You know what, hold on, let me stop in because...
No, it's too late. I press mine, so let's start.
Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, let's start.
Great. Well, Professor, I'm really glad you gave me the time to talk to me today about...
Thank you, Sam.
My name is Sam.
Sam, Sam, yeah.
So I saw your video. A friend of mine sent me the video of you talking about capitalism, that went kind of viral. And you were like speaking about how a lot of people were like triggered or upset. They came on and, you know, started hurling insults at you and saying that you're brainwashed and you're like no actually you guys are brainwashed you know and you gave a really good presentation I watched the entire thing and I took notes on it.
I wanted to talk to you about the points you brought up in that video, but also add a couple points of my own, and hopefully we can have a nice discussion on, you know, on the issue of capitalism as a whole.
Yes, with pleasure. Go ahead.
Yeah, so, yeah, go ahead.
No, no, go ahead. I'm just recording it on my mobile so that we have a third option.
Great, awesome, awesome.
Yeah, yeah. And thank you for being patient with me, by the way. I've been so bad with the Zoom stuff.
No, it's quite okay. We've all been beginners at one point or another.
Okay, so great. Yeah, I like how in your video you said that capitalism is a zero-sum game that, you know, where disproportionately the poor vote against their own self-interest. They vote and act against their own self-interest.
And they're really brainwashed, like you said, to believe that, you know, the right-wing model of neoliberalism is actually a good thing, you know?
And that, well, when we see right now with the rise of Trump in America and how this guy could even get even a small percentage of votes, let alone, like you said, what, is it 40% of the vote and they're mostly poor people, you know, it's a reflection of the fact that, you know, the status quo of how things have been going for a long time has been doing such a disservice to people, even the left, it's the so-called left, because I don't believe American politics has actual left, you know, but the so-called left, the Democrats have really, in essence, thrown the vast majority of the working class under the bus and because of that people are, when they're so desperate they're willing to go to any fringe kind of a lunatic candidate just to maybe bring about a different situation than what was previously going on.
And we see what happened in Argentina right with this guy Milei who got elected. I mean, I knew from the very beginning, this guy is going to be disaster.
But the people on there who vote for him are still viciously, like viciously attack me on social media and on my YouTube saying that I'm crazy and I have no idea what I'm talking about and Milei is going to fix things and stuff.
So, you know, it's again, like a reflection of the fact that as capitalism continues to devolve and get worse and conditions get worse and inequality gets worse, people are more likely if they're not educated. If they're not given the right tools to think properly, they'll vote for candidates actually going to bring about worse results than the past.
So, yeah, those are the points you brought up.
Now, you talk about the economy and capitalism, and there's a couple of things you points you made that I wanted to address, such as the fact that in America, you know, social mobility, this is very profound because I actually done a lot of research on this. Social mobility is lowest among some of the lowest of the developed world in America. That means if you're poor, you're born poor, the chance of you go and making it rich in America is some of the lowest out of all developed countries.
And this is the place where they call the American dream of opportunity, of entrepreneurspirit, and all that. You completely debunk that. And you said that you have a lot of studies you've looked into.
And I have looked into a lot of studies myself.
Are you familiar with the work of Richard Wilkinson, Professor Wilkinson, who's like, you know, yeah, the disparate level, that book is really amazing because it shows that among developed nations, the more inequality there is, and America has some of the highest inequality of anywhere in the world, the more inequality there is, the less chance of social mobility for the poor.
So, you know, it completely shatters the myth that like, oh, the more inequality there is, the more people are motivated to get up there and work harder to make ends meet for themselves and make it success and stuff.
So yeah, please give me your thoughts on that a little bit.
Just to correct one fact, what I said was that Donald Trump got the vote of 40% of poor people. I didn't say that the majority of people who voted for him were poor. I said that he obtained the votes of 40% of poor people.
Which I agree with you is beyond shocking. I mean, I would have never expected Donald Trump to stand in for the poor guy, to represent the impoverished classes.
I mean, the guy is a multi-billionaire by hook and by crook, especially by crook. He's pro-rich people, his pro- is anti-welfare. I mean, he should have been, his anti-free trade, which is one of the main mitigating factors when you're poor. When you're poor, you can't buy cheap products, because free trade is there, and so and so forth.
