December 11, 2024 • 34 mins
The "F-word?"... European Nude Beaches... What's cultural Hegemony? Chat GPT made an appearance, and we fired Matt! Dave Ramsey + David Graeber = DEBT!! Canceling all debt in the Old Testament = Jubilee.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
TGI, the global island.
(00:03):
The f-word. Yeah, we went there.
European nude beaches? What's the Overton window?
We were really confused about cultural hegemony, so we fired Matt and hired ChatGPT.
Is it Iran or Iran? England is the bad guy throughout history? David Graber and Dave Ramsey?
What do they have to say on debt? You know, speaking about debt,
(00:24):
why don't we just cancel all of debt? Wait, the Jews already tried that in the Old Testament.
Jubilee, and we end on consumer neuroscience.
The f-word, brother.
It's like a way of expressing yourself in New York.
I mean, there was that meme going around where it was like the professor talking to a kid from Brooklyn,
and he's discussing England and the Falkland Islands down in South America,
(00:46):
and the kid from, the joke is that the kid from Brooklyn is like,
what fucking islands are you talking about? There's fucking islands over here.
It's just like how you use the cursing.
Sure.
Dude, I have this one coworker, and you would never think that interior design and retail,
there would be so much cursing.
Really? Oh yeah.
(01:07):
But again, it's just Long Island native. Just Long Island, she fucking curses door and everything.
Sure.
See, exactly like that. It just slides right in and there's absolutely nothing to it.
I want to know your history with curse words in general. What do you think about them?
Because I feel like I have changed my mind on that so dramatically throughout my life.
So when I was young, I learned the word cunt from watching a lot of British television.
(01:33):
Listen here, you cunt.
Oh, this episode is hella explicit. Hide your wife, hide your kids.
And we're not trying to be douchebag. We're actually having a genuine conversation about curse words.
I tried to like, I was like, I'm going to be cringy as fuck.
I'm going to say cunt. Oh, you're such a cunt. That's a cunt. Why are you a cunt?
It's pronounced cunt.
Cunt. Yeah, sure.
(01:54):
No, but like in British culture, it was just, it's such a common word.
And it's not necessarily a bad word. But over here, it's like, no, oh my God, don't.
Like, it like breaks my mom's heart when she hears the word cunt.
Yeah.
So like she literally could not even listen to me saying this because it would just bother her.
And I think that like I was a little bit of an edgy asshole when I was a kid.
(02:20):
Has your opinion on curse words like changed throughout your life?
Yes and no. Yes and no. I mean, I try to make a point not to use them,
especially now like in the social work field. Like you really don't want to.
You need to be professional.
And it, sometimes it turns into a bad habit where it's not even intended.
Like there's no negative intention behind it.
(02:41):
Like when I'm with certain coworkers or whatnot, it's like just shooting the shit back and forth.
Sure.
But there's nothing bad meant by it. Like I try not to curse at things in a negative connotation.
So intention is really important.
Yeah, exactly. I really try to not do that intention anymore.
But you brought up an amazing point. And this was something that one of my coworkers
(03:03):
was like, yeah, I'm really trying to stop cursing. And I thought about it. I'm like,
you know, I don't think people want to stop cursing.
It's the reason why people just say that is that they want to feel like they have
control over the words that's coming out of their mouth more so.
Well, also it's kind of like that idea. Like I don't want to bring that kind of negativity.
Like it's an unnecessary negativity.
People can make assumptions about you based off of your verbal abilities.
(03:26):
I'm not that negative of a person.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know what I mean?
And just cause.
Okay. But this, but like, this is why I would love to see like a sociological perspective
from your understanding of it. It just, it bogs me because like words are awesome because
words have a great upon meaning. Right. And then like the fact that we just have this
like weird class of words that we deem as curse words, it feels so unnatural because to me,
(03:50):
it's like in different contexts, you use different words, right? And we all know this,
right? There's a certain way that you talk in the classroom that you don't talk to your friends,
right? And that doesn't even involve cursing or not cursing. It's just a different way of tonality,
the different types of ways that you put your sentences together. Right.
But then we have this like weird set of like, do not say words or like, or like people use them
(04:13):
when like they're really angry. But once again, words are just, are just words and we all agree
upon what they mean and what, and what they don't mean. And it just, it seems like we're putting so
much emphasis on these, on these things and making like personality distinctions based off of it.
I don't know. I think culture goes a little bit too, too mad when it comes to curse words.
Well, I think it depends on the culture because again, like I said,
(04:33):
England doesn't care about the word cunt. I mean,
Bloody hell.
Yeah, you know, you'll see curse words in the news and you'll see nudity in the newspaper in
England and in the United States, that's just completely not acceptable.
Sure. Well, we're also a much heavier, you know, Christian conservative nation.
True. And we don't have that Protestant.
And I think we're also more sexually repressed in America than a lot of European countries.
(04:56):
I feel like sexuality is very weird here, you know, like.
Yeah. And some settings were hella repressed and other settings were like,
yo, let's just go for it.
I find there's no in between, you know what I mean? I find people are either out there
dressed in like leather, full dominatrix in the street at their parade, or it's like, no, no, no.
Like.
Purity matters.
(05:16):
Yeah. You know, it's so difficult. And then because we have this.
God bless the Christians, I love them.
We have this like dualism back and forth on it. Sex still sells in fashion, in advertisements,
you know what I mean? But it's not seen in this sort of like artistic sense. And it's like not
so like widely shared. Like when I was in the south of France, like there were just girls walking
(05:37):
around with their tops off at the beach. Nobody's staring at them. Nobody's harassing them.
Sure.
And they're just going about their day and just like, you know, it's like one of those things
where I notice, I'm like, hmm, I'm like, wow, like I wish we sort of had that sort of humanistic
connection where we're like, you know, this is the way we exist. This is not a sexual scenario.
You know, it's not like in Pakistan where if a woman's not completely covered up, where she has
(06:03):
500 men completely surrounding her, you know. So it's, I definitely think it's the taste within
society. Like, you know, there's a way to look at it through like, you could argue cultural hegemony.
Like.
What's that?
Cultural hegemony was this idea from this Italian Marxist, neo-Marxist philosopher,
(06:24):
Gramsci, G-R-A-M-S-C-I. You know, I'm half Italian and I can't even say it. Cultural hegemony is this
idea that within our culture and society, there is what's agreed upon, like you can almost look at it
as like the generalized other in sociology, that there are these ideas that are.
(06:46):
Norms.
Sort of. It's almost looking at norms as if.
They were cultural ideas.
Yeah, and that there is a hierarchy within the culture of what imposes itself on everything else.
Have you heard of the Overton window?
Explain.
Okay, so this is like a political science concept. The Overton window is like, what are the topics
(07:10):
that we can talk about publicly? And then like, if we start talking about how the CIA actually has
access to alien bio weapons, that's not in the Overton window, Fox News and CNN, we can't talk
about this because this is conspiracy land. What's the difference?
Well, I mean, I guess you could say like within the cultural like taste of society, I guess taste is
(07:32):
probably a better way to look at this.
What their preferences? Cultural preferences?
