EDdy: The decline. The end.
EDdy: We're talking here about the decline of empires, not…
EDdy: In an erudite, informed kind of way.
Kal: No.
EDdy: We're talking about it in the way that Eddie and Cal do it.
EDdy: So, you sent me a very interesting message, you always do, which is why we.
Kal: Thanks, John.
EDdy: all the time, but you sent me a very interesting message. Can you just… can you just go through that? I mean, honestly, you could literally…
EDdy: Read your message right now. I don't.
EDdy: And then… You make…
EDdy: points, I don't even… yeah, I mean, there's, like, a ton of good points in here. I can, like, nod my head.
EDdy: But, like, let's… can you go through there? I mean.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: Yeah, I mean, I literally just want you to maybe take a break every little bit for a little comment. I can chime in.
Kal: True.
EDdy: I think what you've put together is really great, and I think it's… it's worth you and I talking about it.
Kal: Cool, alright. Well, we talked last time, I believe, about the British Empire, because you had reminded me as you were talking.
Kal: About how, … yeah, I think you're just remind… you know, we were talking about the administration of the U.S. right now, the craziness.
Kal: And it just occurred to me as a… as you were talking last time, that I had just watched
Kal: Some sort of snippet of…
Kal: the messiness of Henry… what is it, Henry V? I don't know. Henry VII? I don't know, one of those Henrys.
EDdy: Johnny VIII is the one who, created, the… Church of England?
Kal: Yes, that's the guy. Henry VII, thank you. See, I…
Kal: Eddie, you are effectively my Wikipedia….
EDdy: Henry V is the one from the… is the one from Agincore, the, you know, once more into the breach, dear friends, once more, he invaded, northern….
Kal: Am I talking to an LLM, or am I talking to a real person? I think I'm talking to an LLM.
EDdy: I'm gonna say something you would never say. I am the cyber Hitler. Oh, no, wait, there is one. Never mind, keep going. There's no way to know.
Kal: Nowhere to know. I could be having a really… yeah, this could be me just by myself having a conversation with an LLM every time… every week, and I don't know it. Anyway, I was just thinking about Henry VII, and what… I guess what occurred to me is… Yeah, that's what it does.
EDdy: As, like, as dads do.
Kal: I have a.
EDdy: By the way, this is such a dad conversation, but please continue.
Kal: Good point. A lot of time on my hands with my children. But I… I was just thinking… okay, so, to step back.
Kal: I follow a guy named Ryan Holiday, he's really into Stoicism. Maybe he got me… not… he really didn't get me into Stoicism, but I definitely follow his… his writings, because he's really into the Stoics. And he'll often say things like, hey, don't worry about the craziness going on, because the Roman Empire…
Kal: blah blah blah blah blah, they were… they went through a lot of crazy stuff, and I'm always like, yeah, you know, I can kind of relate to that, but honestly, I can't. I can't relate to the Romans. They're way too long ago. I can't relate to the Persians, any of these great empires, because I wasn't there, I have no idea. But I can relate a little bit more to the more recent history of England, because I think it's a little fresher.
Kal: And other… other empires. And one thing…
Kal: was simply that, what would it be like, as my thought experiment, to live during the time of Henry VIII? You are… you're a Christian, which means, basically.
Kal: the home base is… is Rome. You are… the Pope is…
Kal: closest thing to God, this is your world.
Kal: There's no context outside of that. And you suddenly, your king suddenly decides he's gonna break up with them because he doesn't like that they won't let him get divorced, and he's pissed about that. And you're like, what the fuck?
Kal: You can't just… Take our whole… my whole life.
Kal: and turn it upside down like that. And I… so I just…
Kal: as a thought experiment, just thought that would have been very disorienting as a person. Anyway, so that's kind of what led me to think about this stuff, and the other thing
Kal: to jump ahead, because I don't want to go too much into that, is just, like, what is the difference between, you know, so can you get through those? As a country, can you get through a crazy king? Yeah, there's lots of examples of countries having gone through crazy
Kal: Royals that were out of their minds. Some smarter than others, many not.
Kal: Many, many were very poorly, poor leaders, actually. And…
Kal: what then leads to the decline, specifically, of Great Britain, which has this massive peak in the 1600s to 1800s? It's just at the…
Kal: The height of its, power.
Kal: is that necessarily… can we necessarily assume that the same will happen to the U.S? Because I think a lot of times what the U.S. mindset is, is often based on our…
Kal: so-called ancestral connection to England being a colony of England.
Kal: And so, as we've talked about,
Kal: the U… as we've talked about, the U.S. decline, it's always… sometimes it's… it's kind of almost hiddenly, or…
Kal: In the background, connected with the assumption that, just like England fell, so shall we.
Kal: To spec… to… to, … Case in point…
Kal: And I was gonna look this up, and I forgot. There was a quote about 3 or 4 years ago, right after COVID, where…
Kal: where England… this is where China was taking over Hong Kong, kind of, like, fully, right? So there's… so Hong Kong is having protests, and they're rebelling.
Kal: And England decides, at that moment, to say to all folks of Hong Kong, hey, if you ever want
Kal: citizenship or visa status, whatever, you have it. If you… because you're a former English colony, you can come to England and we'll help you speed up the process. You can become a resident of the UK. And the Chinese government's response was.
Kal: Very upset.
Kal: And basically, like, England, you're… you're an old, aging, archaic, decrepit empire.
Kal: Nobody cares about you anyway, you're worthless, or not, you weren't worthless, but you're basically…
Kal: Non-significant, so whatever you want to do, who cares, you're about to die anyway. And the second part of that, that was not said by the Chinese government, but that I heard in my head, and I'm sure maybe they heard it in their heads as they spoke it, was, and U.S, you guys aren't far behind.
Kal: You're, you know, all y'all are about to fall. This is the century of China, century of the East, etc.
Kal: And I thought to myself at the time, yeah, that's probably true, I mean…
Kal: that's basically the statement that's not being said here, is that, yeah, UK falls.
Kal: And guess who's right next… up to bat? Is the U.S. is about… the Empire of the U.S. is on… has a ticking time bomb.
EDdy: It's not gonna last forever, we can see that.
Kal: the writings on the wall. So anyway, it just made me think about that, and one of the things that came to me was simply, but what was different about the UK
Kal: And the only thing that comes to me again is… Well, what happens when…
Kal: 60-70% of your so-called land disappears, which is what happened after World War II to England. They go from a massive empire where the sun never sets on their empire, to basically a teeny island again, where they started.
Kal: And therefore.
Kal: what kind of impact does that have on the GDP, on the economy? So that's why I kind of looked up and was just like, I'd like to compare some, you know, another power in Europe, similar, maybe culturally, you know, so I looked up France versus the UK 40 years before World War II and 40 years after to see, like, what was the trajectory of both
Kal: nations, and it was interesting to see just that
Kal: they kind of start similar. Of course, UK is in a much better place, you know, 40 years before World War II. They're a very dominant power, very industrial.
Kal: But you… but France is getting up there, too, they're becoming more industrial.
Kal: And then after World War II, you see a massive decline in the UK,
Kal: And you see kind of nothing really interesting happening with France. I just kind of have this great, you know, period from the 60s to 80s. After that, they started to decline a little bit, but not massively. I think they just kind of kept it going. So anyway, that was just my thought and my observation.
Kal: Threw it into the chat room, and …
Kal: I'm curious your thoughts, just because there's a lot of… I think there's a lot of hand-wringing and expectations from the whole world, including ourselves as the U.S, that we are on this trajectory of decline, just like….