And yet he succeeded to obtain the votes of 40% of people, and I agree with you that the reason was, the reason is that the working classes have been betrayed by their erstwhile champions, the left and so support.
The left as far as, I mean I also agree that there's no left in the United States, but what is called the left in the United States, they gravitated towards the middle class.
So now the Democratic Party represents actually the middle classes, not the working class. And the Republicans represent the rich.
So this is the division now. No one represents the working class.
So they are like ghosts. They wander from one candidate to another, trying to find a voice, trying to reunionize, trying to, you know, and there's no solution.
And the reason there's no solution as far as the working class is concerned is that working people are no longer needed. Working people are being replaced by automation. Shortly they're going to be replaced by artificial intelligence.
So the whole, 2% of agriculture employs 2% of the workforce. So working people are pasted, they are think of the past.
And it is the middle class and even more so rich people that are of electoral interest to parties.
So the working classes and the poor and poor people have been betrayed big time.
Capitalism is what we call in psychology a shared fantasy. It's a fantasy state. It's a paracosm. It's a virtual reality. It's an alternative reality fusion. It's not really. It's a pipe dream which is used by the ruling classes, by the elites, to control the masses. By affording the masseshope, which is essentially counterfactual, which is delusional.
So the elites foster a delusional disorder in the masses. And that is of course a great definition of religion as well.
Religion has had the very same role until the Enlightenment in the 17th century in Europe. Religion's job was to keep the masses at bay and to enable the elites.
And so now we have a new religion and it's called capitalism. And of course, everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law are experts on capitalism and economics. And they know best and they know better and so on so forth.
And this grandiosity is a barrier to learning and a barrier to critical thinking and a barrier to open-mindedness.
And in the absence of critical thinking, the masses are much more malleable, much more manipulable. The masses are incapable of thinking critically, so they are gullible, and they are victimized time and again.
At the same time, the elites are selling a narrative that this process of victimization is actually the precondition for social mobility and ultimate happiness.
This is an incredible situation, but not unprecedented.
As I said, the concept of the nation state was a kind of religion. Ideologies such as Nazism and fascism and so were kind of religions, secular religions, and religion itself.
Capitalism is not an economic system. Capitalism is a mechanism to allocate scarce resources, benefits, and so that the allocation usually should reflect inputs.
So the theory of capitalism is that resources and benefits, costs, rewards, benefits, resources, all economic means of production and so on, should be allocated in accordance with contributions and inputs. That's a theory.
So it's an allocation mechanism. There's nothing to do with the economy. It's just a way to distribute money, a way to distribute land, a way to distribute goods and services. It's a distributive mechanism.
And people make the mistake of saying, no, capitalism is the economy.
Capitalism is not the economy.
You have...
Well, okay. I want to address that point of the county.
You brought up so many points that I want to address. I want us briefly go about what you said before in regards to how, you know, the worst inequality gets, the more desperate people become.
And actually, like, there's a common saying that people say randomly, like, as if they're experts on it, oh, when things get really bad, then change will happen.
I say no. If things get worse and people are not educated, it will get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse.
Because if people are not given the tools, the critical faculties on how to think properly and actually observe what's going on around the world, well, it's not going to get any better. You know, so that is why.
And also the study, are you familiar with Dr. Boghossian from the Tufts University? The study that I put that on a couple of my videos, that study that was done, that found out that like you said, the zero-sum game, it actually gets way worse than people could ever imagine because all the mathematical models they ran through, they found out that at the end of the market cycle of all hypothetical scenarios, there's only one ending, which is all the wealth, not 99%, 100% of the wealth ends up in the hands of one person, while the 99% have literally nothing.
So, and this is where we're heading. This is where we're heading.
And all the major rich people, the millionaires on social media who always pretended to be caring about progressive issues, they're all going right now. You know, they're all shifting right because that's how the system protects itself.
But I want to address the point you brought up about capitalism as it not being the economy.
Well, I would have to argue that it not only is capitalism the economy, but it is also much more than the economy. It's also a distribution system, it's an allocation system, but it's also, like you said, a value system. It's a religion. It impacts tremendously the cultures in which we're brought up in.
And you mentioned religion, the main three religions, those religions were born in a time. They're founded in a time that was pretty much the same cultural and economic precondition in which we're living in right now.
