They Finally Admitted Socialism And Capitalism Can't Coexist — We Had To React

What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Sign up for my AI Masterclass: https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=TBS-Livestream&utm_source=you https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=TBS-Livestream&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social tube&utm_medium=social https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=TBS-Livestream&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social Check us out wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1nARKz2vTIOb7gC9dusE4b?si=a8daffd2bf1f48fd Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tom-bilyeus-impact-theory/id1191775648 Do you need my help STARTING a business? Join me here inside ZERO TO FOUNDER: (https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder) Get the exact systems, mindset shifts, and principles that built a $1B brand delivered straight to your inbox every week. Subscribe for free (https://tombilyeu.com) https://tombilyeu.com Check out our Video game - Project Kyzen: (https://projectkyzen.io/) https://projectkyzen.io/ Catch Me Streaming on Twitch - (https://twitch.tv/tombilyeu) Link to IT discord:https://discord.gg/TZKJ2etPbT Tom's Favorite Things List: https://amzn.to/41Ftt7e For Business inquiries: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu The conversation focused on the heated debates shaping the future of America’s economic philosophy, exploring the clash between capitalism, socialism, and the evolving landscape of political ideologies. A key theme that emerged was the tension between purely philosophical understandings of economics and the gritty realities faced by those who operate within the engine of prosperity—entrepreneurs and business owners. The discussion explored why some are drawn to leftist and socialist ideas, the failures and unintended consequences of well-intended policies, and the persistent power of resentment in driving political movements. Several points were raised, including the effectiveness (and pitfalls) of expansive welfare states, misconceptions about the Nordic model, the risks of government monopolies, and the challenges of balancing innovation with regulation in rapidly changing sectors like AI. The conversation wrestled with concepts like income redistribution, union power, public versus private incentives, and the fundamental incompatibility—according to some—of long-term socialism with capitalism. Listeners can expect a candid, no-holds-barred analysis that pulls apart economic myths, critiques mainstream narratives, and asks tough questions about the road ahead for prosperity, growth, and freedom in an era of ideological uncertainty. Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Whatnot: Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Monarch Money: Start your free trial and get 50% off your first year of total money clarity at https://monarchmoney.yt.link/QxOLEVx or code TB50 for 50% Off Monarch Core tier. ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.com Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/TOMBor use code TOMB at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. One of the most important things that any of us are going to be thinking about in this time is what is going to be the economic philosophy that we get behind. Once we understand that economics becomes warfare in the political realm, then we understand we have to wrap our minds around what is the philosophy that's driving this stuff. Right now, the energy in the Democratic Party is the democratic socialist of America,

• 1:30Speaker 00

  and it is entirely a Marxist communist philosophy. And it's very easy, and I will do this many, many, many, many, many times in the future because we must combat these terrible ideas with good ideas, but it's very easy to take the ridiculous among them who just say the quiet part out loud and dismantle it. But I actually came across a guy who is very measured, has a far more reasonable stance, but his philosophy that drives his decision-making will break the engine of prosperity in an extremely knowable way. And so I'm going to go through, I will concede the things that I think he gets right, and I will say all the things that I think he gets wrong, why he's getting them wrong, what

• 2:11Speaker 00

  they will need to be in order to get this right, so that you guys aren't living your life at the level of bumper stickers. You can get in, build this model of cause and effect, know where you fall on the spectrum, and that we can all get sharper.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  ... income levels of certain people that are voting for candidates of the left. I think they could rightly point out that, okay, these people in a comparative standpoint are not necessarily the most oppressed. In many cases, they're earning raises at higher than the level of inflation, but they still feel like they're being squeezed. And what I would point to is the cost of a few headline goods like housing. Beyond that, what I would say is that a lot of people have been drawn to ideas of the left for purely normative reasons. I did not come from a particularly affluent background or anything like that, but I was drawn to the ideas of the left when I was in high school, when I had a part-time job at a Key Foods grocery store.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  But I was politicized not by my experience of being exploited and the Key Foods-

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Proletarianized.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was not that because in fact, I was so ineffective at my job, I'm almost positive I was producing no surplus labor. But I was politicized in the library books, reading books by people like Irving Howe, by Michael Harrington.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  This is the very thing I need people to understand. This is a guy who has an academic understanding of economics. He does not have an understanding of economics from inside the belly of the machine of prosperity that understands how A leads to B, leads to C, leads to D. Because he has a purely philosophical understanding of the economy, he's going to articulate ideas that are so obviously stupid, but he actually doesn't see it. And that's the thing that I think is really fascinating about this guy. I think if you peer inside this guy's soul, you actually don't see a lot of the resentment that drives a lot of the people in this movement.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  I don't think leftism can be understood, the far left, let me be very clear, Leninist, Marxist beliefs, I don't think they can be understood without understanding resentment. I don't think that this guy is actually driven by resentment, which you'll see in what we're going to play. He's conflicted. He knows that his principles lead him to something that make him uncomfortable. And if you're watching, you're going to see him be visually uncomfortable because it's like, yeah, fuck, like, it actually does lead me there, but I'm a little bit. And you'll hear him explain for himself. But this is where, when you're hearing somebody spout economic ideas, you have to figure out if they actually understand the economy because they've engaged in it in some very meaningful way that has yielded a positive outcome.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  The easiest is to run a business, ideally a small business, ideally a small business where they only get paid if the business itself is profitable, and it's profitable based on the things that they do. Because when you're that person and your house is literally on the line, and if you make bad decisions, you lose your house, that creates, at least it created in me, the sense of like, I am not interested in whether I'm right or wrong, I am only interested in the right idea. And if the right idea comes from somebody else and they challenge all of my most cherished beliefs, that's fine. I will adjust my beliefs to get closer to what is true so that I can actually grow this company and make sure I don't lose my house, because that is going to be very traumatic for my wife if nobody else.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  When you encounter people that only understand it philosophically, they will put forward with enthusiasm in their heart, the world's most terrible ideas with no understanding of why they are terrible.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Don't know was a key socialist intellectual mid-century 50s and 60s America, not a kind of communist vanguard trying to bring about violent revolution, right?