EDdy: Yeah, no, no, man, and I appreciate you kind of having this thought and putting it out there. I think that's one of my favorite parts about our conversation. I also hope it's something that we can share with other people.
EDdy: not that our thoughts are authoritative or the most well-informed, it's just that we're just thinking these things out loud. Yeah, it would be great to have an expert here on a panel, but honestly, AI can play that role if we're very careful about how we use it.
EDdy: You just can't ask it things, you have to have well-developed questions.
EDdy: So… Yeah, we could have….
Kal: AI be, like, a, an expert. We can have it personified.
EDdy: It could be the… it could be… it could be challenging our assumptions, and then just kind of introducing new narratives, pushing back, maybe, a little bit on the things we say, which….
Kal: Absolutely.
EDdy: is, I think, my biggest complaint about a lot of… some of my favorite podcasts, actually.
Kal: Hmm.
EDdy: Like, I enjoy real time with Bill Maher, I do enjoy getting who the guest is, Joe Rogan's podcast. For certain guests, it's really good.
EDdy: Sean Ryan is another one, probably not as popular as either one of those, but he does a lot of, …
EDdy: He does a lot of Special Forces guys. It's turned political recently, which I think is really sad.
Kal: Interesting.
EDdy: Because, the political stuff, it just kind of splits your audience. And before, I think he had an audience that…
EDdy: had values that transcended partisanship, and that was my favorite part about him.
EDdy: and some of his guests were that they were practical. They were like, look at this problem, and no one's fixing it. Politicians have let us down, which I think is the correct political attitude to have.
EDdy: You… we… I said this before, man, this is my central thesis about this whole podcast.
Kal: Partisanship and ideology are designed to split us.
EDdy: You have interests, economic, real, practical interests as real people.
EDdy: And I think politicians take advantage of our natural ability to band together according to whatever we perceive our interests are. So they change our interests. My interests, you know, my kids, a livelihood.
EDdy: being, you know, I have values about political expression, being able to participate politically. Those are values people in the world don't have.
EDdy: And other parts of the country, in other parts of the world, how Europeans envision their political participation is different than how we do. I wouldn't say more or less free, it's just different. I don't like it. I do like the American system. I like
EDdy: you know, the Federalist, system with… I have a state, local government, I like that.
EDdy: It can be tailored to my needs, needs of my family, my community. I like the fact that we have a federal government. It is stronger, maybe, than it should be, and I think we're seeing that in this administration, because this particular president really flexes executive power, but he's not the only one to do that. He's not the only one to do that. Others have done it. This is not a partisan issue, it's not….
Kal: Elon.
EDdy: Power, power's sake is part of our political landscape. You've seen it from all parts. Mitch McConnell, right? He's one of the most consequential Senate majority leaders we've ever had.
EDdy: Whether you like it or not, this Supreme Court, and the decisions the Supreme Court has made, is a direct legacy of his hard work in this area. He has been unabashed about how he has seized power in the Senate. He's broken norms to do it.
Kal: This president as well. Absolutely. Other presidents.
EDdy: You know, I remember when people used to actively talk about the Obama administration's drone program.
EDdy: American citizen.
EDdy: no due process, and his Secretary General defended that, right? Oh, it's a due process because we have a kill list, and we talk about it at NSC meetings, right? Okay, so Eric Holder. So, like.
EDdy: The executive has gotten more and more power accumulated.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: as other branches of government has shrunk away from responsibility and become less popular, everyone now expects the president to do everything. And now we've gotten to the point
EDdy: in this country, where we are basically… and I say this, I love Guatemala, but…
EDdy: basically, these Central American countries are so tired of the corruption, so tired of
EDdy: The government not really serving the people.
Kal: Right.
EDdy: They'll take a strongman, And accept that he's corrupt, and maybe a dictator, if the strongman.
Kal: produces results. That's what's happening in El Salvador. Right. That's what's happened in Nicaragua.
EDdy: Guatemala's more complicated, it's a more sophisticated landscape in this regard, but people are desperate there, too, and they've….
Kal: It's even Korea. I mean, if you look at the recent history of Korea after World War II, and then… I shouldn't say right after, I'd say more… after the Korean War, I should say, maybe a decade or so later, you had a very strong dictator running… practically dictator, I'll put it in quotes.
EDdy: Yeah, they've had… they've had very authoritarian governments, but they're… it's a country run by the… the strongest economic families.
EDdy: Right.
Kal: I mean, even if you think about the miracle of Korea's economy, it was initiated by one of the strongest
Kal: dictatorial-like presidents. I mean, yes, on paper he was a president….
EDdy: board.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: It's not a, yeah, it's not an unusual story. Because it requires coordination. They don't for China, right?
EDdy: Exactly. Central planning, organization, and a complete run of the table politically, if you make the right decisions, can lead to success, economic and,
Kal: Which, again, I would say is interesting, because if we look at, again, the empires of Europe, a lot of them were started and initiated during a time where the monarchs had a lot of power.
Kal: ….
EDdy: England's kind of like an exception in that, very early on in… I mean, early on, I mean, for them, history is very long. So for us in American, I feel like early on, they had a strong parliol… I mean, Parliament had an army!
EDdy: that fought the king's army at one time, right? I mean, England's an interesting case. Well, anyway, all this is to bring it back to this idea that, just kind of vibing off of some of the things you said.
EDdy: I agree with a lot of the things you said in the outline of the picture is the decline of America. People talk about it. Ray Dalio has a really great video series on this, actually, and since he's
EDdy: you know, I think some of the best political philosophers are actually economists, and talk about the economy.
Kal: Our… what? Oh, economists, yes. I thought I said economists. I was like, whoa.
EDdy: No, no, no.
EDdy: Or journalists, I guess. So Karl Marx was a journalist. He talked about the economic roots of political history.
EDdy: you know, people who took up the mantle of his analysis and called their system Marxism.
EDdy: Or talked about communism.
EDdy: that comes from the Communist Manifesto written for an England, an English union. Those ideas of, like, well, this is how we solve the problems of economic inequality and the errors of the capitalist system, this is how we fix it.
EDdy: it wasn't workable. What a nice thought, it's just not workable. So, and we, you know, it's been tried, people always argue, but yeah, but they didn't do it right. I'm like, yeah, man, that's how the world works. There is no utopia, there is no, like, let's try it again under different circumstances. This is the world we have.
EDdy: And in this world that we have, capitalism, as it's played itself out in the United States, inherited deeply from the UK, from the United Kingdom.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: capitalism, as it has worked itself out here in the United States, has led to, first of all, because of capitalism.
EDdy: A country of immigrants. A country where, despite the political flavors of the day that hate immigrants, not new, it's a wave.
Kal: Right.
EDdy: America goes through many different kinds of cycles. One of them is this religious fervor.
EDdy: It has this religious Christian revival since the colonial period that is cyclical. People turn to God and get mystical, and they, you know, millennia society, they talk about, like, the end of the world on a cyclical basis. It happens here in America all the time.
EDdy: The other thing that happens is an anti-immigrant settlement. Immigration is the engine of this country.
Kal: Oh my gosh.
EDdy: Just like the capitalist engine, it's tied to the capitalist engine. The capitalist engine goes through cycles. Capitalism has cycles. Boom and bust.
Kal: That's a good point.
EDdy: competition and monopoly. And that's what makes capitalism vulnerable to forces like communism.