You know, I often say that the word capitalism can get thrown around left and right so much. We get confused by it and we think, what is capitalism? When did it really come about?
Well, I don't really care about the, you know, the exact timeline of the modern form of capitalism because I call it, there's a couple of names for it. You can call it the root socioeconomic orientation. You can call it capitalism. You can call the market system.
But I would say a good word to define the system is trade strategizing dominance, which means for as far as we remember, like 10,000 years, 12,000 years until now, humanity developed a new system where they would trade with one another, debt-based economies, where debt pressure would facilitate growth.
So it's a growth-based economy that's based on competition and hoarding our resources for an elite view. Also, it promotes self-interest.
And the whole overarching mentality is of trade, of a gaming strategy where you have to get, it's like a video game. You're gaming through the system trying to find leverage points to find more money for yourself versus other competing people.
And you know if you're a worker who can't find a job go work for the landowner if you don't work for the landowner okay you're better off dead.
It was also the facilitation of poverty.
So whereas for the majority of history, I mean if you're aware of it like 95% of human history, we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, which had a completely different kind of economy, different kind of ideology, different kind of culture, which even though they lived in so-called poverty, they lived in what's called minimalistic affluence where they were not restricted by their mentality of always wanting more. They lived happily within their means, you know, and nobody was left to die from poverty.
Whereas as soon as we went into dominance-based hierarchies and competition and debt-based economies, that's where poverty and a lot of the large warfare that we see was also facilitated.
So, you know, I want to get your thoughts on that, that like, really like, you know, the mentality of trade, of self-interest, competition, those things tremendously impact the actual economy because the economy can be different.
The current economy we see it right now is actually a capitalist economy. It can be much different than what it is happening, you know, what we're doing right now.
Because our allocation method, and as well as the distribution, is extremely inefficient and unsustainable.
What do you think?
Let's start with the basic philosophy of capitalism.
Capitalism is founded on the outlandish claim that altruism is the sum total of selfish actions.
So everyone acts selfishly and then somehow mysteriously what happens is everyone benefits.
So it's an altruistic thing to act selfishly.
So here is the first moral impediment or first moral problem in capitalism.
This claim is wrong, of course. You cannot act selfishly and benefit someone else. If you act selfishly, you're engaged in a zero-sum game, period.
Mistake number two in Caput. And this is, of course, the claim of Adam Smith.
Let's start with Adam Smith. Adam Smith. Adam Smith said that there's an invisible hand of the free market, and this invisible hand allocates resources and benefits in a way that rewards everyone involved, even if everyone is acting out of totally selfish motives.
And that's of course complete nonsense. It can be demonstrated pretty easily with game theory that this is completely impossible.
The second nonsensical claim of capitalism is the claim of growth, the belief that growth is infinite in principle, that we can grow forever. And so the pie keeps growing and everyone keeps benefiting.
And that is of course nonsensical because we live on a finite planet. How did we convince ourselves that infinite growth is possible?
By ignoring costs, for example, we ignore environmental costs.
In financial statements, the costs captured by financial statements are a fraction of the real costs.
Because you have environmental costs. You have health costs, healthcare costs. You have social costs in terms of social and race and inequality. And there are so many costs which are not captured in financial states.
But they're called externalities.
Yes, and they're all in externalities.
Let's not talk about this. It's externality.
Yeah. It's irrelevant to, but of course, because of the inevitable fact of scarcity, capitalism can only be a zero-sum game. Ultimately you are in a finite system. You cannot exit planet Earth at this stage, except if Elon Musk has his way in due time.
Right now, we are stuck here. And because we're stuck here, any profit I make is your loss.
Period.
Period.
That's common sense. And it's also mathematics, by the way.
So this is the second mistake of capitalism.
The third mistake of capitalism is to pretend that all human beings are equal. They're all economic agents.
So in early economics, until the 1960s, 1970s, there was the rational agent in economics. And there was the assumption that every human being is capable of rational decision making. Every human being has the same opportunities. Every human being makes decisions to optimize his or her performance, and therefore the outcomes are evenly distributed.
None of these assumptions is true.
People are not equal. They have different endowments.
People do not make rational decisions. Today we know we have behavioral economics. We have Nobel Prize winners in the field.