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Basically, what he's trying to say is, this isn't one of the bad socialists. This is one of the good socialists. The problem is, because of the mechanisms of socialism, socialism is by design, and I'll talk more about this later, it is by design meant to lead you to communism. So anybody that says socialism, it's by design meant to get you to communism. Again, I will explain why that is actively true, knowably true, but for now, just trust. That's true. So from that perspective, socialism is always going to break the engine of prosperity, always.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  To the left of social democracy, people who just wanted to make capitalism a little bit more humane, but also to, you could say, the right of a certain Leninism.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Joseph Stalin, to the right of Joseph Stalin.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Of course, as we should all aspire to be. But I think that the gap between what I thought society could be, given its abundant riches-

• 7:03Speaker 00

  What society could be given its abundant riches? This is part of the thing that drives me absolutely crazy. Remember, the default state of humanity for hundreds of thousands of years is poverty, grinding poverty. Poverty does not need an explanation. The thing that needs an explanation is wealth. The thing that will happen by accident, nobody has to think about it, is starvation, death, and poverty. The thing that requires hyper coordination, absolutely brilliant ideas, innovation, all kinds of very careful governmental structures and regulatory bodies that are extremely light, light, light, light, light touch, is success, is riches.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  So when somebody looks at that and acts as if the riches are the thing that requires no explanation, that's where the madness begins. And it literally, this is the guy who just looks at it, grew up in it, sees it, and just like, well, that's how the world is. It's not how the world is. The world is grinding poverty, death, and misery by default.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  A layer of people who both feel economic security day to day or feel frustrations, but are primarily driven by these sorts of normative egalitarian-

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Philosophical, your token, yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Ideas. And I don't see a huge contradiction there. I just think we should be aware of the fact that we still don't have the deep level of rootedness that other redistributionist movements in the past have had. Like, let's say the New Deal Coalition in the US from the 30s to the 70s. And as long as we're aware that our goal is to get deeper roots fundamentally by all layers of the working class, then I think we're moving in the right.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Okay, let me translate that. Hey, you know what I'm discovering is the same thing that Marx ended up discovering, the same thing that Lenin discovered, is that the workers don't rise up. In fact, Lenin had to kill a bunch of workers because they were rising up against his dumbass. So the fact is that the world becomes more prosperous as people get more freedom, not less, as they're able to create the companies that are going to generate the prosperity. And keep in mind that Marx was writing before the LLC, I might get into that more later, but that really was a time where you had to be rich to start a company. We don't live in that world anymore.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  So when what he's saying is deeper roots, he's like, we need people to really want this. We have to show people how bad their life is, and they're having a hard time. Even now, with a broken economy, they're having a hard time convincing people that their life really sucks because they're still, at least here in America, they have AC, they have public schools, they have, remember, 47% of America's budget goes to social programs. 47%, man. So the half of the population only pays 3% of the taxes. Almost half of people pay no taxes whatsoever. It is crazy. So in the face of that- It's very hard to get people to rise up in a way that will put their freedom at

• 10:16Speaker 00

  risk because life isn't that bad. And so the idea of getting people so animated about things being so bad that you have to go in and spark a revolution through bloodshed, tear everything down, becomes very difficult. And that's why it's very scary to me that the way that you've gotten so much energy in the movement is through race and trying to get people to hate billionaires, to play the class card, because when they look around and their life really isn't that bad, the only thing they can do is stir up resentment to, and this is why it's always born of the overproduction of elites, you get people

• 10:58Speaker 00

  who the vision they have for their life is so different than the reality because they've been overeducated and they're underemployed, at least by their own estimation. And you have to trade on that resentment to get these quote unquote deeper roots.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Socialists want then in practice, like as you know, you've referenced housing and Medicare for all and so on. But what is the, you know, if there were a socialist contract with America, God help you, right? What would it say? What would be the five points? And how would those be different from what Amy Klobuchar or, you know, a sort of conventional democratic politician would be inclined to support?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Well, for one thing, and I mean this, this earnestly, as far as I can tell, American socialists are way more liberal than they themselves think, and that they truly do believe in pluralism and multi-party democracy in certain places the state should not go.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  So I don't know if he's being disingenuous or he's just not paying attention. If you look at the co-chair of the DSA, which is what he is speaking to here, he calls it out by name earlier in this, I think they mentioned it at the beginning of the clip here, but they are talking specifically about the DSA. And they have just unabashedly said that they're here for socialism. Some of them will say out loud that they're here for communism, that they want to get rid of the Senate, they want a fundamental change to the judiciary, they want to get rid of borders, they want immigrants to be able to come in, I mean, on and on and on. It's absolutely wild. So this guy is out of his