Sort of what we allow. What we allow to exist, what we allow to speak upon.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
Besides the things that we feel that are so disgusting or like repulsive that we just
don't even bring them up or conversate about.
Well, I mean, in some fields we do. I mean, like if you think of like gore films, for example,
(07:56):
Terrifier 3 just came out. This is not a plug for it, but it's just a blatantly gore-fest of a film.
Unless they want to pay us.
I'm all in. I mean, Art the Clown, I don't know if you've seen it, man.
Bro, I don't watch any scary movies. I watch optimistic happy movies because that's what
I want to film my brain with.
Let me put it to you in perspective. In the first movie, there's this one kill scene, right?
(08:17):
Oh, yeah.
He captures this one girl and he's got her friend. The friend is strapped into a chair,
you know, like into like this torture chair and Art the Clown is this just killer.
And he pulls across a curtain and there's the friend, I'm pretty sure he's fully naked,
hanging upside down, like arms and legs sprawled out. And he just starts sawing her from groin to
(08:38):
head and making the friend watch. That's the kind of movie. And this movie has such a cult following.
So it's like, you're right, you know, it's funny. We would not speak about this in general
populations between people, but these sub-genres such as horror and gore films exist.
There is a niche people that are very cultish towards it.
Yeah, exactly. It's funny because-
(08:59):
But that doesn't represent, I would say that that's a subculture. That's not American culture.
Okay, I'm still confused what hegemony is.
Hedge, well-
Look it up, brother. Look it up.
You know what it is, man? It's been a long day.
Humble thyself, humble thyself.
It's been a really long day.
Humble thyself to that muddy power of Google or chat you between.
The first place that I learned about hegemony was in, what was it, Western Civ I. It was explained
(09:25):
through like empires essentially. But cultural hegemony is the dominance within a society
by the ruling class that shaped the culture of that society.
There's one ruling class that has like a monopoly on culture.
Sort of. It's looking at it through a sort of class lens.
(09:47):
Bro, get that chat GPT out here, bro.
It's not a simplistic thing to discuss and I almost don't-
Bro, chat GPT makes everything simplistic.
Are you going to interview, are you just going to talk to chat GPT?
Yeah, Matt, you're fired.
I'm joking, I'm joking.
Nah, that's all right. I mean, the way that I look at it is through like-
Hold on, hold on. What is cultural hegemony?
(10:09):
Cultural hegemony is a concept developed by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci.
It refers to the way a dominant group in society can control and shape the cultural norms, values, and beliefs of the broader population.
Instead of relying on force, the ruling class exerts its power by getting people to accept and internalize-
World view as the norm, making it seem natural or common sense.
(10:33):
This allows the dominant group to maintain power and control because-
Okay, so like if, for example, there's literally like three media companies that are the parent companies of all the media in America, right?
So it's like because there's like a small ruling class that has all the influence power per se.
When it comes to like mainstream media, there's this overturned window of what is discussed and what isn't, and they can kind of influence based off of that.
(11:01):
Here's a great example on this. The DEI industry, right?
If we look at nonprofits and why they have these DEI initiatives and these committees within this company, nonprofits operate by obtaining their funding from funders.
Those funders can be state government, local government, federal government, private equity,
(11:22):
or just general donors. Now, when you're looking at private equity and state government, federal government, for examples,
they will set the parameters on what it is and how you can reach these fundings.
So essentially, the way that I'm understanding in part, this is not obviously all of DEI,
(11:43):
but the way that I'm understanding that they can exert this sort of idea or way of thinking on all of these companies is financially tie them to it.
So now they have an incentive to gain financial backing because they adhere to this.
Because they get a golden star. State-driven DEI funding. Well, they don't get golden star, they get money.
(12:04):
So is it really about diversity? You know what I mean?
So this is where the cultural hegemony kind of comes in is now because of the way in which DEI initiatives are structured
and the funding that is backed to them is set by these very high powers within society in that sort of private realm, in the nonprofit realm.
(12:27):
And at the governmental level, I could argue you could change it. We are in a democracy.
But within a company, you're not going to change their DEI initiatives at all because it's all set seemingly by these outside groups.
Sure. Okay, so this was... Tell me if I'm too cynical. Maybe I'm consuming too many CIA...
(12:50):
You're too cynical.
So to me, the smartest people in the world that have influence and they're also a part of the more dark triad tendencies,
and they work for the intelligence services, even like foreign intelligence services.
Like right now, Russia is putting so much money into internet bots that are basically funding the Jewish posts,
(13:15):
like pro-Israel posts, and then they're also funding pro-Palestinian posts because they're not starting that division in America, right?
They're rather putting more fuel onto the fire because their long-term PSYOP is to create civil unrest and more lack of trust in our institutions and in our government.
(13:36):
That's like a long-term goal for China, Russia, and Iran. And so to me, it's like...
Iran.
Iran, I'm sorry. Yeah. Iran. Iran. Iran. Iran. Iran.
Iran is looked at as the bad guys.
No, but you ready? The people are actually... There's so many amazing Iranian people that are fighting against their tyranny of their government.
(14:00):
And I think the long-term future of Iran is very optimistic if we can get rid of the dogmatic Islamic fundamentalism.
I mean, part of the reason the government that is...
There's movements against the Iranian government by people that left Iran, but realistically, it's the United States' fault why the government is the way it is.
(14:27):
Well, that's debatable. But the US did partly cause the situation in Iran by not allowing them to have their...
I think that an important point is everyone wants to blame the big person.
Yes.
But the problem is that the big person, because they're big and they have all this influence, and they're going to be the world's police, like the US.
I think this is a similar argument where when everyone studies history, everyone shits on England.
(14:52):
And it's like England was the douchebags of history, and they probably were, right?
But I think also just because they had the influence and the power, they're obviously...
Because they're a part of more decisions than not, than the decisions that went sour, they're obviously going to get the brunt of the blame.
And I think America, that's very akin to that, that because we created all these coups in other countries that we were policing,
(15:16):
and we were trying to use intelligence operatives to kind of infiltrate countries and try to create democracy around the world.
And when some of those kind of programs backfired, we obviously have to take the brunt of the responsibility.
You know what? I'm going to partly agree with you, but I am also going to explain why we should be so critical of the United States and England, for example.
(15:40):
So, do you know what the Treaty of Westphalia is?
It sounds familiar, but I don't know.
Treaty of Westphalia essentially was at the end of the 30-year war in Europe.
It set the basis for the modern nation state.
And really, the main takeaway point is state sovereignty.
Now, the issue with this now is that, say we have France, Germany, England, all of these are nation states.
(16:06):
They all have sovereignty, which means they have their own right to govern their own people,
and they should not interfere on the governance of others.
Like, the French should not interfere in the governance of the Germans.
This is where colonialism comes in and sort of this, where Kant calls it, an immoral nature.
The Treaty of Westphalia was not applied to the rest of the world by any means.
(16:30):
So, nobody else had sovereignty, but besides Europe, at least this is the way that some people think about it.
Now, there's also another alternative, like speaking on historians, it's important to not get too focused on,
oh, Europe's racist, so because they're non-European, they're going to, you know, subjugate everybody else.