So we know that people act irrationally, not rationally. We know that people don't always optimize, let alone maximize economic outcomes.
On the very contrary, there's a lot of destruction. For example, wealth destruction in the financial industry.
The financial industry is a net wealth destroyer. It destroyed more wealth than it has ever created.
Great point.
So when you take all these assumptions, you begin to realize that capitalism is an absolute delusion.
It is.
I'm a professor of psychology, among my other scenes. I'm telling you, this is a delusional disorder. People who support capitalism, something is wrong with them. They're not facing reality, simply.
You know, it's actually, I want to make this joke. If capitalism was a person and walked into your office and sat on a chair after only talking with capitalism for 30 minutes or 20 minutes you'd be like okay you're diagnosed as a narcissistic egotistical maniac who has extremely unstable self-confidence.
I would even say it's like coffee.
Capitalism is extremely delusional and narcissistic, but at the same time, extremely insecure.
It's an insecure system because it always claims to be the best, but when you look at the fact that throughout society, other people have tried different alternative methods, it destroys them because it does not want any alternative to ever exist.
It hates the idea of any alternative.
And then, you know, like, I've studied the history of counter, you know, revolutionary kind of societal experiments that have taken place, like in Chile, like in Spain, and how the CIA, I mean, it's an arm of the market really. I consider the CIA to be, you know, the henchmen of the market. They go out there and destroy whatever alternatives could be posing a threat to the status quo.
And yeah, like you said, the system, if it was a person, you wouldn't invite them to your party.
You wouldn't want to be around them, you know?
The amazing thing is that capitalism is a failure.
It's another delusional element when we are told that capitalism is a major success. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and so on and so forth.
Capitalism is a major failure.
Allow me to elaborate on this.
There are two features of capitalism which are self-defeating.
One of them is market failures. The market does not provide solutions to the vast majority of human needs. For example, health care, for example, education, for example, transportation, for example, utilities. They're all examples of market failure, not market success.
The second thing is the boom-bust cycle. It is built into, baked into capitalism.
Capitalism is constructed on a boom-bust cycle because in capitalism, there is no calibration mechanism.
Now, when you talk to capitalistic or capitalist economies, they will tell you that's not true. We have the price signal. The price signal teaches us when to stop producing and start consuming or when to stop consuming and start producing and it's a great regulator.
That's the invisible hand of the market.
Yeah.
That is beyond inane, not to say insane.
Prices are not determined as a consequence of demand and supply. Prices are psychological artifacts. Prices reflect expectations, not realities.
And because prices reflect expectations, they are subject to human foibles, human shortcomings, human weaknesses, human delusions, human insanity.
So the price signal is not a regulator, moderator or calibrator of the market. It is the reason the market keeps collapsing all the time.
The main issue in the free market, in the Adam Smith free market, is that it is constructed on a psychological process, not on reality.
Prices reflect expectations. Expectations reflect mass psychosis.
Simply, when you have mass psychosis, and that's why we have asset bubbles. That's why we have asset bubbles.
So, if you put together market failures and boom-bust cycles, you begin to see that capitalism essentially is a failure.
And then what about the argument that capitalism has lifted billions of people from out of poverty and so forth?
That is expressly untrue. Capitalism hasn't done that.
States have done that. Governments have done that. And lately supranational organizations such as the European Union have done that.
Capitalism started in the 17th century, long before Adam Smith, let's say even 16th century, long before Adam Smith.
And at the time, these were countries that granted monopolies to companies. So you had the East India company and this kind of companies. They were trading with spices, with this, with that, and they were granted a monopoly by the sovereign, usually a king of some kind, a monarchy. They were granted a monopoly.
Capitalism started with a state monopoly. Capitalism was an extension of the state, a long arm of the government.
And only then it evolved through the ravings of Adam Smith. It evolved into the belief that one can divorce the state from capitalism.
I can tell you, you can divorce the state and the church. That's doable. You can never divorce the state from capitalism exactly as you said capitalism is the long arm of the state it is the distributive mechanism which is endorsed by the state adopted by the state implemented by the state protected by the state, and exported by the state to other states, if necessary by force.
This is capitalism.
Now, I have nothing against competition. I think competition is a great way to choose winners. I'm nothing against competition.