• 12:37Speaker 00

  mind to make that statement. That one is just either, again, just completely alive, or he is blind to his own party.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  There's been a sort of reconciliation of liberalism and socialism.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  So you're saying that if there's a socialist contract with America, it does not promise collectivization in a one-party state?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  I think that if we believe in a bill of rights socialism.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  That's good. Okay. So what is, what is it?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  Okay, here's the bad news. The Bill of Rights won't survive socialism. This is the part that everybody leaves out. As every socialist leader has found, you either go the way of the Nordic countries and you just charge everybody broad tax and create massive freedoms, lower corporate tax than we have in the US, and you then do broad-based social programs and really aren't socialist at all. You just have a gigantic social safety net, but you have not seized the means of production. That's not your shtick. Or you start killing. Those are your two options because people will push back.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Idiot set of demands that you could call us attempting to bring about doses of socialism within capitalism. So this comes at the realm of decomodification of certain goods, providing them as social rights instead of them being dependent on your ability to pay.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Another reminder to everybody, the reason that we can't have socialism, the reason we can't have communism is because all of us expect to get paid for our work. The second people will work for free, then you can have this. But nobody does. And they never address that problem. So they are talking about, and he'll even acknowledge this later, what they're talking about is we do need some of you guys to go work and be successful so we can tax you and give free shit to other people. It's so wild how blind they are. And they go on these interviews where the guy agrees with them. So he's not pushing him. He's not asking the real questions of, so sorry, how exactly does that work?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  America is partially decomodified. If you're elderly, if you're very poor, if you're a child, you're going to have a guaranteed access to healthcare. We want to see that extended. Same thing with things like social security and certain other benefits. So an expansion of the welfare state, not unlike Norway.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Anytime somebody invokes the Nordic states, just remember the Nordic states are not at all what they call them out to be. The Nordic states tax everyone to death. Everyone is paying a massive amount of tax. It is super broad-based and it's, you'll also get VAT taxes. So not only is your income being taxed to death, but then when you go to buy something, you get a value add tax. So everything that you buy is more expensive. And so people pay an inordinate amount of their money in tax, no matter how poor they are. So yeah, these guys paint a picture like, hey, over in the Nordic countries, they figured out a way to get the rich to pay for everything. It isn't the case at all. We're hitting pause for a moment. There's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

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• 18:46Speaker 00

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Even within capitalism in the here and now, there's sectors of the economy that I would like to see greater state control of. In the old language of the left, we would call it the commanding heights of the economy, but even things like rail and things like that. I think there are benefits to selective nationalization, particularly of natural monopolies.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Anything where you need it, but there is no way to make money off of it. Yes, I get why we would want there to be a national presence. So there are going to be some things that that will fall into. But if we can agree that monopolies are terrible and we never want people running corporations to have a monopoly, why on God's green earth would we want the government to have a monopoly? Remember, corporations at least, you've got, they have to survive. They have to stay in business. So the market is going to check them if they're being stupid. When it's the government and they have infinite taxpayer dollars that they can throw at it, they can be super retarded and have absolutely no consequence. Why would we want there to be a monopoly there?

• 19:55Speaker 00

  You should want the government to have as few monopolies as possible. You should be looking at things going, God, I hope we don't need the government to intervene on this thing. Like, take roads and shit like that. Yes, you want, let the government pay for roads. That's phenomenal. You're gonna have to deal with, they're probably gonna be less efficient than they would otherwise be. But hey, at least we're gonna get our roads. Everybody can use them. But god damn, like wanting the rail to be run by the government so that we can have a monopoly, that's, that's bad mojo.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Is there any other thing you can think of that the government would be better suited to take over? I know you said roads, but is there any industry that you can think of or something like that the government should?

• 20:33Speaker 00

  I will give it to you at the level of philosophy, as I have not spent time building out a list. But if you look at the X Prize, the X Prize tries to find those things where there's no financial incentive to do it well, or where looking at the financial incentive, it will create abuses. So prison system, great example. That it has deranged putting it in private control. Education, there should be a public option. It may not be the only option. Or at a minimum, there should be public dollars put towards people to use in private institutions. But you don't want to be like, oh, sorry, your parents can't afford your education. Sorry,

• 21:15Speaker 00

  kid. You definitely do not. Like, that's just, think of the intelligence in your country as a natural resource for fuck's sake. And so that's one where I just do not understand people's mentality. It's like, I want to make sure the fucking poorest kid in America gets a gangster education. And as long as that kid shows that they're really fucking sharp, keep going, keep going, kid. I'm gonna keep paying. If you're a bonehead, you're gonna eject out into something. Sorry, that's just, you gotta be fucking Chinese about it. And just say, you gotta earn your spot on that one. But that would be another one. It's gonna be things like that, where do we all benefit from this? And if we give it to private industry, is it going to make it

• 21:56Speaker 00

  better? Or is there something where there's not a real business model there, right? Prisons. That's a weird business model. Because now you're gonna do weird shit in the same way that like video games start becoming predatory towards like kids with microtransactions. Prison system becomes predatory towards their very captive population. And so it's just proven, it's not a good scenario. So if you take that principle and then look for other things that would fall into that category, great. But man, you should be super paranoid about it. Because humans, humans become the problem.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, got you.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  That vision right there of socialism within capitalism could be true of a lot of social democrats. So the question is always, now, why would you go about calling yourself a democratic socialist? And for me, I call myself a democratic socialist because I actually believe in a socialism beyond capitalism. I actually do believe in economy built on the idea that workers should control their workplaces and on this sort of more radical vision of a society without capitalism, even if it still has a motor needed for investment and for efficiency gains and growth and so on.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  All right. That's absurd. So this is somebody that leads with philosophy, who's never tried to run a company. What you realize very quickly is the very reason that companies work is because you have a king that is going to make decisions and they're just gonna decide. And that's it. And that's the thing that we're doing. But because you can leave at a moment's notice and take your talents elsewhere, that king has a desperate desire to make sure that everybody in the company is actually bought into the vision, that they're moving in the right direction. That's like 10x true in a small company, becomes less true as the company gets bigger because people want, people that are attracted to a big company are either there