There's also this idea that David Graeber brought up on debt, that a lot of conquest and this expanding conquest,
(16:55):
and even the slave trade, really came from these constant debts that people had, like based on credit.
And they had to pay off the debt by...
Exactly. And so, like, Cortes, for example, was somebody that took out so much credit,
even though Cortes conquered Mexico, he had to constantly conquer because he was constantly taking out credit
(17:17):
and constantly accumulating debt. And I believe he had to go back to Spain at one point because he was so poor.
He was so indebted and he kept conquering. And this is actually something that's similar with the slave trades.
The African towns that were on the ocean were started to become based upon, like, the classical credit systems that they had.
They started becoming indebted, so then they started taking other people's slave.
(17:41):
They started taking people as slaves and then selling those slaves.
It's interesting when you break your understanding on history and you clear it.
So, like, this is what Karl Popper means when it's like, not everything is just racism.
Let's look at it from another perspective and we can find something else.
That's why David has really great takes on this stuff.
Oh, he does. But that's where...
(18:04):
The debt thing is wild because, I mean, right now, look at American debt is... Yeah. Okay, so hold on.
I know, I kind of swung that topic there. No, no, no. This is a fun one though.
So, could we say that the real racists, the real assholes of history are the financial industry?
Okay, so here's a great example. There's this idea in both...
(18:29):
Goldman stacks were coming for you. Huh? Goldman stacks were coming for you.
Well, actually, you know what? The IMF is one of the most evil organizations on the planet. What is the IMF?
The International Monetary Fund. It was one... The IMF and the World Bank were created following the end of World War II.
You don't like any of the data from the World Bank? You don't trust it?
No, it's not that I don't trust the World Bank. The World Bank and the IMF are two different organizations.
(18:50):
Sure.
The IMF is the one that gives out loans and hands out structural adjustment programs.
In other words, say, Niger wants a loan from the IMF because they're indebted,
because they had a previous dictator that took all their money to Paris and, you know, again, nobody in Paris was, you know,
or Switzerland was saying anything about this. They just were happy to take the millions of dollars and this dictator took it from Niger.
(19:16):
But now let's say, hypothetically, Niger has a democratic elected government and this government's trying to fix the problems that the past corrupt dictator left.
They would go to the IMF and say, we need a loan. We want to structure our programs right now.
So because we only look at debt in the sense that David Graeber breaks it down as a moral issue,
(19:38):
and he brings it up like historically both in Christianity and Buddhism, that a debt, somebody that lends money, a creditor,
technically is immoral and so is the person that takes out debt is also technically immoral.
But the IMF, where it is really immoral, is it imposes structural adjustment programs on these countries.
(20:01):
Now, this is real neocolonialism. So let's say Niger has school programs and they want every kid to go K through 12 and they are funding their lunches.
The IMF will come in and say, we're going to give you, you know, $5 billion, but guess what?
You're cutting all your lunch programs and they often always go after social services first,
(20:23):
which is contradictory to Africa's like core being because they are a very historically communal continent.
Like, they're very similar to Japanese or Native Americans, that idea that community, they're not entirely individualistic as we are in the West.
So that's where this idea of like now Western cultural hegemony is now being imposed on African nations through the IMF.
(20:51):
Fundamentally throughout all of human history, those that have resources and now that's, you know, those who control the banks,
those who control the money supply, you have the influence, right?
If a world is based off of that and if value is transferred via wealth, then you, the person who, or the groups of people who run that,
(21:14):
you fundamentally are the most powerful people in the world.
I think this was more enshrined following the Marshall Plan and the current monetary system of the globe,
where money is, where essentially our money is based on debt, essentially. It's so much to explain.
(21:37):
No, seriously, David, I was listening, David Graeber has this like two hour long history just-
On debt.
On debt.
Yeah, I gotta check this out. Do you know who Dave Ramsey is?
No, I don't.
He's a Christian financial expert.
Okay.
Really great stuff. The thing that makes him unique is he is anti-debt.
(22:02):
So he doesn't have any credit cards his whole life, doesn't believe in taking out car loans, any of this.
His parents were in like the real estate business and so he got his real estate license and he knows how to use mortgages.
But besides that, no debt. And he talks about how-
Oh shoot, this is actually my- That's so funny.
(22:23):
Every 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. I do my like four, seven, eight breathing. You're breathing your nose for a second.
I got you.
Seven seconds, you hold it and then take it slow. I'll have to do that right after this.
But Dave Ramsey is just like really counter-cultural in that sense.
People call in and people are like, yeah, so I got $100,000 in student loan day.
I got my Mercedes-Benz 20- And he's like, how much money do you make?
(22:46):
And the guy's like, I make $60,000. And then he's like, listen brother, and it's great.
But it shows us that we're all- Okay, this is the point that I want to make.
I got it. So Dave Ramsey talks about how people always say, well, I need a good credit score.
(23:07):
Where the fuck did this concept even come from?
200 years ago, motherfuckers didn't have a credit score and you could still move in the world.
The financial industries created this whole concept of a credit score.
And the crazy thing is Dave Ramsey talks about how you actually don't need one, technically.
How you can actually get a car, you can get a mortgage.
And what they do is instead of looking into your credit history, they can look into your other financial histories.
(23:31):
And there's all these back ends that historically were the ways that we would actually measure
whether a person was able to receive a loan from the bank.
And now the whole financial industry has created this whole narrative around a credit score.
Why? To get people on a credit card early, to get people using.
And I had multiple credit cards and I've never paid one penny in interest in my whole life and I never will.
(23:55):
I treat my credit card like it's a debit card.
And I probably made around $2,000 off of credit cards in the last maybe four years.
And I'm grateful for that.
At the same time, I do realize that I am probably spending more money than I would if I didn't have credit cards.
And there's other psychological things that makes it more cognitively taxing.
So I don't know if I fully agree with Dave Ramsey's point, but it does bring up kind of to be a little bit more skeptical
(24:22):
in regards to how Kanye West had dragged him in here.
He goes, who the hell invented the sidewalk?
And it's like, yeah, nobody thinks about that because it just blends in.
There's so many things in our life and in our culture that we just assume is life.
And we're just so focused into our time period that we need to kind of be a little bit more wider.
It's also the taste on our time period a bit.
(24:43):
So we think of it as an immoral thing to not pay our debts, correct?
Like if you said, oh, that person didn't pay his debt, the general implicit bias of society would be like bad person.
Do you think it's not immoral?
Well, I mean, let me explain.
If there is immoral debt, you believe that you shouldn't have to pay it.
(25:06):
Well, so historically there was this thing called in Judaism called the Jubilee.
Graber, this is like every 700 years or like 70 years.
I believe it was every 50 years.
They essentially did debt cancellations periodically.
Yeah, the Old Testament, baby.
But they also had the bond servitude, which is basically like slavery where instead of paying off your debt,
you would basically use, you would like sell your own labor and say, hey, I'll work for you for 10 years.
(25:31):
Well, those were indentured servants, which you're thinking of, because that's where somebody.
So this is...
But I'm sorry, go back to the Jubilee concept.
So the Jubilee concept, actually, there was this group, economic group in Boston.