But to pretend that competition yields optimal outcomes has been debunked long, long time ago, including, as I mentioned, in game theory. It's been debunked long time ago.
And if competition is unbridled and uncontrolled and non-supervised and non-regulated, it leads to extreme dysfunctions, especially in the marketplace. That's the irony.
Yeah, it's true because you knowwhat the defenders of capitalism often say, competition leads to better price, better what is it the better best goods at the lowest possible prices and leaves to the most alternative and the most options provided to the population.
Actually, if we are to be truly honest and look at the end result of competition, okay, I compete in martial arts. I go into the boxing ring. I still compete to this day. I do boxing kickboxing.
When I go into the boxing ring, there's only one goal, to eliminate the opposition. So it's not like, oh, no, let him have a fair chance, hit him a couple times and let him recover and then go.
No, the end game is to destroy the other person, knock them out, eliminate them.
So zero sum.
Zero sum game.
So in the market, when you look at the market, what is the end goal of any corporation? Eliminate the competitors, hence monopoly, hence buy out your opposition, use the legal system, use the political system to enforce legislation that allows you to gather fewer companies and more companies to become fewer and fewer and fewer.
That's why in America all the media companies that have become less, all the big agricultural companies have become less, all the tele media companies that have become less, all the big agricultural companies have become less, all the telecommunications companies have become less and less and that hands are fewer people.
That is capitalism. When people act like that's a perversion of capitalism, it's not. Sorry, it is the system.
The intention of capitalist competition is to eliminate your opposition, and the best way to do that is to use the state as your ally to absorb your competition.
So when people are outraged, it's like, no, monopolies are not an expression of the market.
Sorry, my friend, that is the market. That is the market's will being expressed to the fullest extent.
And I would argue that as things get worse economically around the world, as we're seeing all the right-wing leaders being elected, the system, when it starts dismantling, and I truly believe right now, we're coming to the end stage of capitalism.
We are really, in the next few decades, are going to be the last death throes of the system.
And I'm very terrified of the fact that as the system collapses, it's going to start becoming more totalitarian, more authoritarian, and more fascist.
Because the system actually is a fascist system. If you were really to break it down at its underlying root, it's a fascist system.
Any system that tells you that you have to work for a living and if you can't find a job, go and fucking die, that is a fascist system.
Because even if we have an abundance of resources, and which we do today, we have the technology to bring about a better reality for most people. We have the scientific and technological wisdom to create a completely new system.
But no, let's keep things the same way they are and force people to find jobs.
Right now, look at all the jobs we've been created. They're all, you know, they're not low-paying jobs. They don't pay people money.
Young people in America, the recent poll shows 65% of young people have no optimistic outlook on the future. They feel quite hopeless about the future.
So when we look at all these prospects or lack of prospects, we see that either we change the system, and that's where I'm really focused on. That's my main passion is talking about alternatives.
Either we change the system or we cannot pass the system anymore, we cannot patch it up anymore.
Anything we do to bring about more equality or elect politicians that favor this or that for the working class or for protection of the environment, as we've seen historically, it will be eventually overturned because that's what the game is.
It goes right back to the government. The capitalist investment ruling class will do whatever they can to reverse whatever hard work has been done. And we're going to end up way worse off than when we started.
So, you know, I want to make a few comments based on some of the things you've said.
I made a claim that capitalism is a fantasy, a fantasy defense. It's known as a Sherfan.
What does fantasy mean? Divorce from reality.
I can prove to you that capitalism is totally divorced from reality. The richest people made more money during the pandemic than at any other time.
When the real economy was wallowing and collapsing, rich people made a lot of money.
In other words, the proponents of capitalism, the embodiment of capitalism, the rich class, makes money regardless of the real economy.
So there is a divorce between capitalism and the real economy, and that's a great definition of fantasy.
When you divorce reality, it's a great definition of fantasy.
Number two, 80% of innovation takes place within oligopolies, not in small businesses, not with entrepreneurs, but within oligopolies.
In other words, capitalism leads inexorably to concentration of economic power, which then gives rise to research and development and innovation, including technological innovation.
And because innovation is a main engine of capitalism, this means that capitalism has a built-in incentive to concentrate the economy rather than disperse it competitively.
Another observation has to do with free trade. Free trade is actually not coupled, not intimately linked to capitalism.