• 23:53Speaker 00

  because they want to become part of the executive team. And so they pay an exorbitant amount of money to attract the best and the brightest. Or they want a place to prioritize security and safety over impact, over having autonomy. And so it's a trade and people can make that trade. But there are so many different companies. And when the economy is thriving, the companies are all competing for that talent. Japan, that's one of the things I worry about with them. They just promise people a job for life. And so people don't have the impulse to compete with each other. People aren't moving from company to company. And so you lose that dynamism. So I know that my employees have a gun to my head as I have a gun to theirs. I can fire

• 24:35Speaker 00

  them at any moment, but they can fire me at any moment. And there is a lot more of them than they are of me. And so I think a lot about my employees and getting them bought in on the vision and where we're going. And so that dynamic of these two opposing forces holding each other in that dynamic tension, as with all good things, it's like, that's what you want. This guy's saying, oh, the employees should be able to control their workspace. Are you fucking high? So now you're going to get people that contribute in different ways. And so what's going to happen? The high contributors either revert to the mean and they lower their productivity down to the median, or you get people that are like bitter and resentful that you've got this guy that's not contributing in the way that they are,

• 25:17Speaker 00

  and they all start infighting. And what do you need to keep that infighting from happening? Get ready, everybody. You need a leader. That's right. And so you need somebody who's like, okay, we're going to do my things my way. Now, when you earn that trust, then everybody moves in that direction. And the owner of the company should earn that trust. When you don't have that trust, then people should be free to leave. But if you're looking for the employees to just magically align themselves with each other, pick a direction for the company and move with intelligent direction, you're really in for trouble. You're going to get a horse, what do they say, camel is a horse by committee? That's what you're gonna end up with. You're just watering it down because innovation requires people to take these incredible

• 25:59Speaker 00

  leaps of faith that will often be wrong. They've gotta be, I mean, think about Uber, man. Like, just all it required Travis's particular personality, his cantankerousness, his willingness to fight the local governments, all of that shit. You're never going to get that when everybody can just pull in a different direction. It's nonsensical.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  That vision is not going to be the vision of the National Democratic Party in 2028, presumably, right? But there is going to be a vision of the National Democratic Party in 2028. And if the faction that we're talking about here, and I think we can say it includes everyone from people who envision a world beyond capitalism to people who are just sort of fellow travelers who want the Democratic Party to move to the left. If that group wins, so then the party becomes definitively pro Medicare for all, definitively pro various other expansions of the welfare state. What else?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  I think that's a great immediate program to win over people. If you can't convince people to have a American National Health Service or a single payer system like they have in other industrial country, there's no way you're gonna convince a majority of people that, you know, every cook can govern and everyone should turn on their workplaces. I think that would be a great and good enough place to start. You have to listen to people and listen to what their demands are. I'll give you one, one quick example. You know, Dan Osborne, running as an independent in Nebraska for Senate, one of his key demands is the right to repair. The idea that, you know, if you have your John Deere tractor, you should be able to open that tractor up and do basic maintenance without voiding

• 27:45Speaker 01

  your warranty and not having to send it to some special service.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  So that one's crazy to me. The right to repair, I like. So people being able to go, it's yours, do whatever you want. If you want to turn your combine into, you know, something that fucking gives kids a Ferris wheel ride, go for it. But you're gonna void your warranty. Because I don't know what you're going to do to it. So if you go in and do something fucking stupid, I'm not going to pay to fix it. You're on your own at that point. So yeah, I don't, that argument's just dumb.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Socialists in America who's against that demand, but that's also not a demand that would naturally, you know, come to us, you know, living, living where we're living in Queens and Brooklyn and whatever, you know, I don't have a patch of grass in front of my apartment, much less room for a riding mower. But that comes out of, you know, being in a certain environment, talking to people, hearing their concerns. And I think a lot of the program of any party, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, needs to come from dialogue with constituents and people you want to win over.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Okay. But so those, those people in Queens, though, who you mentioned, they're concerned about housing, right? What is the leftward view of what housing policy should be from, for the Democrats going forward?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I think everyone can see across the political spectrum that there's a huge problem with housing construction in the US. So Zoran's policies, for example, in New York is very heavily built around upzoning and making it easier for developers to build.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Zoran Mamdani is making owning property in New York less appetizing. We're already seeing, we saw Sergey Brin bounce out of New York real estate. We've seen Ken Griffin hit the pause button on his New York real estate. Mamdani's administration is being sued by local bodega owners. I think property managers are also, if they haven't launched a suit, are rumored to be working on a suit. It's just like, that, that argument is dumb. If you're making owning the property difficult, you are going to get less of it. That's just plain and simple. So now the question becomes, what ends up happening if you upzone? Does it, do you actually attract the people that you need to attract?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Or are you creating something where this is all going to be government-owned housing, which has never gone well? Because you're not running it like a business, and so now it needs taxpayer dollars. So now they tend towards being in disrepair in the exact way that they complain about slum lords running things. So if you really want to solve the housing problem, this is a NIMBYism problem. This is everybody saying, okay, yeah, it's a good idea, but it's just not in my backyard. So you've got to get to a zoning place where the entrepreneurs realize, oh, cool, I can build a business, I can make it make money, and so my business is property, and so I'm going to build and build and build and build. If you let people build, now you're going to see that this is a supply and demand problem. And as there's more supply, the cost will come down. It's so, this one's so bonehead simple.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  The problem is, we've been telling people for god knows how many decades, that the only asset you have to worry about is your house. Your house is always going to go up in value. And if we start telling people that your house isn't going to go up in value, it may not even keep up with inflation, now you're going to have people who own property starting to panic. And it'll be interesting to see if millennials switch their script as their boomer parents die and leave them property. And are they now like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I want this property to go up in value? We'll see, but that's a problem you actually have to solve for.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  But beyond that, I think on the left, we point to successful examples around the world of public housing being done right. We think at least part of the construction needed, needs to be public housing. We also need to maintain and expand existing units. I think that's the room for the state to step up and do more, more things. But I think these solutions, for example, that I'm mentioning, are largely first and foremost on the supply side. Then beyond that, we do believe in certain stabilizations and other, other things.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Rent, rent, stabilization meaning rent control?