Kal: Isn't….
EDdy: The whole point of the Marxist analysis is that capitalism has these built-in weaknesses, and one of the built-in weaknesses is that the capitalist-owning class needs an educated workforce to work in their factories, but that very education is what makes them conscious.
Kal: to their clock.
EDdy: white, and helps them organize, which goes against the interests of the capitalistic powers.
EDdy: Which makes sense! All of human history is just a competition for resources and power.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: I think we've become a lot more enlightened and conscious as a society, as our brains have developed, about what that can look like, and different levels of technology
EDdy: Both…
EDdy: both societal organization has changed, as technology hasn't changed, and we are capable of a lot more than we used to be.
EDdy: law and organization on a level, that was not possible.
Kal: Absolutely. I mean, I think that that is… you're hitting the nail on the head, which is… I just saw a reel today by…
Kal: how did I see this? I don't know, but it was a Noam Chom… recent Noam Chomsky, right? …
Kal: Interview, and he's going on… he's….
EDdy: Yeah, yeah, I'm here.
Kal: What's going on about….
EDdy: He makes some… hey, look, man, he makes some really good points.
Kal: He does.
EDdy: The point about manufacturing consent, that's real, and that's a playbook that gets used pretty well by authoritarian, even capitalist states that aren't authoritarian democratic states.
Kal: Yeah, he was going off about how every single job is tyranny, every single job is, like, worse… it's more tyrannical than a government, da-da-da.
EDdy: Yeah, this thing is hilarious, coming from an academic, by the way.
Kal: Yeah, I know, and I was sitting there, and I was just thinking, you know, I get what he's saying, and I kind of want to feel the injustice as he's talking. I can definitely tap into that, like, oh, this is terrible. But at the same time, if you look at it from a first principles attitude.
Kal: If you take away all the…
Kal: It's almost like he's making some things really… that are simple, very complicated, and other things that are complicated really simple. One of them is all companies are tyrannical. That's making a more complicated, nuanced situation into something black and white, which is not the case. On the other hand, he's making….
EDdy: And workers versus companies, yeah.
Kal: And then I think the other thing he's doing is making something simple fairly complicated, which is what we're doing as a society
Kal: is extracting resources from the Earth and figuring out how to share them in a way that's as… I guess… I won't say equal, because I don't think we're shooting for equal all the time, but it's… we're trying to at least, yeah, fair to.
EDdy: Fair and equal two different things. I would say fair.
Kal: Fair to some degree, and…
Kal: that has been not just any kind of recent, you know, like, the US or anything, it's… that's been the effort of humanity for thousands of years. How do we take the resources from the ground.
Kal: And with technology and innovation, How do we make them more accessible
Kal: So that more of us can survive easier, and that's what… if you look at technology, that's what it consistently does, is make… basically, it depreciates the value of all of… you know, if it took 10… if it took a thousand people to get a crop of whatever, of corn in the old days, now it takes 10.
EDdy: Yeah.
Kal: And then now it takes 1.
Kal: It creates.
EDdy: It creates efficiencies. It lowers the costs.
EDdy: of… of valuable services and commodities. Absolutely. Which makes them… you look at the, you know, supply and demand curve, now you have a lot more supply. Yeah. You fill the demand, and then the cost goes down. Right.
Kal: Because there's basically a representation of how easy it is to pull these resources out and distribute them. If you think about a company, you could call it, on one hand, tyrannical. On the other hand, you can call it a very efficient machine at, again.
Kal: resources and distributing them.
Kal: government.
Kal: I always think, like.
Kal: Do I want the government to be running my Safeway? Do I wanna… do I wanna replace…
Kal: my grocery store, which is extremely efficient. I mean, you can argue, you know, don't like this or that, but effectively, it's a fairly efficient system, has a lot of variety, it's fairly cheap, it's all available for me, I don't have to go kill a chicken and cut its head off when I want a chicken. Do I want that system to be replaced by a government…
Kal: new. We've seen that. We've seen what happens to the, you know, you look at the reservations of the Native Americans, and when they were put on land where they couldn't grow their own crops, the only way to get them food in these terribly desolate areas was government cheese, government flour, government sugar, and the result of that
Kal: was fry bread. I mean, that's how fry bread got created, was government supplies, and then what's the result of that? Long term, it's sky-high diabetes, sky-high diseases, chronic diseases that
Kal: were not there before. Suddenly, they're there, suddenly. And it's because the government is now the distributor of food, they don't have any choices. Here's your… you know, we're acting like the grocery store. So that's the negative aspect of that.
EDdy: So this fuels my view on what you just said, right? There's a lot of context, but, you know, we can edit that out, I guess, that I… that I try to add. So I'm coming from that space of… I view things practically, I zoom out, I look at the history.
EDdy: as far as I understand it, of humanity. I'm curious about humanity. When people talk about wage slaves, I'm like, okay, but I'm sorry, but, like, then what is Noam Chomsky's solution? He's talked to… he's pointed to a handful of things.
EDdy: and mostly are anarcho-syndicalist forms of government, like what Catalonia had for a very brief period during the Spanish Civil War. And if you've read Homage to Catalonia, Orwell, who was
EDdy: had inclinations to be like, this is great, he was a communist, right? He believed in that idea that we could do it, and back then.
EDdy: I think it was, to me, very… wow, like, this is a new concept. We had a very limited idea of what was happening in the Soviet Union.
EDdy: And so it was like, wow, maybe they're pulling this amazing thing off.
Kal: Right.
EDdy: They weren't, and very good-intentioned people didn't know it until they knew it. And George Orwell found out during the Spanish Civil War, and that's when he came back to the UK. Interesting. His whole… his whole motivation was anti-fascist. He knew what…
EDdy: oppression looked like, and he could hear it coming towards Europe. And he went to Spanish to defend liberty and democracy.
EDdy: And he believed that communism could work, it's a new idea. He found out, oh wait, these communists, these Stalinists who've come here.
EDdy: are oppressive, authoritarian, and he is the one who came out of that. There's a debate about who coined it, but this idea of totalitarianist states, came out of that. He's like, oh, wait a second, like, this is basically the same
EDdy: Total result of fascism is oppression.
EDdy: And so, I like that. He's non-ideological, he's nonpartisan. He's like, hey man, this communist thing sounds like it makes a lot of sense. I see there's people over there making it work, it looks like it works. He's like, oh wait, no, it doesn't. Let's try something else. And then the fight becomes… then people group up against fascism and defeat fascism. It's a terrible idea.
EDdy: But people have forgotten that, and now we're in that moment again, where all these ideas are out there. So when I hear… I hear people complain about the manga movement, I hear people in the manga movement, and it's like, to me, it's like… I feel like a lot of people who are new
EDdy: to voting for Republicans who've come in through the MAGA movement.
Kal: I think correctly.
Kal: this George Orwell moment of.
EDdy: Well, hey, look!
EDdy: I know this idea.
Kal: Interesting.
EDdy: sounds like, oh wow, maybe it's unworkable, but, you know, maybe the president can make this happen, and what's the alternative? There's this other alternative that I don't like the way it feels to me.
EDdy: let's try it. And I… and I'm… and I'm… what I'm hoping is that people will lose their faith in politicians, lose their faith in
EDdy: parties and an ideology, and come back to the sensible middle, which is where America was made. America was made in the sensible middle.
EDdy: And there have always been powerful interests trying to get what they want and take more and more from common people in America. That's always how it's happened.
