for example ozimpyk didn't exist in 1990 right but but uh makes this kidney destroyer

1:26:50bones you know whatever we even need those for any ways um um and was not invented for that reason it was a beneficiary diabetes also it killed the body positivity movement oh yeah that's funny it kind of did yeah even even the podcast i used to listen to it was mostly about it that i listened to because it was like the body positive people were like 80% good until they started talking about science and then i was like no no as a person who has struggled with weight all my life no like uh thermodynamics exist i will tell you getting under 300 pounds did remarkable stuff to my joints and now that i am consistently in the uh 220 to 240 range uh i'm a lot healthier but the damage done from when i was 300 pounds is still here

1:27:52yeah it's not as bad it's still here and i have x-rays to prove it um so you know that's just a visible damage too there's all kinds of damage done to your like organs and you know even you're not loving your body enough yes it's not harder yeah i'm i'm weird to me that i get when i get when i tell people you shouldn't shame people about their weight it's counterproductive it doesn't help them like yeah that's true right like a lot of the reasons why people are fat are our social problems is food access bad food systems some of the bad food systems are actively substituted by by the god damn government like solely for the profitability of farmers like stuff like that um and doesn't mean we have to pretend like it's good though right but but then i like but it's good though i'm like so yes there are outliers at any weight sense who can be perfectly healthy at any weight size but in general most people do suffer from from a lot of excess weight particularly you know when they are

1:28:58over i don't know uh with their morbidly obese like you know i'm not even going into the like the outliers can't use his own obesity i know that the data there is is questionable what i get and i know that doctors over obsess over like five to ten pounds where there's no meaningful game and longevity i i agree with all that but there's this bait and switch where like you're talking about like people who are 190 pounds versus 170 and then you like talk about someone who's 400 pounds and those are yeah wow that's very different that's very different so not just a different uh it's a different order of magnitude which requires an entirely different scale so it's a different kind of conversation and like bmi is horseshit because the amount of body the amount of body fat that you can hold on to and be healthy varies wildly from person to

1:29:58so like going over just like height height versus weight as like the only indicators of like whether or not you're holding onto a healthy amount of fat is totally insane and that is what they still use doctors still use that like a buddy of mine who's been lifting weights for like uh you know ten years now and is an incredibly large and very strong person his bmi says that he's morbidly obese and that he he had to take his doctor a body scan to show him how much of his body was lean muscle compared to fat to make his doctor lay off of him about his bmi being a lot of whack that's like you should know that you should fucking know that yeah yeah i mean bmi was designed to be also a population measure not a yeah like it aggregates his that individual statistic like so there's a lot of stuff in this we need to start wrapping up there's a lot of stuff in this so that i am with you but i sold that as a sign of decadence i sold that as a sign of left giving up like um

1:31:02like when people talk about family abolition and like totally utopian terms and like yeah in some like loose sense i'm probably more sympathetic to his old 19th century instantiation than maybe you guys are but i've also pointed out that like with the family abolition we've got is just the work in class not having the means to reproduce itself yeah um and the hot and hyper commodification of human sexuality even by historical norms um and uh i don't think it makes me a conservative law to say that that might not be good um no you know yeah i mean that this is actually all we something that we touch on but i've never really like dived into on the podcast it's just this sort of tendency of the left to have it just really given up on social issues and just to accept whatever horrible shit capitalism forces down our throat as something that's good because it's

1:32:05something that's happening to oppressed people yeah and then i naturalize it yeah like um um and i find this all fascinating i what it uh although i have to admit it was interesting readers chapter because it like all this is pre-COVID and it seems like a million years ago and it's only five um right and everything he's talking about except for AI and like stocks being insane like you know if you took the magnificent seven out of the stock market and all the AI stocks like the stock growth is also not good no um the only driver of profitability in our economy right now it's all fucking made up it's all the i and it's gonna be bad and it like it'd be real that's the only the only thing that has been proven to have profits is the chips yeah yeah like actual profits not stock profits actual profits on the product at hand is the chips everything else and with these IPOs if history is an indicator many of these companies are about to blow up