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Or?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Rent control can.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Destroy the property, destroy the value. Yep.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Which can be designed well. It could also be designed poorly, but you could imagine, for example, telling landlords, we're going to clear the way, we're going to allow you to create this big housing development, we're going to fight against the interests of local homeowners, and you build your big piece of housing, but after 30 years, after you have a reasonable return on investment, that unit is going to have some degree of rent stabilization.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  This guy seems really sweet, but he's actually retarded. So again, this is somebody who's never had to run anything ever in his life. So what he's telling you there is, oh, you got a return on your money, and now we're going to make the building untenable and make it impossible for you to keep up with. Because remember, inflation happens. And so, once you put rent stabilization in, it doesn't matter when you put the rent stabilization in, once it's in place, unless it far exceeds the rate of inflation, and so the business owner can actually still run a business, you're going to be in a position where that property loses value and will become slum lord run immediately after the fact that you've got the cost to upkeep the building escalating faster than they're able to raise the rents.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  That is the fundamental mechanism that breaks and why you don't want to do it. And why, when this has been done, even in New York, it has been absolutely catastrophic.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  It's a perfectly common sense, economically coherent vision for housing.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  It is not economically coherent.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  I know, just lots of talk on the left and in the Democratic Party about the debate of our abundance, but fundamentally, any form of social democracy is grow, give. There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  So he's talking about grow, give versus redistribute. The question is, why do you have to redistribute? Why don't people just give? Because it is not in our nature. In our nature, we give to our loved ones, friends, family, maybe the church, and that's about it. And so, it doesn't scale. You cannot have society at our scale where you're expecting people to just give in the right amounts to the right people. It does not work like that, which is exactly why you expect everybody to, hey, go do your thing. Capitalism was like, oh, it's a realization that people are going to be selfish, but if we create limitations so that the only way for them to get rich is to do good things for other people, awesome, they will serve their selfish interests, but it also feels awesome to build something that people want. I'm literally speaking from experience.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  And so, now you create something, people want it, you get wealthy doing it, it is awesome. It is a tremendous feeling. And capitalism has been able to capitalize on that. You don't get grow, give. What you get is grow, redistribute. Because you realize you have to do it by force, and when you start doing things by force, top down, you break the system. This is the part that they refuse to talk about.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda, is making sure that there's strong unions and workplaces that can advocate for higher wages, even before the state gets involved with redistribution.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  What about AI? Bernie has, you know, taken some pretty strong stances, I would say, has sort of staked out a position as the Democratic politician most open to both kind of doomer narratives about AI, and, but also most enthused about sort of the prospect of strong government intervention. What is the socialist position on the AI industry right now?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I think there's a host of different socialist positions. I lean more on the side of just seeing it as any other technology. Companies are going to invest in new technologies, the economy is going to change, we're going to need to adapt and figure out how to regulate it. Obviously, any changes that we do, any regulation we do to do, need to make sense in an international context, too. Doesn't make sense to tank certain US companies if there's going to be other companies creating the same disruption that are coming from other, other parts of the world.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  That's at least sensible. I've got to give him there. It doesn't make sense to break the companies in the US trying to stop this if we know that this is still going to happen somewhere else. That makes sense.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  See where there's legitimate debates. I think the idea, which has been touted by figures as, as varied as Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, of the US government owning a stake in major AI companies, it makes, makes perfect sense.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  It's absolutely moronic.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  But fundamentally, we have to respond to a dynamic economy in which there's always going to be new technologies, there's always going to be new wants and needs and new goods and services, and we need regulation that's able to be flexible and adapt with changes.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  All right. It's a bit word salad-y, but he's at least being intellectually honest. It is going to happen, and so we're going to have to, there's no point in breaking it and stopping it from happening here. We're always going to be contending with new technology, and so we're going to have to find a way to embrace it. Yep.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  I don't see AI as, let's say, a, you know, once in a century opportunity.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  Boy, do I want to ask him. Okay, so pause. You don't see AI as a once in a century opportunity for socialism? What do you mean by that? God, I want to know what he means by that. Because socialists need control, AI offers massive amounts of control. That's option one. Option two is the far more optimistic view, which is, well, once we have an age of abundance, then we can actually start distributing this stuff.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  In the sense where you've just described a pretty expensive list of things that socialists want to do, right? So there's, I feel like there's an imaginable future where socialism gets invested in the idea that there's going to be this AI surplus that can then be redistributed to create the, you know, the, the social democracy, or the socialist democracy of, of our dreams. What, what do you think about that conceit?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  So I do think there's going to be productivity gains. I think our goal has to be to make sure that companies that are seeing increases in profit because of these gains are forced to invest in expanding production and invest in the economy and not just, you know, cut bigger checks and bigger dividends to shareholders and obviously still have some sort of economic effect, but is way more diffuse than those companies just expanding a production.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  What is that? What is that? So let's just say we're talking about OpenAI or Anthropic or something, right? And suddenly they're making insane profits, lots of new billionaires and so on. And you're Bernie Sanders or you're, you know, a socialist president who's not Bernie Sanders in the future. What does it mean for them to invest in the economy, first of all?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Well, I'm fairly confident, I could be wrong, that OpenAI, Anthropic will never be making huge amounts of profit, but I think their technology will enable other companies to make huge amounts of profits. What we want on the left is not just to increase your corporate tax, but we also want you to make sure that you are finding other avenues in the economy to take that surplus from and to invest in more, more jobs and, and meeting more, more needs. My only fare with the direction of the economy here is that more and more companies are just going to cut checks to, to, to shareholders and we're not going to have the sort of massive growth we had in the mid-century from new technologies.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  But the growth in the mid-century, that was riding on the back of new technologies, but you didn't have the government forcing people to find ways to invest, to do this, that or the other. By having a capitalist society, that takes care of itself. People are trying to get ahead. They're pursuing their selfish interest within the shell of doing something awesome for society and for the people that want to buy that product. And it all happens. So it's when these guys try to get this authoritarian top-down control, that's where I start being re-remembered, that as sweet as this guy seems like he is, he still wants to have control and he later is going to admit, actually, I'm anti-capitalist. And so, yeah, this is how, when you think that you're smarter than all of the collective