EDdy: And yes, they are the ones who prefer immigrant labor. They are the ones who prefer illegal immigration. Uncontrolled immigration is always the powerful capitalist.
Kal: Mmm.
EDdy: And it's always the middle America who sees the threat to their economic base, and now….
Kal: Middle meaning middle in the country, or middle,
EDdy: I'm talking about median. The median….
Kal: Canadian, okay.
EDdy: economic… you know, median on wage, median on possessions, on resources, on access, you know.
EDdy: So to me, it's like, yeah, the capitalist classes bring in immigrants, they don't care if it's legal or not, they want bottom-line costs, they want second-class citizens, and after the 1920s, and the United States made a grand social bargain that, like, you know what? Actually, like, you have to take care of people. Social Security, income tax.
EDdy: capitalist classes hated the income tax. They still do! Grover Norquist still is out there banging on about the income tax.
EDdy: President Trump is talking about tariffs paying out for… that's how… that's how capitalist classes think. They think, like.
EDdy: how can I lower the cost of production, and then have… and take as much as I possibly can? Yeah, yeah. Right?
Kal: So when you lend your faith to an ideology or a party.
EDdy: You're basically handing the keys over to a group of elites who will, the very first moment they can.
EDdy: …
EDdy: take advantage of the common people. That's how it happens, and it's fine. That's greed. It keeps the system going, it keeps people honest. It's our job as the people in the middle, the median, to be greedy back, and be like, no, I won't give you that. No, I'm voting you out of office. Democracy, the voting booth is supposed to be
EDdy: Our… our ability to counteract
EDdy: their high amount of resource allocation and power. It is a very small amount of power we have as a democratic voting bloc. It really is. The system is designed to give us only an incremental small amount of power more than we had maybe 100 years ago.
EDdy: But we use it, we leverage it, but the system gives you the choices, right? And the system did not want to give the United States the choice of Donald Trump, because the system didn't think Donald Trump
EDdy: would give to the system the benefits it wanted, because he talked like someone who was going to give it all to the people, and the system didn't like that, and the system did try to disqualify him and push him away. It really did, you could see it work. I mean, you don't have.
Kal: Because….
EDdy: conspiracy theorist.
Kal: Yeah. To see how different elites in his own party.
EDdy: and the only other party that exists, try to push him out, right? In ways that they don't try to push out others, George W. Bush.
Kal: Sure.
EDdy: W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton. These are not candidates who the system tried to destroy.
Kal: True.
EDdy: And so President Trump came in talking about how, oh, look, I'm not attached to a party. I'm not attached to an ideology. And people were like, people understand the thing I'm talking about. Ideology and party are dangerous. Do people know that?
Kal: This is not a country that easily lends itself to personality of cult.
EDdy: But it transformed into that. The system adopted him. The system took him in. And now, it… anything that looks like he's not part of the system is theater. It's powerful factions fighting against each other. This is the kind of shit that happens in China.
EDdy: powerful factions fight against each other. They do corruption sweeps. That's Xi Jinping came to power, made his faction the most.
Kal: Right.
EDdy: faction by an anti-corruption suite.
Kal: Right, right, right.
EDdy: So, like, that's… we're in a consolidation phase of power now, where someone who was a populist has been adopted by the system, and now we're seeing the system via the Supreme Court, via the Congress, via powerful economic elites, embrace him, especially in this last election, right?
EDdy: And so, to me, it is very interesting. You look at these waves, that… and we talk about the decline of America, there are white supremacists who talk about the decline of America racially.
EDdy: Ray Dalio talks about the decline of America economically. His biggest measure of this is the adoption of the US dollar, and the strength of the US dollar. And he has a great video on this, and he has put together a team that has historically analyzed
EDdy: this… he says, forget empire, forget colonies, forget… all that exists for economical reasons. So it's almost like a Marxist, materialist reading of… he would never call it that, because it scares people away, because people only know what they know, right? They hear Marxist, and they're like, oh, it's a communist, and you can't be that, right? I mean, you shouldn't, it's a terrible idea, but yeah, you can if you want to, who gives a shit.
EDdy: The point is, Ray Dalio comes at this from a Marxist point of view, which is, let's look at the material.
EDdy: Analysis of history.
Kal: You're talking about the core Marxist ideology, which is less….
EDdy: What about market analysis?
Kal: Yeah, yeah. Which….
EDdy: Which… it comes from historical… the historical dialectic, which he did not… he invent… he did not invent a dialectic, okay? This is an old philosophical idea. I'm blanking. If someone is actually listening to this, they were probably able to tell us who. I'm not gonna look it up, because we don't have time for that right now.
Kal: Send it to us. But this idea that history is a combination of opposing forces.
EDdy: Philosophically.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: Intellectually. Thesis and antithesis, fighting and resulting in what they call a synthesis.
EDdy: So Marx took this idea and applied it to economics, and said there are opposing forces in every economic system, and then a new result comes from that. And so.
EDdy: the economic organization of human societies have gone through the medieval phase. The medieval system is an economic system. We know it.
Kal: Right.
EDdy: political system with a king and nobles and vassals who belong to the land. But it's an economic system. You have a bunch of people working for subsistence whose entire political and economic future is provided by a baron, a tiger.
EDdy: aristocrat who then has obligations to the vassals that are on his land. The nobles participate in a political sphere that is completely exclusive of vassals. Only nobles play in this game. It is among nobles.
EDdy: that the Magna Carta was created. People talk about Magna Carta as, like, a precursor to the Constitution. No, the Constitution of the United States of America is a unique document because it talks about a political organization based off the idea that all men are created equal just because they were born.
EDdy: Yeah. Right? Then, later, people added… that was the Declaration of Independence, but then later, people added to the Constitution, which is an actual political framework. Oh, but not slaves, because if you don't say slaves, then you'll lose half the country. Okay, political compromise.
EDdy: So, to me, I agree with Ray Dalio. I agree with the Marx analysis. I agree with the materialist explanation that materialism won't tell you everything you need to know about a society. Values matter. Ideology, as I've complained about, affects how we make our choices, and they're non-rational.
EDdy: But I think that the… the economic…
EDdy: idea of what decline is, is very powerful here. Because, if you look at it through that, instead of, like, oh, you lost…
EDdy: power and hegemony throughout the world, that's what people… I think that's what most people talk about when they talk about the U.S. decline. We won't be able to have… we have embassies.
EDdy: throughout the world, right? The United States is one of the only diplomatic forces in the world that has an embassy in most countries. 206 countries, I think I saw on their website.
Kal: Which is wild.
EDdy: Which is wild. Most people, like here in Jakarta, where I live, I know there's an American embassy, they send out little notices about, like, consular stuff, how you get your passport. But, I mean, there's only a handful of countries that really have an embassy here. In the region, in Southeast Asia, there are countries that have the embassies here, because they have direct relations with Indonesia. But you're talking about, like.
EDdy: I don't know, Guatemala has a three-person embassy, right? Like, Canada…
EDdy: It's just, like, a dozen people, I think, something like.
Kal: It's alright.
EDdy: Yeah, so, like, even very large, powerful economic country….
Kal: Hmm.
EDdy: countries with economic power have very small embassies here, but the U.S. is present everywhere.
EDdy: We have military bases overseas, we have diplomatic posts, that… and we have, we influence multilateral organizations, we influence the WTO, we appoint the head of the World Bank, we're a board member in IMF, we direct a lot of its programs.