It may have been Jeffrey Sachs's organization.
I'm not sure because Sachs is involved with so many things.
And they ran this model of what happens if we canceled people's debts,
(25:57):
not debts between corporations and corporations and banks, just people's debts.
People's debts towards the bank?
Towards...
Just overall people's debts.
I don't know the exact details on individual debt.
Individual debt, exactly.
So if I take out, you know, my graduate school loans are probably going to be $34,000, for example.
And, you know, say I owe, I don't know, say I owe $5,000 left on my car.
(26:22):
Say overall I owe, I don't know, add in miscellaneous, say I owe $40,000 in debt.
Essentially that it would just cancel it out.
They found that it was bad, but it was not as bad as if we just kept letting debt continue to grow as it does.
Exactly.
Because there's probably a huge kind of physical capital labor cost to that because then people aren't as productive.
(26:50):
And the entrepreneurial people don't have the resources to actually make the products that increase GDP and lower the cost of goods and services.
Okay, so here was a great example that Graeber brought up that I just, I was like, holy crap.
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, right?
And all the banks were buying up all the mortgages and they failed, right?
(27:13):
We, I mean, this is in part government's fault and also greedy financials.
It's a combination of things going on.
We bailed out the banks, but everybody that had these bad mortgages got kicked out of their homes.
Graeber brings up the idea of what if instead of just giving the banks these massive checks, we bailed out everyone with a mortgage?
(27:37):
Then the banks would be paid anyway and the banks would still exist and the system would still go on.
So from my understanding, but they wouldn't, but the banks wouldn't get the amount of money that they were looking in the short term.
They would get it in the long term.
Well, the banks failed because everybody was defaulting on their debts and these were loans that nobody could actually ever pay off.
(27:58):
They were insanely predatory loans.
And so what David argues is if you just gave the people the money to actually pay them.
Well, if you just paid off the mortgages, now you have people with houses and the banks are owed the mortgages that they're owed.
Therefore, they would not fail.
Do you see what I'm saying?
We have this.
How quickly we forget.
One of his big arguments and he cites the Jubilee of this and classical debt cancellations that kings used to do over their lands during the Middle Ages was this idea that, okay, so both the creditor and the debtor can both be immoral.
(28:30):
And it depends entirely on the situation.
But wouldn't canceling everyone's debt, wouldn't that increase inflation?
So this is where I feel like they don't fully address it.
We now also have such a consumeristic society where we don't have a game plan tomorrow.
(28:51):
Our values are horrible.
Our values are horrible.
We don't have a game plan.
If you cancel people's debt, they will accrue a pretty substantial amount of debt tomorrow.
Oh, absolutely.
And this is in part personal responsibility and as well, you have to think the marketing companies have neuroscientists developing programs to sell you stuff.
So if we could just constantly do this, basically the argument is overall, we are a debtor society and it's gotten to the point where it's not working.
(29:19):
It's out of control.
It's out of control.
You know, how can people pay like 26% interest?
Like how how like how could we ever afford a home?
You know what I mean?
It's like I if I have one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bank, let's just give a round number and the houses where we live five years ago were four hundred thousand dollars.
I would have had a substantial down payment and not that bad of a mortgage.
(29:43):
Now the same home is nearly nine hundred thousand a million dollars.
You know, it's like I can't even catch up with inflation and I'm doing things that I'm supposed to be doing correctly.
And this debt then enslaves us because we need to take out this debt to even survive.
And this is where it becomes immoral.
(30:04):
Now it's it's such a hard conversation to say to like, oh, wipe out debts.
I mean, it makes sense.
But I mean, Biden had the debt forgiveness program, the what the the student debt forgiveness program.
Well, that was cancel.
What Biden did there was he took people that should have had their loans forgiven, but they were due to technicalities and because the whole student aid programs are are so just corrupt.
(30:29):
They screw people out of possibilities.
And essentially what Biden did was kind of unscrewed all the people that were screwed out of it.
Isn't it true that student debt is the only debt that if you die, your family has to like take on?
I don't know if your family has to take it on, but it's a debt you cannot get out of.
I know that for certain. It doesn't matter.
(30:51):
Yeah, no. Well, dude, that's why I turned down.
That's why I said no to Columbia.
Like, I want to go to Ivy League school.
I want to be there.
But the irony is in a social work program, I get the credibility, but yet I'm financially in slavery.
Well, so thinking about it as a social work program, we're fighting oppression.
But yet you are literally selling me a form of oppression.
Yeah, yeah. And it's enticing.
(31:13):
So it's like a sweet candy. You know what I mean?
It's like neuroscience, bro.
Exactly. It's an Ivy League. It's a freaking title.
It's a name. Harvard, Wharton. Not Wharton. Penn, you know, U Penn.
Like, yeah, it's a freaking name.
Okay, so why don't we end on some like some like crazy freaky neuro consumer neuroscience studies.
(31:36):
Tell me why I'm buying what I'm buying.
Dude, this one lab, this one neuroscience cycle lab, I don't know where.
They stuck Apple users and Android users in fmRI machines.
And what they did is they basically showed them these different news stories of like negative things about Apple and negative things about Android.
And the crazy thing was that in the Apple users, like dramatically more than the Android users,
(32:03):
when the Apple users were shown negative stories about Apple as a company,
in the Apple users brains, their empathy circuits were lighting up so much more than when the Android users saw stories that said bad things about Android companies.
And so what the researchers concluded was that the marketing campaigns for Apple were so strong that they were able to convince the, you know,
(32:27):
non-conscious parts of our brains to have deep empathy for the richest company in the world and to feel bad when people bash it.
And so that's a pretty substantial accomplishment, whether it was explicit or implicit on the marketing team's part of Apple.
But consumer neuroscience.
(32:49):
You know what I took away from this? That I need to hire Apple's marketing team.
To unwire me.
To make a cult, I mean religion, and market it to people. I mean, preach it.
Preach it.
Slight of hand.
Remember, every single, you know what?
(33:12):
See, words matter, bro. Cursed words. We're wrapping this around.
Words matter. And markets have implicit. This is why Donald Trump can say nothing and everything at the exact same time.
Because it's so vague that everyone just puts on it what they want to believe.
You know, I wish Donald Trump would just own being the corporatist that he is.
Because he, once again, these people are entrenched in their worldview and there's nothing stopping them.
(33:37):
We can all have our own opinions about how people should and shouldn't react. These are how people are.
And I think it's more important to just understand why they are the way they are and then try to be as truthful and really getting to the root of why they are the way they are instead of trying to change it.
Oh, I'm not trying to change it. I think he's hysterical.
You almost have to look at it at a completely different level. You can't take it seriously. You have to laugh with it.
(34:02):
Dude, the spaghetti monster for president 2024. Let's go.
Spaghetti. Are you spaghetti?
What is that religion? Apostopharian. Apostopharian, man, I'm telling you.
You know what? Every time somebody asks me who I'm voting for, I say King Charles.
And I start, God save the king.
God save the king.
Why do we even have a revolution?
Soon we'll see. You'll remember how the night will be.
(34:25):
It's the Hamilton song. It's so good. We'll be back.