• 40:46Speaker 00

  wisdom of a bunch of decentralized attempts at something, the vast majority of which will fail, a very small number will succeed. I am reminded of the fact that I believe it's 94% of all companies failed to do $10 million or more in revenue. And so this is a guy that's like, okay, even though 94% of all companies failed to do this, I know what you should be doing so well that I'm going to now put pressure on the few people who have actually managed to survive and shown that they know how to run a company. That, that's where this gets deranging.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  What is the political policy mechanism that gets that company to, you know, invest in six new factories in Wisconsin instead of, instead of doing shareholder capitalism?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  One mechanism is actually stronger unions. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but stronger unions and forms of sectoral and centralized bargaining. So basically saying to companies, now you have to, across the board, your competitors have to deal with the same wage floor too. Now you have to deal with demands of paying auto workers an extra $5, $10, $15 an hour. What that will do in reality is it'll take the weakest companies in the field, it'll probably make them collapse. It would allow the, the companies in the middle of the field to kind of survive and continue to find ways to innovate the level of labor techniques and labor-saving technology.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And it would enable the, the companies at the top of the, the sectors, the benchmarks, producers, to be able to have some excess profits that they could then, you know, invest to maintain their, their, their market share. That's just a classic example for social democracy of something that seems like it would tank the economy, stronger unions, actually being used to push the economy towards more productivity and more technology.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  That, that is the most outlandish thing that he has said this entire time. This is so fucking ridiculous. So this is why my instinct with the unions is that the problem becomes, they become like a government. They want to exist, they want to make themselves bigger, and they become the problem unto themselves. And this is a guy literally saying, we're going to use unions as a weapon against the companies. We're going to cause the smaller companies to go out of business. We're going to force the middle companies to be sort of on this bubble where maybe they exist, maybe they don't. And then we're trying to create market force dynamics, essentially. So I'm going to go in, 94% of companies fail anyway.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  I'm going to try to increase that number by killing off the small companies who may have the better idea, the more brilliant thing. They may speak to workers that want to work at a small company. No, I'm going to reduce the total options available to workers so that I can create this pressure that I think is somehow going to make these companies better. That, that is so absurd. He literally just said the quiet part out loud. We are going to kill off a bunch of these companies by using unions as a weapon. It's so crazy. These guys think that markets can be manipulated easily and you can just get the outcome that you want. And this is exactly how they break the engine of prosperity over and over and over. Running companies is ferociously difficult. And when you think you know, oh, we're fine killing off the little guys, that's going to be fine.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  You don't realize that then power entrenches in the few companies that are left. It starts looking like another monopoly. Like, are we in a better position because the social media companies have been decided and they're just getting bigger and bigger and bigger? I don't think anybody's going to say, yeah, that's a great idea. And he's saying he wants to use wage pressure via the unions to create that across the board. So fucking crazy, man. It's so crazy.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Act stronger market pressures.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's still, I, I think part of the logic behind even crude measures like the minimum wage, part of that logic, let's not just sweat out labor, let's figure out a way to make companies more, more productive.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  By putting them under artificial stress. Yeah, brilliant.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  It's of mechanisms. I'm just using those as examples that aren't just regulatory.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  By the way, really fast, keep in mind, all the workers at those companies that you supposedly love and are trying to help, they just all lost their jobs. Great work.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  It's redistribution though. I'm also for smart, common sense regulations. And of course, I'm obviously for, for redistribution. Socialism needs a tax base for, for a welfare state.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  But just pulling, pulling back, I feel like we've danced around this a little bit. So let me just ask it directly. Is democratic socialism compatible with capitalism?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  In the long term, no. We're anti-capitalist. We want a world beyond capitalism. But in the short term, while we're within a capitalist economy, of course, we need firms that are profitable, that are providing employment, that are providing taxation. So I think to govern in the short term as social democrats, we need profitable firms. But in the long term, you know, I don't hide my desire that I, I think the economy should be socialized, even if I think in this socialized economy, there needs to be a role for markets and also a role for worker-controlled firms to be able to meet people's needs and provide new goods and services.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  That, that was the last thing I wanted to make sure that we hear. Okay. That, that is finally him admitting what's really going on is this is somebody who wants to see the means of production seized. Now he can tell that, oh shit, we do need it now, we need something to redistribute. The question is, his only hope is to say, well, no, really what I'm looking for is the Chinese model. And it's an entirely market-based economy with wild amounts of inequality that by the person who measured this, I think the best, at least in the research that I could find, the person who people respect his methodology for measuring China says they have greater household wealth inequality than we have in the US.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  So no matter how you shake it or bake it, whether it's a little bit worse than ours, same as ours, a little bit better, it, it certainly doesn't not exist. So China has a very unequal society. China's the one with nets to catch workers from jumping while they're trying to commit suicide. Okay? So the people that we're trying to emulate, not exactly the utopia that we were promised, but the reality is that the thing that China is doing is they understand you absolutely need a ferocious amount of competition, that you're going to let these companies, you're going to decide where, what industries we want to see flourish. And then within that, you let them compete like absolute mad. So, and inequality be damned. We're going to let our billionaires exist, we're just not going to let them push back against the government.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  And so these guys, like, there, there's like this hand-wavy thing that happens where it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that for me to have something to redistribute, that we need capitalism now. However, there'll be this magic thing that happens in the future and we suddenly won't realize, we'll suddenly realize we don't need that. This is where I have to take time to define. So Marx writes this whole thing, trying to get people onto communism. Marx does not ever talk about socialism.