EDdy: we are the… still, even with this administration still the largest contributor to the UN, we, you know, direct a lot of the work of these multilateral organizations, and have set the pace for the American…
EDdy: way in the international system, and we're losing ground to China.
Kal: Sure.
EDdy: losing ground to Russia, in that sphere, in this political sphere of influence, but it is expensive, and I think that's what the American people and the MAGA movement have complained about. Like, it is expensive to maintain this, and who's getting the benefit from that anyway, right? Yeah, yeah.
Kal: Well, that is a good question, is… and so, you know, as we… I do agree… well, I would say I would see a decline in the soft power that we have around the world as we start to pull back. Maybe we do reduce embassies and consuls around the world, and maybe that's what the people want, and that's what the administration wants. That said.
Kal: Again, I would say…
Kal: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, like, if you lose land, you're losing real GDP. Those are… that's hard… you know, what happened with England as they… when they had India, let's say, under their…
Kal: under their power, under their reign, was they could count that… all that activity as their own economy. They could say, that's ours, we're… and, you know, it was a great deal of it.
EDdy: economies work differently now, and so you can have high productivity out of a… land no longer figures in an advanced economy. Land is not related at all to GDP. It is for medium and low-income countries. So, to me.
Kal: Well, land is not, but the activity that's happening on that land, and the people on that land… Right.
Kal: distributed to GDP, and so if you
Kal: You're England and you have India producing.
EDdy: The highest productivity activity happens on the computer.
Kal: Right, well, that's true, too.
EDdy: You don't need that much. You do need energy.
Kal: Think about it, if you wanna….
EDdy: a better individual.
Kal: Yeah, energy can be good, but I do think that that is… that's where I would still say…
Kal: even with soft power, we're still not… and it's kind of a game, right? You can say, well, what's the GDP of the U.S? It's still… as many… as much soft power is going on, it doesn't count activity in a place where it has influence as its own…
Kal: activity. It's not counting that, like, oh, okay, we have a great relationship with, you know, Panama, so we'll count Panama's GDP as part of ours, which was what was happening with England. Now, that said….
EDdy: Probably, yes.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: tuned.
Kal: Right, exactly, that's true. That said, I do see, you know, there is a question, of course, like you're saying, about what happens as we pull back our hands all over the world, and pull back our economy, and pull back our military. What is the result? And…
Kal: And is that…
Kal: Is that the same kind of level of decline that, again, UK had, or is it a different kind?
EDdy: And this is the problem when you compare things… I mean, you know, so I actually do like the exercise of what does… let's define it. What do we mean by decline?
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: You could do economic, like Ray Dalio talks about. You could talk about political, as we were just mentioning. I think most people think political. What does decline mean? Influence? Power? Territory? Is it the economic influence?
Kal: Specifically?
EDdy: part of influence, right? So for me, when I think of the decline, and then, you know, I think white supremacists talk about cultural decline, which is this weird, ideological, made-up, racial thing. There is no white race, like, sorry, I know.
Kal: It's a challenge.
EDdy: box and a government form, but it's a made-up thing. It's a powerful made-up thing for a lot of people.
Kal: I was just looking at… one of my clients is, Pakistani, and I was looking at an application, you know, she was applying to a school, and
Kal: I mean, she checked white as the demographic. I just… I thought it was interesting, I was just like, you know, what do we… we think we have these numbers, and they mean something, as if we… as if they're, like, clear. It's like, well, who knows what, you know, what all that means.
EDdy: She probably should have checked the Asian, but then that brings up its own problems.
Kal: Yeah, she just, she chose she didn't want to.
EDdy: Right, because there's only, like, 3 races according to that form. Anyway, the point is, I'm serious, there's 3 races, and there's, like, 5 ethnicities.
EDdy: And so, yeah, it comes to me, I think this is a better conversation when we define what we mean. So, you talk about Henry VIII,
EDdy: I don't think he was crazy. I think he did what's in his own personal best interest, and completely changed.
Kal: the way society, culture, and politics works to suit his own personal needs. Absolutely. I think that's a really great comparison, and he's not crazy. He's bold.
EDdy: Very much. And did not care about norms.
Kal: and defined.
EDdy: He did not care about Norms so much, even his personal relationship with the Bishop of Canterbury did not mean anything to him. Right. And he would execute whoever he had to execute for the raw political exercise of power that is in his direct interest, that he could, if he wanted later, say that it was in the interest of his country.
Kal: But….
EDdy: And he wouldn't have said country, he would have said kingdom, because it was a kingdom, not a country.
Kal: That's a good point.
EDdy: And so that, I think, is comparable to now. I think you have a leader, whether you like him or not, I think you could argue that he, for the sake of
EDdy: power has broken a lot of norms. Whether you like those norms or not can be debated, and people have different opinions. I respect people's opinions. They might differ from mine, but he has broken long-standing norms in political power. Every single administration, every single political organization in the United States
EDdy: Has always followed its own naked power interests.
EDdy: And has only been willing to break some norms.
EDdy: There's a strong, hard limit to how many norms a lot of previous administrations were willing to break. The Kennedy administration sent in the National Guard to integrate a school.
Kal: True.
EDdy: Right? In the 70s, National Guard troops shot and killed students, right? It was at Kent State?
EDdy: That's….
Kal: And if you think about the post-Civil War, I mean, that was a very.
EDdy: We're talking about… well, you don't even have to go back that far. We're talking about a very powerful, unilateral, implementation of executive power. But Kennedy then, on top of, you know, integrating the school via force, via the army, who had rifles, by the way, you know.
EDdy: Then broke a norm about, nuclear diplomacy.
Kal: I was crucial.
EDdy: And people blamed Kennedy's missteps for causing the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the brinksmanship there could have ended the world. Right. And there's a school of thought that there were so many norms in the way that things are done that he broke.
EDdy: But even then, there was a hard, bright line that it did not cross, and every administration kind of, like, plays with that line. We see this all the time, playing with that line constantly.
EDdy: the Congress, the Supreme Court, the President, state governments playing with that line, back and forth, back and forth, it's a tussle.
EDdy: This administration is marked because of how much, how frequently, and across how many different.
Kal: parts of society. That's true.
EDdy: To have a cultural takeover of museums, institutions of higher learning, they're leveraging federal money.
EDdy: People are like, how can we leverage universities and tell them what to do? Well, because they get federal money!
EDdy: Federal money, because we've had decades of the federal government growing and being involved in everything.
Kal: Right.
EDdy: Liberals, who loved this idea.
EDdy: now we're regretting it. Because now, whoever's in charge of the executive.
EDdy: So, it's just the historical forces of the gathering of executive power, the increase of the federal government's power. Up until now, liberals have been okay with it, because they're like, well.
EDdy: the DOJ is independent. So, the fact that the DOJ goes into countries and goes into states and tells them how they can and can't vote, and how they should hold elections, liberals like that when they're desegregating schools, when they're making elections more racially.
Kal: Yingwo when they're.
EDdy: when they're dismantling state rules about voting that make it harder for other races to vote, liberals liked the fact that the DOJ was everywhere. And they thought, okay, well, the DOJ, though, is separate, it's independent.
EDdy: Not legally, not in the way power is imposed in this system. It was a norm. The norm is that it's independent. The norm is that the federal bank governors is independent.
Kal: Is it.
EDdy: the Consumer Bureau Protection Agency, that the state… you know, all of these agencies in the federal government that are legally, statutorily under the executive branch.
EDdy: Liberals have been building up their power because states don't have policies they like, so the federal government gets more powerful. Guess what?