For example, during the 1960s, one of the countries with the freest trade was Yugoslavia, which was a socialist country.
So free trade is not necessarily connected to capitalism. You could be a communist country with free trade. It's not true to say that without capitalism, we won't have free trade.
And finally, capitalism is Darwinian, natural selection, survival of the fittest, and so on so forth.
But if we look at the theory of evolution, it describes the survival of the fittest, very few over the many. There have been zillions of experiments during evolution. They've all perished.
Evolution is about the survival of the very, very, very, very few. Evolution doesn't pretend to be altruistic.
And so capitalism is about the survival of the very, very, very few. Elon Musk's and the demise, the disappearance of the vast majority of a population. That's a true face of capital. It's Darwinian.
I think we have to, I know, we have five minutes more. I'm sorry.
Yeah. I want to make a point about what you said about evolution because I feel like capitalism in large part has bastardized the true definition of evolution, which, like you said, evolution is not about survival of the strongest, but the fittest, which means those who can adapt.
Yeah, those who can adapt to change will survive and, you know, put further their offspring to the next cycle.
And so we look at like the ecological systems of our planet, which actually I think is a brilliant thing to study to understand how to actually develop an economy. We can learn from nature. We can learn so much from nature.
Well, in nature, you know, you have the top species, you know, the apex predator, you have the grazers, the herbivores, then you have the plants. Well, if there's any imbalance in that ratio, the system can start collapsing.
And so, you know, capitalism says the strongest will survive and crush the rest. Well, if you have a few people at the top of the pyramid, crushing everything else, that actually eventually leads to disastrous outcomes. And so I often argue that capitalism is an anti-evolutionary system. It's an anti-revolutionary system. It's an anti-revolutionary system. It's a system based on maintaining establishment preservation and establishment paralysis, which means like, you know, a perfect example, the oil companies, they found out a long time ago that were destroyed in an environment, okay, it's better to go to a renewable. The tobacco companies found out a long time ago, okay, tobacco products can cause cancer. You know, we have known this information, but why has there been such little change being made in the political system and even the economic system to redistribute and reorganize our economic activity to be more sustainable? Well, capitalism, because capitalism is based on institutional self-preservation. So the fossil fuel companies, there's a book called Merchants of Doubt. I mean, tremendous, there are some of the dirtiest and most dishonest industry in the history of economics, which has done everything they can to publish false studies, hire scientists to say, oh, no, the climate is going to be stable. It's not because of fossil fuels. So in essence, the system is against change, is against revolution, it's against evolution. And, you know, I would also argue that, are you familiar with the work of Al Thie Cohn, the public speaker? He wrote a couple books. He wrote a book called The Case Against Competition. In that book, there are several hundred studies that show that a competitive environment is not the best environment to produce innovation or the best results or to complete a certain task.
I just mentioned that most innovation takes place in oligopolis, not in a competitive environment.
Yes, yes. And that actually, like, if you look at innovation, innovation has always been steadily increasing, regardless of what economic system we've had in place. So regardless of whether we had communism, socialism or capitalism, human innovation is the natural, if I would argue it's a natural built-in thing of humanity to want to explore and test things out and discover and get better at understanding the world around us, capitalism has been a parasite that has been lucky to be around at a time where innovation is exploding right now because of Moore's law and because of, you know, our ability to do so much more with so much less energy and resources.
Like, you know, this phone I have right here has a billion, a million times more processing power and computing power than the first computer, which literally used the same energy as a city block and perform only a couple calculations per minute. This can do a trillion calculations per second or whatever, and look how much less resource it takes. That is not a result of capitalism. This is a result of human innovation and many other factors such as cooperation, the sharing of ideas. How crazy is it, right? And this goes back to the poor, how uneducated, the more uneducated they are, the more benefits the system. If people did a little bit of research to understand the very basis of common sense, a child can understand this. Sharing of ideas, hence cooperation, leads to more innovation than the hoarding of ideas, hence competition.
So there's so many comments, then, arguments that I don't have to show a bunch of books and read it on a bunch of books to understand that capitalism doesn't work.
Because it simply is a parasite that has been lucky to be around to exploit technology for growth and for self-interest and for inequality. That's all it's been doing.
I think we're running out of time. Would you like to proceed or would you like to call it today?
We should continue if you're okay with it.