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Marx talks about communism, okay? Now Lenin goes Marx is a G. I'm gonna go do this. We're gonna, we're gonna overthrow the government, which was a terrible government, by the way, in Russia. So I get why people were mad. They overthrow the government and Lenin goes, okay, we've like started killing our way to get where we want to go. And we've now got control. Ah, some of the pesky workers were trying to rise up. Don't worry, we killed them. Uh, and so we're gonna give them this movement, whether they want it or not, am I right? And so he builds out his socialist utopia through bloodshed, of course, as people are always want to do. And now he's looking at all of this going, oh, like this is not yielding the thing that we want.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  We want to get all the way to communism, but we've sort of like inserted ourselves. We're running things, we're sort of breaking things, we're killing people. I need a name for this. What is this thing? Because we haven't gotten all the way to the thing we really want, which is from each according to their ability to each according to their need. That's where we're going. That's what Marx told us all about. That's where we really want to be. But we're at this sort of middle ground. What are we gonna call it? And he called it socialism. And then he was asked, what's the point of socialism? And he said, to get to communism. So all this hand wavy shit, remember when we get to communism, all we do is kill. All we do is kill as far as the eye can see. We put the secret police in place, which Lenin did, known as the Cheka. Um, we do famines, which Lenin did.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Uh, we do famines, which Mao did, which uh, fucking, uh, God, what is with this guy's name? Stalin, uh, we did with Stalin. Pol Pot, we just kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. We starve people to death. That's what we do. That's how we keep this going because we've broken the engine of prosperity. But they, they never make that leap. So what, what are you saying? If you're saying that you want China, then we've got to contend with, do you really want someone to tell you what to do? Or is this really just you saying you want to be part of the Politburo, telling everybody else what to do? What happens when, um, you're doing the wrong thing, right? So right now China's economy is in trouble. You don't get to vote Xi out. Uh, Xi's doing purges like crazy, which by the way, was invented by Lenin.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  So for all the people that make out like Stalin was a bad guy, but Lenin was great. That's fucking ahistorical. I don't know what they're talking about. And so you have to put these draconian measures in place specifically, because it does not line up with human nature. Humans want control. Humans want autonomy. They want to be able to run their own lives. They want a certain amount of freedom. I'm not saying everybody wants an American democratic, uh, solution. They most certainly do not. However, people want to say, I've got an idea. This is the idea. I want to give it a shot and they want to be able to do that. And these guys don't understand that that very impulse, when put in the right regulatory framework, gives you the greatest, most wealthy nation the world has ever seen.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  But instead of asking, what were the mechanisms by which we got here? People just go, we are here. And so let's redistribute this with no sense of what we might break. And so the reason I wanted to show this guy is I really think he's not like driven exclusively by the, um, the resentment that I think drives a lot of people on the far left. I think he actually got uncomfortable as he has to confront that, yes, like ultimately they're not compatible. And I know I just spent like 40 minutes talking about all these, um, basically capitalist enterprises and, and how much abundance that's created. And before I think this clip, uh, earlier, uh, in the interview though, he's talking about, you know, my family came here, I love it. America's been so welcoming. It's this incredible place.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  I think it's the best place on earth, all of that. And now I want to fuck it up. That is the like crazy shit is these people only have the ability to have the social systems because we've built something so extraordinary. And everybody that goes to actual socialism, not social democracy, okay? I wish they'd used any other word. Nordic states, that's a very different thing. That is not socialism. Socialism, as these guys want it, is to seize the means of production on our way to, at best China, at worst, full blown communism. And that's where all of this stuff gets crazy. Drew.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Um, how do we solve the problem that capital, capital, capitalism doesn't like losing? So it tries to capture the system.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Well, that's human nature. So you have to protect yourself against that at all costs. Whether you're talking about the government running away and becoming, uh, the sinister, uh, regime, which Mao is a great stand in Stalin, Lenin, all great stand ins for. Uh-oh, government realized they could seize power. So you're gonna have to protect yourself from that, whether it is a CEO, uh, who will use child labor, work them 16 hours a day, six days a week, and only gives them Sunday off because if he doesn't, they start getting sick. Uh, yeah, you gotta protect yourself from that. And we have historically done a good job by having a left and a right political party, uh, checks and balances all throughout our structure as a government.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  This is why so many places started doing sort of loose imitation of what the US was doing, because it is so effective at generating prosperity and wealth. This is exactly why I'm not a libertarian or somebody who's interested in anarchy. You just end up creating a vacuum where the strongest person will rule, because you know that you can hurt other people. And so they do, and they hurt people and the vast majority of people fall in line when you hurt them.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Um, what do you think about the emboldened AI and the vast amount of companies building it? That would make socialism possible.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  So that'd be dope. Look, if we get to a point where it is legitimately, I don't have to worry about you. You don't have to worry about me because you have all the riches you could ever want. I have all the riches I could ever want. That would be incredible. It's not my prediction. My prediction is we hit an age of abundance and everybody goes, oh, I can't prove that I'm better than you. By the way, that'll check out a huge number of people. Let's say 60% of people go, oh, I don't care. I've got everything I want. I'm good. I'm over here, just leave me alone. But 40% are gonna be like, well, I like where your house is. I, I don't just want the same house. I want that house. And so then they'll go, so how do we decide? Why do you get it? And I'm like, well, I put my house here first. Oh, so just because you did it first means you get it forever? No, fuck that, man. Like I want that exact view.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  I want that spot and nothing else will do. We need another way. And you will invent scarcity and people will bring that shit back. And it will end up looking like money. How do I know? Because we've run this experiment already. And, uh, this is what we do is we find a way to say, we're all different. And, uh, we all have different abilities. And so I need some scarce things so I can get the thing that a lot of people want, and only a few people can have. Geography becomes the easiest because they're, as they say, they're not making any more, uh, Manhattan. So it's like.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  Well, you said we've done this before, like, what do you mean?