EDdy: It works the other way. If Trump doesn't like the way DC or Chicago or New York does policing, he can use federal money.
EDdy: emergency statutes. He can use all of these levers of power that conservatives for decades have been saying, don't do that.
Kal: No, interesting.
EDdy: And liberals were like, we're gonna, because we're gonna solve racism.
Kal: Right, right.
EDdy: poverty, we're going to create equality by force, unilaterally. Now it's being used against liberals' interests, and now they're like, how can he do this? He's breaking a norm. Yeah, it shouldn't have been a norm.
Kal: in, like, a.
EDdy: in law the way conservatives have wanted for so long. Yeah, the irony is very palpable.
EDdy: the irony is palpable. There are very poor conservatives who are traditional Republicans who are actually… have been complaining about liberal overreach, the powerful executive for decades, and who don't like this administration. Right. So they're just always suffering, basically. They're never… they're never quite happy, because the government never gets smaller. You know, I'll give you a little stupid example.
EDdy: Right? You've heard of the stories of government agencies that cut all this money, it went up on Doge's report, all of receipts, the government, the wash… you know, the spokesperson of the White House has been talking about all this money they've cut and spent, and government overreach, government overreach.
EDdy: they slashed all this money from the budget in September, you're gonna see that they're gonna report that they have cut 300,000 people from the federal workforce. You're gonna see that. Why in September?
EDdy: At the end of the federal budget year, the people who got riffed, sorry, they were subject to a reduction in force in federal government, which is when you fire people for non-personal reasons, which makes it.
Kal: Boom.
EDdy: You've eliminated a function. They got rid of USAID. They shredded down the Consumer Protection Bureau to its legally, statutorily.
Kal: Clean minimum, interest.
EDdy: Hard minimum. Same thing for the Millennium Challenge Corporation. By the way, that was conservative… that was a neocon thing.
EDdy: They loved that PEPFAR, AIDS in Africa, these programs, right? Those are done through a lot of these foreign aid places. They've dismantled all of these agencies, they've gutted them. When they weren't legally able to destroy it completely, they took it down to its bare minimum.
Kal: Right.
EDdy: …
EDdy: Right, and so they did all these things. Some of them are arguably illegal because they were created by statute by Congress, and only statute can remove them, but they went ahead and did it, because the executive has a ton of power. And so, a lot of these firings take effect on September… at the end of the budget year.
Kal: Hmm, interesting.
Kal: So they're still working then, or are the….
EDdy: USAID was working right up until August 15th.
Kal: Oh, interesting, okay, I didn't know that.
EDdy: And so, some of them were put on administrative leave.
Kal: As soon as the announcement.
EDdy: It was made back.
Kal: Okay.
EDdy: Is it May or something?
Kal: Got it.
EDdy: In July, a lot of them were fired, but paid money, and then a lot of them worked until August 15th to help shut it down.
Kal: Wow.
EDdy: Now, the only remaining USAID employees are on administrative leave until September. Then, that's when the government will very giddily report that they have cut 300,000 people from the federal
EDdy: You know what they're not gonna say? They're not gonna say how much money they've had to reestablish for programs that they cut. They're not gonna… they're not gonna say that, because there's.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: To replace money in programs that cut.
EDdy: So they did cut….
Kal: Meaning new programs that they've started, you're talking about?
EDdy: Got it. So, think about this. In the last year, I have lost 50 pounds.
Kal: Go! Congrats, by the way. You look great.
EDdy: I gained 60 pounds.
Kal: Oh.
EDdy: Right. That's what you're gonna hear in September.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: We lost 300,000 jobs, we cut those. We cut X billion dollars of money.
Kal: But you weren't supposed to say the second part, that's the, that's the trick that they're using.
EDdy: They added 200….
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: jobs, because they realized they cut a bunch of stuff they didn't know what it did.
Kal: Yeah, yeah.
EDdy: I actually have sympathy for this. The federal government is too large. It has grown with every administration. They add their own little piece of it. Absolutely. And it becomes this, like, Frankenstein's monster of all these pieces out of the federal government, contractors, programs.
Kal: Yeah. Even the New York Times, I mean, if you listen to The Daily.
Kal: on some of these episodes, they'll…
Kal: plainly admit, a fairly liberal news organization, like, well, you know, I can't blame them wanting to cut the government. It has gotten over… bloated and all this stuff. And I think there's a certain…
Kal: aspect of society where we relate to that. You know, you look at…
Kal: a good example is the UK. They're… they're, yes, they declined, but they're also massively bureaucratic. They're famous for being bureaucratic and inefficient. I mean, it's one of the worst bureaucratic, over-bloated systems in the world. So there's certainly an argument. I mean, I… I'm a….
EDdy: You couldn't open a lemonade stand without filling out rims of paper.
Kal: Exactly. And you think about it, there's just so much, like you say, what does that do to… what does that do to business? What does that, you know, and you're talking about China, a place like China, a place like Indonesia, where if you want to start a business.
Kal: you know, there's not much red tape, you just start it, you just go. And does that lead to a lot of innovation and growth? It does… it often does. When I was… when I moved from California
Kal: Which I had lived in for 12, 13… well, Southern California, I lived in about 12 years. I do not remember a single
Kal: maybe one single, skyscraper being built. I remember the cranes and stuff, and I was like… and maybe it was a remodel, too. It was not even, like, a brand new building. I remember going to Asia, and I could not believe
Kal: Everywhere you look… everywhere you turn, there was a new skyscraper going up everywhere, even in a small town… a small city.
Kal: And then we moved back to Texas.
Kal: And I was like, wow, I…
Kal: it's not to the level of Asia, for sure, it's nothing compared to Asia, but I had to admit, there was…
Kal: there were many skyscrapers being built in Austin, Texas, and in Dallas, where I was spending time.
Kal: And I had just had not seen that in California. It just… that era was over. Things were on the decline, if anything, and in a place where there really weren't many rules and a lot of red tape.
EDdy: business is booming in Texas. So I do think that there's a reality to that.
Kal: which is the more red tape you put on stuff, the more bureaucratic you have a system, it will slow down growth. It will… I mean, look at the… I mean, look at the, …
Kal: famous example of, like, the bullet train in California. I mean.
EDdy: It's a joke.
Kal: It's a complete joke.
EDdy: You can't….
Kal: They built a single mile, I think, going to Bakersfield. I mean, there's a quote of even Gavin Newsom saying.
Kal: sitting on a podium and saying, you know, we're so happy and proud to be here, we've got the first mile done. He even says in that speech, yes, some say that a bullet train to Bakersfield is a place… is a train to nowhere, but still, and it's just like….
EDdy: Why would you say that out loud? Well, anyway…
EDdy: No, no, I hear you, I hear you, and so we're getting back to economics, right? Which is….
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: The reason why I like economics as, like, the center of mass for a conversation is because it often bends politics to its will more often.
Kal: than the.
EDdy: opposite.
EDdy: And every time… every time politics has tried to bend economics to its will.
EDdy: It has eventually failed. My opinion, it depends how you define these terms, so you could argue it either way. But my point is this, my point is that, you know, my little breakdown of the administration and all these other things, these are huge forces that have been acting on the American… on the American political system for decades. Yeah. It's an accumulation. None of this…
EDdy: There's a lot of stuff here that's unique and novel, but the overall trends are what created the situation we're in right now. When liberals complain that the executive is unilaterally doing all these things, it's because it has accumulated power often through liberal overreach when it comes to what I think are perfectly fine goals.