Then we have to end up and then wait five minutes because the file is being saved and then click on the same link and it will be able to meet me again.
All right yeah no no problem it's been a great discussion. Yes, thank you. Okay, great.
Yeah.
I would like...
Okay, so continuing discussion, part two.
I would like to kick off the second part, throw a few ideas your way, and then listen to what you have to say, of course.
Sure.
So, let's start with two ideas, two issues.
The first one is the distinction between allocation of resources and allocation of functions. Allocation of functions is also known as division of labor.
Okay.
Allocation of resources, there's a scarcity of resources, limited amount of resources, how to deploy them best, how to deploy them so that they provide the maximum output and optimal performance.
That's allocation of resources and presumably capitalism is the ultimate way of allocating resources.
That's highly debatable for reasons we've mentioned.
People are not rational. There's a question of expectations, etc.
We're not going to it again.
But there's another issue which is often ignored by advocates of capitalism, and that is functional allocation, division of labor.
Capitalism invariably and inevitably devolves into monopolies, cartels, and oligopolies.
Why is that? For three reasons.
The first reason is a first mover effect.
If you're the first in the market, even if your product is shoddy, your service sucks, you're still going to dominate the market.
The second reason is specialization.
Because you've been doing it for so long, you're the best. It's very difficult to reach up to your level.
And the third reason is network effects.
Network effects, you know, you have a client base, and this client base feeds on itself and your reputationfeeds on itself, and so on.
So if you put the three together, first mover advantage, network effects and specialization, the end result in all so-called pseudo-competitive processes in capitalism is the concentration of labor in a single entity.
So you have Amazon, which is in control of 80% of the publishing market worldwide. You have Google, which is in control of 80% of the search market.
Bing, notwithstanding. I mean what is Bing?
Yeah, wherever you look you end up with a single player which of course gives the line belies capitalism's claim that it is about competition.
It's not about competition it's about functional competition it's about functional concentration.
That's the first observation.
The second observation I'd like to make, you know, I got a lot of flack. People told me Sweden is capitalistic, France is capitalistic, you're wrong about this all these countries are capitalistic and so so forth.
Well, in most of these countries, the state constitutes 60% of GDP. And another 20% of the private sector relies on what we call rents, relies on government outlays.
So 60% of GDP is directly in the budget, and then another 20% the entities in the private sector are subcontractors of the government. They work for the government. They provide the government, their suppliers and so on so forth.
And so these countries are not capitalistic by any definition thatso on so forth.
And so these countries are not capitalistic by any definition that I'm aware of. These are socialist countries. They may call themselves capitalistic, but they're not capitalistic.
And now here's the clinch. These countries where the state effectively controls 80 plus percent of the economy are the most successful by any measure. By any measure.
Health care, happiness of the people, which to my mind is a relevant factor, environment, productivity, social mobility, you name it, Sweden, Norway, even France, Israel, they far exceed the United States, which is supposedly the ultimate capitalistic.
So capitalism seems to have failed when we compare capitalism to non-capitalistic countries.
We have an experiment going on. That's what I'm trying to say. We have a control group and we have an experiment.
So we have the control group and we have very clear outcomes. The greater the involvement of the collective, doesn't have to be the state, but the greater the involvement of the collective, the more prosperous the country.
And of course the ultimate example is Switzerland. In Switzerland, yeah, I was actually there. I was actually in Switzerland. What was it, December? And I was very impressed.
My friend who lives there, he invited me to visit him. It's extremely hard to get a visa to live in Switzerland because they're trying their best because they know how chaotic the rest of the world is.
So they've done their best to have like an insulated little model where they have severe protection of the environment, like severe restrictions on what corporations can do. And Amazon is blocked in that country. They don't allow Amazon, exactly. Restrictions of competition.
They have direct democracy. They rule by direct democracy.
The prime minister serves one year in Switzerland and they rotate.
Oh, wow. Interesting.
They rotate. The state constitutes about 50% of the economy. Another close to 30% of the economy is affiliated with the state.
And yet, it is the most thriving banking sector, a lot of manufacturing, agriculture, and prosperity. I think it's the richest country in the world per capita, as far as my memory goes.
And I wouldn't say Switzerland is capitalistic by any extension of the word, by any definition.