And then it goes, when push comes to shove.
I don't remember.
I'll kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.
Oh gosh, it's going to get copyrighted.
Singing Hamilton.
TGI, the global island.
(00:03):
The f-word. Yeah, we went there.
European nude beaches? What's the Overton window?
We were really confused about cultural hegemony, so we fired Matt and hired ChatGPT.
Is it Iran or Iran? England is the bad guy throughout history? David Graber and Dave Ramsey?
What do they have to say on debt? You know, speaking about debt,
(00:24):
why don't we just cancel all of debt? Wait, the Jews already tried that in the Old Testament.
Jubilee, and we end on consumer neuroscience.
The f-word, brother.
It's like a way of expressing yourself in New York.
I mean, there was that meme going around where it was like the professor talking to a kid from Brooklyn,
and he's discussing England and the Falkland Islands down in South America,
(00:46):
and the kid from, the joke is that the kid from Brooklyn is like,
what fucking islands are you talking about? There's fucking islands over here.
It's just like how you use the cursing.
Sure.
Dude, I have this one coworker, and you would never think that interior design and retail,
there would be so much cursing.
Really? Oh yeah.
(01:07):
But again, it's just Long Island native. Just Long Island, she fucking curses door and everything.
Sure.
See, exactly like that. It just slides right in and there's absolutely nothing to it.
I want to know your history with curse words in general. What do you think about them?
Because I feel like I have changed my mind on that so dramatically throughout my life.
So when I was young, I learned the word cunt from watching a lot of British television.
(01:33):
Listen here, you cunt.
Oh, this episode is hella explicit. Hide your wife, hide your kids.
And we're not trying to be douchebag. We're actually having a genuine conversation about curse words.
I tried to like, I was like, I'm going to be cringy as fuck.
I'm going to say cunt. Oh, you're such a cunt. That's a cunt. Why are you a cunt?
It's pronounced cunt.
Cunt. Yeah, sure.
(01:54):
No, but like in British culture, it was just, it's such a common word.
And it's not necessarily a bad word. But over here, it's like, no, oh my God, don't.
Like, it like breaks my mom's heart when she hears the word cunt.
Yeah.
So like she literally could not even listen to me saying this because it would just bother her.
And I think that like I was a little bit of an edgy asshole when I was a kid.
(02:20):
Has your opinion on curse words like changed throughout your life?
Yes and no. Yes and no. I mean, I try to make a point not to use them,
especially now like in the social work field. Like you really don't want to.
You need to be professional.
And it, sometimes it turns into a bad habit where it's not even intended.
Like there's no negative intention behind it.
(02:41):
Like when I'm with certain coworkers or whatnot, it's like just shooting the shit back and forth.
Sure.
But there's nothing bad meant by it. Like I try not to curse at things in a negative connotation.
So intention is really important.
Yeah, exactly. I really try to not do that intention anymore.
But you brought up an amazing point. And this was something that one of my coworkers
(03:03):
was like, yeah, I'm really trying to stop cursing. And I thought about it. I'm like,
you know, I don't think people want to stop cursing.
It's the reason why people just say that is that they want to feel like they have
control over the words that's coming out of their mouth more so.
Well, also it's kind of like that idea. Like I don't want to bring that kind of negativity.
Like it's an unnecessary negativity.
People can make assumptions about you based off of your verbal abilities.
(03:26):
I'm not that negative of a person.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know what I mean?
And just cause.
Okay. But this, but like, this is why I would love to see like a sociological perspective
from your understanding of it. It just, it bogs me because like words are awesome because
words have a great upon meaning. Right. And then like the fact that we just have this
like weird class of words that we deem as curse words, it feels so unnatural because to me,
(03:50):
it's like in different contexts, you use different words, right? And we all know this,
right? There's a certain way that you talk in the classroom that you don't talk to your friends,
right? And that doesn't even involve cursing or not cursing. It's just a different way of tonality,
the different types of ways that you put your sentences together. Right.
But then we have this like weird set of like, do not say words or like, or like people use them
(04:13):
when like they're really angry. But once again, words are just, are just words and we all agree
upon what they mean and what, and what they don't mean. And it just, it seems like we're putting so
much emphasis on these, on these things and making like personality distinctions based off of it.
I don't know. I think culture goes a little bit too, too mad when it comes to curse words.
Well, I think it depends on the culture because again, like I said,
(04:33):
England doesn't care about the word cunt. I mean,
Bloody hell.
Yeah, you know, you'll see curse words in the news and you'll see nudity in the newspaper in
England and in the United States, that's just completely not acceptable.
Sure. Well, we're also a much heavier, you know, Christian conservative nation.
True. And we don't have that Protestant.
And I think we're also more sexually repressed in America than a lot of European countries.
(04:56):
I feel like sexuality is very weird here, you know, like.
Yeah. And some settings were hella repressed and other settings were like,
yo, let's just go for it.
I find there's no in between, you know what I mean? I find people are either out there
dressed in like leather, full dominatrix in the street at their parade, or it's like, no, no, no.
Like.
Purity matters.
(05:16):
Yeah. You know, it's so difficult. And then because we have this.
God bless the Christians, I love them.
We have this like dualism back and forth on it. Sex still sells in fashion, in advertisements,
you know what I mean? But it's not seen in this sort of like artistic sense. And it's like not
so like widely shared. Like when I was in the south of France, like there were just girls walking
(05:37):
around with their tops off at the beach. Nobody's staring at them. Nobody's harassing them.
Sure.
And they're just going about their day and just like, you know, it's like one of those things
where I notice, I'm like, hmm, I'm like, wow, like I wish we sort of had that sort of humanistic
connection where we're like, you know, this is the way we exist. This is not a sexual scenario.
You know, it's not like in Pakistan where if a woman's not completely covered up, where she has
(06:03):
500 men completely surrounding her, you know. So it's, I definitely think it's the taste within
society. Like, you know, there's a way to look at it through like, you could argue cultural hegemony.
Like.
What's that?
Cultural hegemony was this idea from this Italian Marxist, neo-Marxist philosopher,
(06:24):
Gramsci, G-R-A-M-S-C-I. You know, I'm half Italian and I can't even say it. Cultural hegemony is this
idea that within our culture and society, there is what's agreed upon, like you can almost look at it
as like the generalized other in sociology, that there are these ideas that are.
(06:46):
Norms.
Sort of. It's almost looking at norms as if.
They were cultural ideas.
Yeah, and that there is a hierarchy within the culture of what imposes itself on everything else.
Have you heard of the Overton window?
Explain.
Okay, so this is like a political science concept. The Overton window is like, what are the topics
(07:10):
that we can talk about publicly? And then like, if we start talking about how the CIA actually has
access to alien bio weapons, that's not in the Overton window, Fox News and CNN, we can't talk
about this because this is conspiracy land. What's the difference?
Well, I mean, I guess you could say like within the cultural like taste of society, I guess taste is
(07:32):
probably a better way to look at this.
What their preferences? Cultural preferences?
Sort of what we allow. What we allow to exist, what we allow to speak upon.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
Besides the things that we feel that are so disgusting or like repulsive that we just
don't even bring them up or conversate about.