EDdy: Of, you know, racial equality, of helping…
EDdy: underserved economic people, etc. But, once again, how you do things matters.
EDdy: And because it was done through executive overreach, through executive orders.
EDdy: Because it was done in, like, court battles, and not through…
EDdy: mass democracy, people didn't show up to a voting booth and vote for integration in some places, and the federal government didn't like that. Right. People who were in charge of the federal government. And so, okay, well, that matters less now. Okay, but the problem is, liberals, it matters less now.
EDdy: And so, to me, you know, when I zoom out, that's why I say, I can argue against
EDdy: the MAGA movement or the progressive movement. Why? Because it's ideology-based, because it's partisan. It forms, initially, in this kind of gaseous environment where people just are discontent.
EDdy: And people don't think that the elites are running things well for them, and we want to change the system and pick someone who will come in from the outside. And the more desperate they get, the more extreme the outsider is.
EDdy: And that's what we have right now. Yeah. …
EDdy: I think the elites of this country were forced to cede more territory to the common person back in the 1920s, when they created the social contract after the market crashed.
EDdy: After communism, and after anarchism, Were dangerous political forces that threatened to destroy the livelihoods.
Kal: You're talking about, like, the FDR era?
EDdy: they made a grand compromise, and that was, I think, one time where things shifted to be more equal, and they actually had to give up, but the elites only gave up power and money when they absolutely have to, when it's an existential.
Kal: price.
EDdy: With the advent of technology, this flows into our AI conversation, they will no longer be in a position to be threatened by people anymore. And that's the problem. Why? Because the army of the future
EDdy: is controlled by them and a button, and the people, the poor people who used to be in that army, and you would have to convince them for ideological reasons or partisan reasons to join the military or support violence, those National Guard troops in D.C. right now are people.
EDdy: They're humans.
EDdy: Those ICE agents who are going around, those are people, those are agents. You had to convince them to do that. And how did you convince them? Hey, man, illegal immigration is a huge problem, it's uncontrolled, desperate, wild criminals are coming in, why don't you do something to help us? Okay, I'll do that.
EDdy: Even if they're lying to themselves, that's why they're doing it as a human. Now imagine that ICE, the military, police, armies.
EDdy: are drugs.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: And that there are… there's a group of 5,000 people in the United States who own everything, who control that with a button.
EDdy: You don't have to convince anybody of anything anymore.
Kal: I hear you.
EDdy: That, to me, is the client. It's scary.
Kal: That's… that could be very scary.
EDdy: That's what I mean by decline, is that, like, the Elite will be able to take 99% of the pie now.
EDdy: They have ceded some benefit to us common people and to poor people, but they don't… they won't have to do that anymore. That decline.
Kal: And how does this current wave.
EDdy: how does the MAGA populist movement, which wants to create
EDdy: more benefits for the common person here in America.
EDdy: That movement is seeding the ground, is laying the groundwork.
EDdy: for that future of decline where we have nothing. And….
Kal: This administration is handing over that power to these forces out of.
EDdy: directly personal interests.
Kal: You know?
EDdy: But the power being used right now was built over decades by other people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who had also who had good intentions.
EDdy: Who created these tools of power, but the entire through course, the entire history of this trend, is the concentration of power.
EDdy: Yeah. Away from where it went in the 1920s. And it's been, little by little, it's created successes for the middle class after World War II, that was a blip.
EDdy: of cooperation politically, that was a blip, of ceding the ground to the masses. And now, since then, all that has happened. And you can look at any economic indicator you want. You can look at real wages, you can look at the concentration of wealth, you can look at the Ginny Index, you can look at equality.
EDdy: you know, the concentration of power of money, it's all trending towards what I think is the inevitable decline of the elites have finally found a way to no longer need a middle class. That's decline, and it's political, it's economic, but it's most economic.
Kal: Let's say the trend then, just to summarize what you're saying is, if the trend is a, …
Kal: A centralization of power.
Kal: Instead of a decentralization where, you know, you have, …
Kal: more power, maybe, distributed. So if you have this centralization of power away from the people.
Kal: That could be one thing, but at the same time, one thing to consider with AI, so one aspect of it is, like you're saying, it's the ability to exert power more easily as a central power.
Kal: Watch people, snoop on all our conversations, et cetera, and maybe control and maybe intervene more, more directly, in a way that they couldn't before.
Kal: On the other hand, because AI is so disruptive.
Kal: And will, as we've said before, will cause a mass, … A mass wave of unemployment.
Kal: You could also envision another… wave, or another instance of what happened in the 1920s and 30s, which is…
Kal: You had all these people suddenly…
Kal: On the street, in the bread lines, all this stuff, and that causes another angst and another desire for…
Kal: for another… a new agreement, right? So, I mean, who's to say…
Kal: which way it will go in this country. We know that in other countries, it's gone more totalitarian.
Kal: But it could happen that there's another FDR wave, right? Because there's so… I mean, again, I would say that…
Kal: There does seem to be some sort of connection that I have yet to kind of study well enough.
Kal: Of this delayed effect of the movement from… …
Kal: I don't know, agrarian to industrial society in the US, and I don't know that that necessarily results in
Kal: in the Great Depression, I think maybe something I heard, I'm not sure. Again, I feel like it's still a bit of a loose connection there, but it's possible that there's all these, you know, again, there's a lot of folks that are like, I'm desperate, I'm hungry.
Kal: the government needs to do something, the government needs to take care of me, or give us more power. I don't know, it's interesting to play with that idea, and … it'll be interesting to see what happens, actually.
EDdy: Yeah, I mean, me too, right? But to me, I think…
EDdy: What is dangerous, because right now, you can create that movement that you're talking about.
Kal: Hmm.
EDdy: through mass action. That's how… that's actually how the Naga movement happened, right? They took control over their political destinies, they…
EDdy: They pushed off
EDdy: this traditional Republican cast, they, held liberals at bay, created a movement, and it's a very successful political movement.
Kal: Yeah. And it, you know, I have to say.
Kal: I give them less credit for succeeding.
Kal: than I do giving… fault.
Kal: To the liberal movement for letting themselves.
EDdy: Like an air?
Kal: You might have talked to the reality that it was just like a… it was a slam dunk. It wasn't… it wasn't a hard shot.
EDdy: I'm not talking about the… well, I'm not talking about the leaders of the MAGA movement. I wouldn't give them credit. I would give credit to the common people who are like, you know what? This makes sense to me. The other stuff doesn't. I'm talking about those people, those people who showed up at the ballot box, who talked to each other. This is heavily discounted in liberal circles. I do not know why.
EDdy: The MAGA movement isn't just Trump and a handful of people convincing a bunch of stupid people to do stuff. It's not that at all. We're talking about.
Kal: I don't know.
EDdy: thinking people sharing.
Kal: I agree.
EDdy: grassroots action. This, I mean, liberals used to like grassroots action. They weren't manipulated, they weren't pushed into it. Think about normal, everyday Americans who talk to each other on social media, talk to each other over the phone, talk about how crazy the world is, and they have gone with this movement that they have passionately fallen in love with.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: It's not top-down.
EDdy: You're talking about a bunch of people who've connected in their angst, their fears, their anxieties, their hopes, you know, in my opinion, a misplaced nostalgia. America has always been a struggle. It's never been… it's never been a paradise for the medium class. Just even after the post-World War II period, where there's all this opportunity and mobility, that was a fluke.