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Human history is the answer to.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Got it, got it, got it.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Uh, we're trying to survive and we're not all equal. How do we address it? Uh, real estate is finite. What do we do about it? And we fight.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Um, have you read Marx? Some people are saying you haven't read Marx.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  They are correct and it, it'll be, um, I will obviously eventually have to put that to bed.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Uh, just like I'm gonna have to read the Quran. So yeah, I've read enough analysis that I'm happy to take the Pepsi challenge with anybody from a just understanding standpoint. Uh, but they'll be able to say, well, buddy, you said this. And I'll be like, fuck, I don't know the context of when he said that. Um, so I can only point at history and say, well, this is how it played out. But it does create a weakness in my ability to pound the table. So, uh, yes, it is true. I have not read Das Kapital or any of his other works. Uh, that's not true. I read like a chapter, but I haven't read enough. Um, so yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Um, and then a lot of times when we talk about age of abundance and things like that, there's this idea of like the scarcity mindset. Is there, when it comes to socialism, capitalism, a lot of times we always get into the conversation of, once we convert to this system, people are just gonna do money grabs, power grabs, everybody's gonna die. Is there a transition where we can do it that makes the pie big enough that everybody's good? And what's that thing that we need to kind of flip that switch?

• 56:17Speaker 00

  It's a scary moment, man. I don't know. So the human tendency is to use the latest weapon to get control over people that don't have the weapon. And it's a pretty rare moment, like World War II, where you nuke the shit out of people and then rebuild them. Um, so I worry that the US and China will use the race to artificial superintelligence to reposition whoever wins as the global hegemon. Um, so that feels like the honest answer to how this is gonna play out. Um, but do I hold out hope that we can get to a point where the age of abundance is true and wonderful and, um, it won't be only good, but will it be overwhelmingly good? That's certainly my hope.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  This seems like a mindset, ideology that we keep pushing against in different ways every couple of decades. Um, historically, I feel like we had this conversation a couple of years ago and then it came back up. DSA is now winning elections. They're starting to get more airtime in the conversation in national media. What is your prediction on what happens with our, with America and the DSA?

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Like our culture? So is the DSA going to get more powerful, get elected, get more

• 57:28Speaker 03

  What's your prediction you think is gonna happen?

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Ah, oh, God. This is where my reasoning is now motivated, and that is a super dangerous place to be. So my reasoning goes like this. I so don't want it to happen that I almost can't allow myself to paint that scenario. So give me the out and I'll paint two scenarios. Scenario number one is myself and a gazillion other people get on the microphone and talk about the mechanisms of prosperity. What we need to change, acknowledge that the system is broken now, acknowledge that people are struggling, that's real. Talk about what very specifically needs to change in order to get the train back on the tracks. Get people focused

• 58:11Speaker 00

  on what candidates are likely to get us there. Call out the bullshit, all of that. Give people enough nuance that they can actually make contact with reality, and we deflate the enthusiasm around the DSA because the DSA is resentment created by overproduced elites. So, cool. We use ideas to solve for that so people don't get sucked into that. The alternative is that because the resentment is there and a bunch of dumbasses on the right just keep fighting for as long as the top of the case find what the problem is. And so then they just keep making it worse and worse and worse. And then that resentment will eventually spill over and you will have revolution and that will be led by the DSA.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  And then you end up in just naked civil war where you've got the DSA going head to head with basically the well armed right. And it, neither side is going to go quietly. So those are really your two options. And the left actually wants bloodshed. So, let me be very careful. The far left Leninist Marxists admire the bloody revolution that was waged in other countries and long for that outcome. Now, whether they are like, this is going to be fun to pass through the bloody part, or whether they, only young dumb ones are saying that, only time will tell. But there is actual revolutionary energy, and revolution

• 59:38Speaker 00

  means killing other people to get what you want. There is actual revolutionary murderous energy on the extreme fringe of the left. The DSA is going to be a spectrum. This guy, the, not the guy you can see on the screen, but the guy that's been talking, I don't think he has a murderous bone in his body. He does not strike me that way at all. This seems like a person you can have a very reasonable conversation with. You could debate the ideas. He seems like he's perfectly capable of doing that. Now, whether he's been captured by his own audience or his own soundbites, that I don't know. But truly, when you look in his eyes, does not strike me as the murderous type. I think he will be very surprised that that's how these things tend to play out. But there are people in the party who are

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  at the extreme fringe that really do have that bloodlust. You see it in Antifa, you see it in some, especially some of the people that are more youthful. So there's the YDSA. I don't know if it stands for youth, or young, or whatever, but anyway, I assume it's one of the two because they're all super young. And when you hear them talk, it's direct action, meaning go picket, maybe throw a rock or two, on up to bloody revolution is what's needed.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Somebody said that the Communist Manifesto is way too short for you not to have read it. So, that's on your reading list.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

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