Well, I mean, in some fields we do. I mean, like if you think of like gore films, for example,
(07:56):
Terrifier 3 just came out. This is not a plug for it, but it's just a blatantly gore-fest of a film.
Unless they want to pay us.
I'm all in. I mean, Art the Clown, I don't know if you've seen it, man.
Bro, I don't watch any scary movies. I watch optimistic happy movies because that's what
I want to film my brain with.
Let me put it to you in perspective. In the first movie, there's this one kill scene, right?
(08:17):
Oh, yeah.
He captures this one girl and he's got her friend. The friend is strapped into a chair,
you know, like into like this torture chair and Art the Clown is this just killer.
And he pulls across a curtain and there's the friend, I'm pretty sure he's fully naked,
hanging upside down, like arms and legs sprawled out. And he just starts sawing her from groin to
(08:38):
head and making the friend watch. That's the kind of movie. And this movie has such a cult following.
So it's like, you're right, you know, it's funny. We would not speak about this in general
populations between people, but these sub-genres such as horror and gore films exist.
There is a niche people that are very cultish towards it.
Yeah, exactly. It's funny because-
(08:59):
But that doesn't represent, I would say that that's a subculture. That's not American culture.
Okay, I'm still confused what hegemony is.
Hedge, well-
Look it up, brother. Look it up.
You know what it is, man? It's been a long day.
Humble thyself, humble thyself.
It's been a really long day.
Humble thyself to that muddy power of Google or chat you between.
The first place that I learned about hegemony was in, what was it, Western Civ I. It was explained
(09:25):
through like empires essentially. But cultural hegemony is the dominance within a society
by the ruling class that shaped the culture of that society.
There's one ruling class that has like a monopoly on culture.
Sort of. It's looking at it through a sort of class lens.
(09:47):
Bro, get that chat GPT out here, bro.
It's not a simplistic thing to discuss and I almost don't-
Bro, chat GPT makes everything simplistic.
Are you going to interview, are you just going to talk to chat GPT?
Yeah, Matt, you're fired.
I'm joking, I'm joking.
Nah, that's all right. I mean, the way that I look at it is through like-
Hold on, hold on. What is cultural hegemony?
(10:09):
Cultural hegemony is a concept developed by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci.
It refers to the way a dominant group in society can control and shape the cultural norms, values, and beliefs of the broader population.
Instead of relying on force, the ruling class exerts its power by getting people to accept and internalize-
World view as the norm, making it seem natural or common sense.
(10:33):
This allows the dominant group to maintain power and control because-
Okay, so like if, for example, there's literally like three media companies that are the parent companies of all the media in America, right?
So it's like because there's like a small ruling class that has all the influence power per se.
When it comes to like mainstream media, there's this overturned window of what is discussed and what isn't, and they can kind of influence based off of that.
(11:01):
Here's a great example on this. The DEI industry, right?
If we look at nonprofits and why they have these DEI initiatives and these committees within this company, nonprofits operate by obtaining their funding from funders.
Those funders can be state government, local government, federal government, private equity,
(11:22):
or just general donors. Now, when you're looking at private equity and state government, federal government, for examples,
they will set the parameters on what it is and how you can reach these fundings.
So essentially, the way that I'm understanding in part, this is not obviously all of DEI,
(11:43):
but the way that I'm understanding that they can exert this sort of idea or way of thinking on all of these companies is financially tie them to it.
So now they have an incentive to gain financial backing because they adhere to this.
Because they get a golden star. State-driven DEI funding. Well, they don't get golden star, they get money.
(12:04):
So is it really about diversity? You know what I mean?
So this is where the cultural hegemony kind of comes in is now because of the way in which DEI initiatives are structured
and the funding that is backed to them is set by these very high powers within society in that sort of private realm, in the nonprofit realm.
(12:27):
And at the governmental level, I could argue you could change it. We are in a democracy.
But within a company, you're not going to change their DEI initiatives at all because it's all set seemingly by these outside groups.
Sure. Okay, so this was... Tell me if I'm too cynical. Maybe I'm consuming too many CIA...
(12:50):
You're too cynical.
So to me, the smartest people in the world that have influence and they're also a part of the more dark triad tendencies,
and they work for the intelligence services, even like foreign intelligence services.
Like right now, Russia is putting so much money into internet bots that are basically funding the Jewish posts,
(13:15):
like pro-Israel posts, and then they're also funding pro-Palestinian posts because they're not starting that division in America, right?
They're rather putting more fuel onto the fire because their long-term PSYOP is to create civil unrest and more lack of trust in our institutions and in our government.
(13:36):
That's like a long-term goal for China, Russia, and Iran. And so to me, it's like...
Iran.
Iran, I'm sorry. Yeah. Iran. Iran. Iran. Iran. Iran.
Iran is looked at as the bad guys.
No, but you ready? The people are actually... There's so many amazing Iranian people that are fighting against their tyranny of their government.
(14:00):
And I think the long-term future of Iran is very optimistic if we can get rid of the dogmatic Islamic fundamentalism.
I mean, part of the reason the government that is...
There's movements against the Iranian government by people that left Iran, but realistically, it's the United States' fault why the government is the way it is.
(14:27):
Well, that's debatable. But the US did partly cause the situation in Iran by not allowing them to have their...
I think that an important point is everyone wants to blame the big person.
Yes.
But the problem is that the big person, because they're big and they have all this influence, and they're going to be the world's police, like the US.
I think this is a similar argument where when everyone studies history, everyone shits on England.
(14:52):
And it's like England was the douchebags of history, and they probably were, right?
But I think also just because they had the influence and the power, they're obviously...
Because they're a part of more decisions than not, than the decisions that went sour, they're obviously going to get the brunt of the blame.
And I think America, that's very akin to that, that because we created all these coups in other countries that we were policing,
(15:16):
and we were trying to use intelligence operatives to kind of infiltrate countries and try to create democracy around the world.
And when some of those kind of programs backfired, we obviously have to take the brunt of the responsibility.
You know what? I'm going to partly agree with you, but I am also going to explain why we should be so critical of the United States and England, for example.
(15:40):
So, do you know what the Treaty of Westphalia is?
It sounds familiar, but I don't know.
Treaty of Westphalia essentially was at the end of the 30-year war in Europe.
It set the basis for the modern nation state.
And really, the main takeaway point is state sovereignty.
Now, the issue with this now is that, say we have France, Germany, England, all of these are nation states.
(16:06):
They all have sovereignty, which means they have their own right to govern their own people,
and they should not interfere on the governance of others.
Like, the French should not interfere in the governance of the Germans.
This is where colonialism comes in and sort of this, where Kant calls it, an immoral nature.
The Treaty of Westphalia was not applied to the rest of the world by any means.
(16:30):
So, nobody else had sovereignty, but besides Europe, at least this is the way that some people think about it.
Now, there's also another alternative, like speaking on historians, it's important to not get too focused on,
oh, Europe's racist, so because they're non-European, they're going to, you know, subjugate everybody else.
There's also this idea that David Graeber brought up on debt, that a lot of conquest and this expanding conquest,
(16:55):
and even the slave trade, really came from these constant debts that people had, like based on credit.