EDdy: we, the medium, you know, voting class of people who, like, if I lost my job, if you lost your job tomorrow, we'd be fucked.
EDdy: Yeah. That's who I'm talking about, that's the middle America. Those people of different races, different cultures, they like different things. Those people, us, we have all this in common, and we have been successfully divided.
EDdy: You know, when I look at a person in the middle of Louisiana who rides a swamp boat, and who loves MAGA, and has all the MAGA stuff, has the golden sneakers, that's my brother, man. That's like someone who's in my boat. He just doesn't realize it. I wish there was a better way to convince him or her that we are in the same boat, and we're being divided by pretty superficial shit.
EDdy: Because the real shit that matters, like, my kids over there in the room, you know, that car in my garage, that shit is the real shit, man. That's just stuff about, like, can we live our lives? And this part is in bullshit, like, that, you know.
EDdy: that doesn't divide this median class that I'm talking about. Right. And the MAGA movement, I think, has been grassroots. I think people have, yes, they've surfed the wave.
EDdy: Just like with all movements, it's been co-opted, manipulated, pushed in the right direction, so the system can benefit.
EDdy: But that's why it's so important not to stay in the ideological pigeon.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: Why it's good to get out of the partisanship, why a personality of cult Is the democracy killer.
Kal: Absolutely.
EDdy: who might have been in the cult of, like, the, oh, I'm with her, Hillary, she's a woman, let's vote for her. Obama, Obama's great, Obama's, like.
EDdy: flawless, Trump, Trump is the king, he can do whatever he wants. No, man! That's ruin. That's a road to ruin. That's a road to wine. I'm worried that we're gonna get to the point where mass political action isn't enough. The consciousness that we can develop among each other that our interests are aligned is not enough.
EDdy: When?
EDdy: the elite can control us through technological means, and I'm talking about information manipulation, I mean, that's already happened. That's been happening. You think newspapers were owned by poor people? Come on.
EDdy: To me, I'm talking about robots in the streets with guns.
EDdy: It seems farcical, but they're controlled by AI. The elites don't even have to have anyone in charge of it.
EDdy: the III doesn't.
Kal: Yeah.
EDdy: It's when we lose….
Kal: You could have done that before. I don't think AI changes… It's the best one I….
EDdy: Not just AI, we're talking about autonomous weapons programs, we're talking about factory automation. You don't need factory workers, you don't need armies.
Kal: No, that's, you don't.
EDdy: The power… why? If Venezuela's doing so terribly, how come the people don't rise up? Because the military's on board. That's why. The military protects Maduro. It's like they did in Spain during its fastest period.
EDdy: Just like in Chile under Pinochet, this isn't new, this isn't, like, some amazing thing. Nicaragua, which is a quote-unquote socialist, Marxist, whatever, is controlled by the police and the military.
EDdy: If the right elite classes are co-opted, then you're done.
EDdy: the elites get the most concentration of power when they don't need middle-class people to hold the guns for them. And that… we are very close to that being the possibility. Class consciousness, democracy, our will as people will no longer be necessary. Because we won't even be needed
EDdy: in the factories where they make the drones. That's where they're… they're trying to get there as fast as humanly possible, so they won't have to create artificial partisanship and ideological fissures.
EDdy: That's what we're racing towards.
EDdy: I don't think it's a conspiracy theory.
Kal: I think that's just how power works. That's how capitalism works. It's the concentration of wealth and power. So you're saying it's more that the, … it's not so much about the technology, really.
Kal: Shifting that's causing… that could cause such a dystopian…
Kal: future, it's more about the political faction, factioning, where people are pulling apart from each other.
EDdy: Well, no, that's always happened. It's the tools are different now, so the tools are.
Kal: So you do think it's the… you do think it's a technology?
EDdy: It's the technology. It's absolutely the technology. Before you had airplanes, you couldn't travel halfway across the world. Now people do that on a regular basis in the middle… in the middle class.
EDdy: Well, we had fairly impressive technology as Russia, you know, the USSR, as North Korea, as….
Kal: China for a long time, demonstrated that we, even without amazing technology, you could still do that. You could still control people very….
EDdy: That's true.
EDdy: North Korea still has an elite class in the military who keep them afloat. Ditto for Russia, Russia has oligarchs.
EDdy: Right. And Putin kills off the oligarchs and no longer needed. They still need to manufacture consent in elections and fake elections. They need to do that to maintain their power. Sure. There's a future where they won't even have to do that.
EDdy: That's my point.
Kal: Well, they might. That's interesting. I mean, that, that, that could be, …
Kal: Now, of course, the counterargument to that would be that
Kal: AI is… while it is also… well, again, it centralizes power, has a potential to centralize power, also has…
Kal: It has the potential to decentralize power.
Kal: through, … if you were to use it in a way to break this, let's say, to point your target at the centralized power, you could also use it in a way to break things apart, too. It's very powerful both ways, right?
EDdy: You're right, and that's what the movie Elysium is, that's what the movie Terminator is.
Kal: Good point, yeah. Anyway….
EDdy: Speaking of Terminator, I must go.
EDdy: Yes, coming over, but once again, I cannot have a short conversation with you, Kevin. You stimulate my brain in amazing ways.
EDdy: And if that sounds erotic, good.
Kal: Yeah, well, you know….
EDdy: You owe….
Kal: You just get.
EDdy: me thinking then, and as you can probably tell, as anyone can probably tell from this, conversation.
Kal: We need to have more people listen. Let's get some… let's get some listeners. If you have something to say to us.
Kal: Come to our website, don't tellmywife.com, oh, no, sorry, don't tellmywife.pod.com, and leave a comment on this episode, as well as, of course, rating this positively. I'm gonna be creating a Twitter account.
Kal: And I'm gonna be, blasting, and I'll probably have Threads account, too.
EDdy: Just because….
Kal: That's right, that's right. X and… X and Threads.
EDdy: Whoa, whoa, X! Forenzo.
Kal: I'm not sure. I'm gonna create two accounts, and we're gonna blast both sides of the spectrum with our…
Kal: With our tweets. I don't know what you call them, our posts. So that'll be coming soon, so follow us on either one. If you're… if you're right or you're left, or anywhere in the middle, you'll find us.
EDdy: Yeah, wherever you imagine you are in this completely fabricated political spectrum that only serves the…
EDdy: You know, the purposes of the powerful.
Kal: By the way, I saw a great reel, to your point, that I enjoyed, which was, it was a… I love the nostal… you're talking about the nostalgia, how people love the nostalgia of the videos. I'm a big fan of the nostalgia videos, I'm kind of obsessed with them.
Kal: Because they bring me back to my 80s, childhood of simplicity. And there was one that, I'll put… I'll try to put it in the show notes, but it was basically, …
Kal: The caption was, the 1980s… You're a lower… you're in a lower-middle-class family.
Kal: And the image in the video was the most beautiful, decadent, suburban house, with everything perfect, and a beautiful pool, and a beautiful car.
Kal: And, this was called Lower Middle Class. I love that.
Kal: So, anyway….
EDdy: It's also an illusion, but okay, fine, whatever, let's….
Kal: Let's watch it for next time.
EDdy: I gotta go.
Kal: Yes.
EDdy: Yes, and enjoy your, lush lifestyle there, you know.
Kal: Thank you! Paying 30 cents for your, coffee. Alright, sir, great to talk to you.
EDdy: Okay. Bye-bye.
Kal: Till next time.