1:33:12so and like and even when when companies are profitable it's from leasing data center real estate to unprofitable companies so that that's not something that can sustain itself no i mean and i'll be honest with you this stagnation is not just here we can talk about how china is handling it way better they are but they are slowing down too they've been slowing down for 20 years um uh they're just doing way better not stay now how they've got mechanisms to shift things around in ways that we cannot because that would be called socialism right yeah but there are still some pretty big limits that they're hitting too yeah there's they also have a demographic bomb that we can talk about like um when people like oh well everyone's got a demographic bomb i'm like yeah they do i'm not like blaming china i'm not like the one child policy

1:34:12was it was probably one of the bad ideas but um i know why they did it but it's probably a bad idea for a variety of reasons um but um um the both the consumer of the world's goods and the producer of the world's goods and then it's hanger the in between hanger on in europe all three of those societies are about to have demographic bombs go off at the same time the places where uh climate change is shit it's going to hit the worst um have demographic expansions that are slowing down they are they're slowing down they're slowing down dramatically actually but they still exist like if you think about the average age of the person a person in Palestine or a person in Lebanon or a person in north or south africa something like 17 as per the average age of here which is like 39 yeah well you know where the future is and you're going to have a bunch of people freaking

1:35:18out over that as well because as as things get worse in climate change there's going to be a great movement of people's and people are already freaked the fuck out about it yeah um so funny how like conservatives really love war and don't want to do anything about climate change but they also hate immigrants yeah you know things that create immigrants they love the things that create immigrants like um you fuck out i love dog i love reaping it's so awesome i mean i love sewing damn i fucked my own jokal yeah yeah i love so many so i love it don't give it actually they don't love war either i mean i do actually we'll say the average conservative person in even vets does not love war most of the time right 30 like 50% of them which is about 20% of the population can be conned in the loving war consistently yes um but i do find it interesting that conservatives in power even ones that say they

1:36:19don't well war even ones that sincerely seem to like you it like we all thought i'm one of them that we might see trump do crazy shit like in the sphere of influence that he was trying to build uh not necessarily the way he was talking about that all felt k-fay but in ways that wouldn't sound like tinces or whatnot i did not really see him just out of the blue thinking that he could vina suela anaya tola no like uh that was not that was not on my cards of even trump would not be that silly i was wrong so like i whenever liberals push back with this like we'll see come all i harris would have never bombed iran and never gotten us into this stupid war i'm like that's i don't think that's true isn't she saying that she would yeah she did it so did Hillary Clinton and you know whatever every single democrat in the past

1:37:22sensobama has uh promised to either take a harsher line with iran that would eventually lead to war or to actually go to war with iran but like yeah i'm the only one who actually went the other directions yeah same with kuba too you know one of the the two good things he did in his fucking presidency but like um yeah i i i do think that they would have been less stupid about going to a war with iran that's what they wouldn't have gone off have cocked but they certainly would have gone to war with iran or at least uh we should have wrap up it's yes for now okay yeah so let's in here we'll we'll meet sometime soon uh and do it uh what's in for now i know how long this actually takes we'll be doing this book for a while um what's in for chapters two three and maybe ambitiously for because i think i think two and three we will go through slightly quicker

1:38:24yeah we gave everybody a preview of two to do yeah yeah and three we covered three might be slow but maybe not we'll see we covered a lot we didn't just cover the first chapter we also cover the introduction which is that's true the whole scope of the book so is it yeah it's good yeah matter that we usually do or we don't even make it through like the first part of the introduction in the first that's that's fair that's that's because i'm now taking notes per chapter as a poster reading the book line by line again of that's fun but we just can't sustain that nope nope not people like well you've spent 20 years on or not 20 years but but uh the little 180 page book that Jason and i read over two and a half years yeah um the series that y'all did on the patreon the the um is a traversal book right or not in zedra what was it oh uh

1:39:26the disaster nationalism that took how long like a whole year and it's like a hundred thousand more years yeah yeah yeah yeah um so we'll speed up all right yeah see you guys like a piece

1:40:30um