And they had to pay off the debt by...
Exactly. And so, like, Cortes, for example, was somebody that took out so much credit,
even though Cortes conquered Mexico, he had to constantly conquer because he was constantly taking out credit
(17:17):
and constantly accumulating debt. And I believe he had to go back to Spain at one point because he was so poor.
He was so indebted and he kept conquering. And this is actually something that's similar with the slave trades.
The African towns that were on the ocean were started to become based upon, like, the classical credit systems that they had.
They started becoming indebted, so then they started taking other people's slave.
(17:41):
They started taking people as slaves and then selling those slaves.
It's interesting when you break your understanding on history and you clear it.
So, like, this is what Karl Popper means when it's like, not everything is just racism.
Let's look at it from another perspective and we can find something else.
That's why David has really great takes on this stuff.
Oh, he does. But that's where...
(18:04):
The debt thing is wild because, I mean, right now, look at American debt is... Yeah. Okay, so hold on.
I know, I kind of swung that topic there. No, no, no. This is a fun one though.
So, could we say that the real racists, the real assholes of history are the financial industry?
Okay, so here's a great example. There's this idea in both...
(18:29):
Goldman stacks were coming for you. Huh? Goldman stacks were coming for you.
Well, actually, you know what? The IMF is one of the most evil organizations on the planet. What is the IMF?
The International Monetary Fund. It was one... The IMF and the World Bank were created following the end of World War II.
You don't like any of the data from the World Bank? You don't trust it?
No, it's not that I don't trust the World Bank. The World Bank and the IMF are two different organizations.
(18:50):
Sure.
The IMF is the one that gives out loans and hands out structural adjustment programs.
In other words, say, Niger wants a loan from the IMF because they're indebted,
because they had a previous dictator that took all their money to Paris and, you know, again, nobody in Paris was, you know,
or Switzerland was saying anything about this. They just were happy to take the millions of dollars and this dictator took it from Niger.
(19:16):
But now let's say, hypothetically, Niger has a democratic elected government and this government's trying to fix the problems that the past corrupt dictator left.
They would go to the IMF and say, we need a loan. We want to structure our programs right now.
So because we only look at debt in the sense that David Graeber breaks it down as a moral issue,
(19:38):
and he brings it up like historically both in Christianity and Buddhism, that a debt, somebody that lends money, a creditor,
technically is immoral and so is the person that takes out debt is also technically immoral.
But the IMF, where it is really immoral, is it imposes structural adjustment programs on these countries.
(20:01):
Now, this is real neocolonialism. So let's say Niger has school programs and they want every kid to go K through 12 and they are funding their lunches.
The IMF will come in and say, we're going to give you, you know, $5 billion, but guess what?
You're cutting all your lunch programs and they often always go after social services first,
(20:23):
which is contradictory to Africa's like core being because they are a very historically communal continent.
Like, they're very similar to Japanese or Native Americans, that idea that community, they're not entirely individualistic as we are in the West.
So that's where this idea of like now Western cultural hegemony is now being imposed on African nations through the IMF.
(20:51):
Fundamentally throughout all of human history, those that have resources and now that's, you know, those who control the banks,
those who control the money supply, you have the influence, right?
If a world is based off of that and if value is transferred via wealth, then you, the person who, or the groups of people who run that,
(21:14):
you fundamentally are the most powerful people in the world.
I think this was more enshrined following the Marshall Plan and the current monetary system of the globe,
where money is, where essentially our money is based on debt, essentially. It's so much to explain.
(21:37):
No, seriously, David, I was listening, David Graeber has this like two hour long history just-
On debt.
On debt.
Yeah, I gotta check this out. Do you know who Dave Ramsey is?
No, I don't.
He's a Christian financial expert.
Okay.
Really great stuff. The thing that makes him unique is he is anti-debt.
(22:02):
So he doesn't have any credit cards his whole life, doesn't believe in taking out car loans, any of this.
His parents were in like the real estate business and so he got his real estate license and he knows how to use mortgages.
But besides that, no debt. And he talks about how-
Oh shoot, this is actually my- That's so funny.
(22:23):
Every 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. I do my like four, seven, eight breathing. You're breathing your nose for a second.
I got you.
Seven seconds, you hold it and then take it slow. I'll have to do that right after this.
But Dave Ramsey is just like really counter-cultural in that sense.
People call in and people are like, yeah, so I got $100,000 in student loan day.
I got my Mercedes-Benz 20- And he's like, how much money do you make?
(22:46):
And the guy's like, I make $60,000. And then he's like, listen brother, and it's great.
But it shows us that we're all- Okay, this is the point that I want to make.
I got it. So Dave Ramsey talks about how people always say, well, I need a good credit score.
(23:07):
Where the fuck did this concept even come from?
200 years ago, motherfuckers didn't have a credit score and you could still move in the world.
The financial industries created this whole concept of a credit score.
And the crazy thing is Dave Ramsey talks about how you actually don't need one, technically.
How you can actually get a car, you can get a mortgage.
And what they do is instead of looking into your credit history, they can look into your other financial histories.
(23:31):
And there's all these back ends that historically were the ways that we would actually measure
whether a person was able to receive a loan from the bank.
And now the whole financial industry has created this whole narrative around a credit score.
Why? To get people on a credit card early, to get people using.
And I had multiple credit cards and I've never paid one penny in interest in my whole life and I never will.
(23:55):
I treat my credit card like it's a debit card.
And I probably made around $2,000 off of credit cards in the last maybe four years.
And I'm grateful for that.
At the same time, I do realize that I am probably spending more money than I would if I didn't have credit cards.
And there's other psychological things that makes it more cognitively taxing.
So I don't know if I fully agree with Dave Ramsey's point, but it does bring up kind of to be a little bit more skeptical
(24:22):
in regards to how Kanye West had dragged him in here.
He goes, who the hell invented the sidewalk?
And it's like, yeah, nobody thinks about that because it just blends in.
There's so many things in our life and in our culture that we just assume is life.
And we're just so focused into our time period that we need to kind of be a little bit more wider.
It's also the taste on our time period a bit.
(24:43):
So we think of it as an immoral thing to not pay our debts, correct?
Like if you said, oh, that person didn't pay his debt, the general implicit bias of society would be like bad person.
Do you think it's not immoral?
Well, I mean, let me explain.
If there is immoral debt, you believe that you shouldn't have to pay it.
(25:06):
Well, so historically there was this thing called in Judaism called the Jubilee.
Graber, this is like every 700 years or like 70 years.
I believe it was every 50 years.
They essentially did debt cancellations periodically.
Yeah, the Old Testament, baby.
But they also had the bond servitude, which is basically like slavery where instead of paying off your debt,
you would basically use, you would like sell your own labor and say, hey, I'll work for you for 10 years.
(25:31):
Well, those were indentured servants, which you're thinking of, because that's where somebody.
So this is...
But I'm sorry, go back to the Jubilee concept.
So the Jubilee concept, actually, there was this group, economic group in Boston.
It may have been Jeffrey Sachs's organization.
I'm not sure because Sachs is involved with so many things.
And they ran this model of what happens if we canceled people's debts,
(25:57):
not debts between corporations and corporations and banks, just people's debts.
People's debts towards the bank?
Towards...
Just overall people's debts.
I don't know the exact details on individual debt.
Individual debt, exactly.
So if I take out, you know, my graduate school loans are probably going to be $34,000, for example.
And, you know, say I owe, I don't know, say I owe $5,000 left on my car.
(26:22):
Say overall I owe, I don't know, add in miscellaneous, say I owe $40,000 in debt.
Essentially that it would just cancel it out.
They found that it was bad, but it was not as bad as if we just kept letting debt continue to grow as it does.
Exactly.
Because there's probably a huge kind of physical capital labor cost to that because then people aren't as productive.
(26:50):
And the entrepreneurial people don't have the resources to actually make the products that increase GDP and lower the cost of goods and services.
Okay, so here was a great example that Graeber brought up that I just, I was like, holy crap.
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, right?
And all the banks were buying up all the mortgages and they failed, right?
(27:13):
We, I mean, this is in part government's fault and also greedy financials.
It's a combination of things going on.
We bailed out the banks, but everybody that had these bad mortgages got kicked out of their homes.
Graeber brings up the idea of what if instead of just giving the banks these massive checks, we bailed out everyone with a mortgage?
(27:37):
Then the banks would be paid anyway and the banks would still exist and the system would still go on.
So from my understanding, but they wouldn't, but the banks wouldn't get the amount of money that they were looking in the short term.
They would get it in the long term.
Well, the banks failed because everybody was defaulting on their debts and these were loans that nobody could actually ever pay off.
(27:58):
They were insanely predatory loans.
And so what David argues is if you just gave the people the money to actually pay them.
Well, if you just paid off the mortgages, now you have people with houses and the banks are owed the mortgages that they're owed.
Therefore, they would not fail.
Do you see what I'm saying?
We have this.
How quickly we forget.
One of his big arguments and he cites the Jubilee of this and classical debt cancellations that kings used to do over their lands during the Middle Ages was this idea that, okay, so both the creditor and the debtor can both be immoral.
(28:30):
And it depends entirely on the situation.
But wouldn't canceling everyone's debt, wouldn't that increase inflation?
So this is where I feel like they don't fully address it.
We now also have such a consumeristic society where we don't have a game plan tomorrow.
(28:51):
Our values are horrible.
Our values are horrible.
We don't have a game plan.
If you cancel people's debt, they will accrue a pretty substantial amount of debt tomorrow.
Oh, absolutely.
And this is in part personal responsibility and as well, you have to think the marketing companies have neuroscientists developing programs to sell you stuff.
So if we could just constantly do this, basically the argument is overall, we are a debtor society and it's gotten to the point where it's not working.
(29:19):
It's out of control.
It's out of control.
You know, how can people pay like 26% interest?
Like how how like how could we ever afford a home?
You know what I mean?
It's like I if I have one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bank, let's just give a round number and the houses where we live five years ago were four hundred thousand dollars.
I would have had a substantial down payment and not that bad of a mortgage.
(29:43):
Now the same home is nearly nine hundred thousand a million dollars.
You know, it's like I can't even catch up with inflation and I'm doing things that I'm supposed to be doing correctly.
And this debt then enslaves us because we need to take out this debt to even survive.
And this is where it becomes immoral.
(30:04):
Now it's it's such a hard conversation to say to like, oh, wipe out debts.
I mean, it makes sense.
But I mean, Biden had the debt forgiveness program, the what the the student debt forgiveness program.
Well, that was cancel.
What Biden did there was he took people that should have had their loans forgiven, but they were due to technicalities and because the whole student aid programs are are so just corrupt.
(30:29):
They screw people out of possibilities.
And essentially what Biden did was kind of unscrewed all the people that were screwed out of it.
Isn't it true that student debt is the only debt that if you die, your family has to like take on?
I don't know if your family has to take it on, but it's a debt you cannot get out of.
I know that for certain. It doesn't matter.
(30:51):
Yeah, no. Well, dude, that's why I turned down.
That's why I said no to Columbia.
Like, I want to go to Ivy League school.
I want to be there.
But the irony is in a social work program, I get the credibility, but yet I'm financially in slavery.
Well, so thinking about it as a social work program, we're fighting oppression.
But yet you are literally selling me a form of oppression.
Yeah, yeah. And it's enticing.
(31:13):
So it's like a sweet candy. You know what I mean?
It's like neuroscience, bro.
Exactly. It's an Ivy League. It's a freaking title.
It's a name. Harvard, Wharton. Not Wharton. Penn, you know, U Penn.
Like, yeah, it's a freaking name.
Okay, so why don't we end on some like some like crazy freaky neuro consumer neuroscience studies.
(31:36):
Tell me why I'm buying what I'm buying.
Dude, this one lab, this one neuroscience cycle lab, I don't know where.
They stuck Apple users and Android users in fmRI machines.
And what they did is they basically showed them these different news stories of like negative things about Apple and negative things about Android.
And the crazy thing was that in the Apple users, like dramatically more than the Android users,
(32:03):
when the Apple users were shown negative stories about Apple as a company,
in the Apple users brains, their empathy circuits were lighting up so much more than when the Android users saw stories that said bad things about Android companies.
And so what the researchers concluded was that the marketing campaigns for Apple were so strong that they were able to convince the, you know,
(32:27):
non-conscious parts of our brains to have deep empathy for the richest company in the world and to feel bad when people bash it.
And so that's a pretty substantial accomplishment, whether it was explicit or implicit on the marketing team's part of Apple.
But consumer neuroscience.
(32:49):
You know what I took away from this? That I need to hire Apple's marketing team.
To unwire me.
To make a cult, I mean religion, and market it to people. I mean, preach it.
Preach it.
Slight of hand.
Remember, every single, you know what?
(33:12):
See, words matter, bro. Cursed words. We're wrapping this around.
Words matter. And markets have implicit. This is why Donald Trump can say nothing and everything at the exact same time.
Because it's so vague that everyone just puts on it what they want to believe.
You know, I wish Donald Trump would just own being the corporatist that he is.
Because he, once again, these people are entrenched in their worldview and there's nothing stopping them.
(33:37):
We can all have our own opinions about how people should and shouldn't react. These are how people are.
And I think it's more important to just understand why they are the way they are and then try to be as truthful and really getting to the root of why they are the way they are instead of trying to change it.
Oh, I'm not trying to change it. I think he's hysterical.
You almost have to look at it at a completely different level. You can't take it seriously. You have to laugh with it.
(34:02):
Dude, the spaghetti monster for president 2024. Let's go.
Spaghetti. Are you spaghetti?
What is that religion? Apostopharian. Apostopharian, man, I'm telling you.
You know what? Every time somebody asks me who I'm voting for, I say King Charles.
And I start, God save the king.
God save the king.
Why do we even have a revolution?
Soon we'll see. You'll remember how the night will be.
(34:25):
It's the Hamilton song. It's so good. We'll be back.
And then it goes, when push comes to shove.
I don't remember.
I'll kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.
Oh gosh, it's going to get copyrighted.
Singing Hamilton.
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