Well I want to give some pushback on that.
So what you mentioned earlier about like these Scandinavian nations, you know, and the book Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson, actually a big part of his research of him providing a better alternative to what's going on in America and England is like, okay, look at Scandinavia because they have so much less inequality.
And I think a huge part of the examples you gave of Sweden, Switzerland is because of the fact that there's so much less inequality.
Hence, when there's less inequality, decision making is more democratic, you know, and it allows the people to have more of their voices expressed and concern.
The only thing is, I would say that the entire world, in my view, the entire world is only capitalistic, but the main difference is, to what extent is the market expressed in America, as opposed to what extent is the market expressed in Europe.
So in America, we have a will of the market kind of a mentality where it's like, like you said, the financial sector is so massive, you know, it's so big. The government is so limited in what it can do. The government is an arm of the mafia, you know, corporations.
However, in Europe, we still have a capitalistic system, but as a social democracy, there are social democracies in which the mechanisms of capitalism are still there.
Okay, because if you really think about it, there's like three or four main attributes of capitalism that pretty much you go to any country these four attributes are unchanged you have a labor for income system you have a growth model every economy needs to grow on the planet doesn't matter what country it is communist china, people call it communist china is not a communist country is a very capitalist country with extremely powerful state involvement.
Labor for income, growth, competition, which is people, people corporations have to compete for money and for market share. And then you have the monetary value.
So everything's given monetary exchange value and those things have to be put into effect.
I'm smiling. I'm smiling because this is exactly the crux of my argument.
I think people confuse market economies with capitalism.
Every country in the world has a market economy.
I fully agree with you and all the elements that you've described, are hallmarks and attributes of the market economy.
Yes. Everything is market economy.
But not every country is capitalistic.
I think capitalism is often confused with the market economy because Adam Smith conflated the two.
He said the markets are the regulating mechanism of capitalism.
But markets existed long before capitalism. Venice in the 15th century. The Baltic states in the 13th century, markets existed long before capitalism, and markets will survive capitalism.
Capitalism is exactly, as you said, a parasitic outgrowth from market economy, superimposed on market economies.
It's like...
I mean, would you call it then, because I mean, I'm sure we agree on the overall basis.
Maybe it's just the definitions of being like a little mixed up because would you agree that then like, we don't even have to call it capitalism? It's like neoliberalism.
Like what is this thing?
Because what is in your view the main difference between a market system and a capital system? What is the main difference?
A market system allows for external regulation, involvement, interference, and intervention in order to prevent market failures and boom-bust cycles and so forth, and fully collaborates with collectives like the state of the government and so on so forth.
So market system is simply a way to regulate economic activity in order to prevent adverse outcomes.
Capitalism is an entirely different thing. Capitalism is a way to allocate the benefits of the market system.
It's like the market system produces things. The market system is productive, and then capitalists come in, and they say, okay, there's a lot of profit here, a lot of money here, a lot of goods here, and I want more than my share.
So capitalism is about how to allocate the produce of the market system.
Now there are many systems, there are many mechanisms.
Communism is exactly the same thing. Communism is a way to allocate the products of the market system.
It's a myth that communist countries don't have a market. Of course they have a market. It's just that the market, the end products of the market, are allocated and distributed differently than in capitalism.
In communist countries, the end products of the market are distributed theoretically, evenly. While in capitalism, they accrue to a specific segment of the population.
And this specific segment of population created an ideology and a morality and a religion around this mechanism of accrual.
I don't want to say theft. These are robber barons. I don't want to say theft.
But there's an ideology around. We are rich because we deserve it.
Now, if you allow me another two minutes, I know I'm monopolizing the conversation, but I'm a capitalization.
No, no, no. I'm a capitalization.
So, if you allow me one more insight or observation.
When you talk to rich people today, they would tell you that's the way it should be. It's the way it should be because I worked hard. I worked hard for my money. I'm an entrepreneur. I had a great idea. I am this.
So I am virtuous. I am virtuous. You are not.
And this is the Protestant work ethic.
Protestantism, especially in Puritanism, there was this belief that you are, if you are rich, it's a sign that you are blessed by God, that you're chosen by God, that you are virtuous. Wealth was equated with virtue and virtue was equated with godliness.
So if you were a godly man, saintly man, a virtuous man, you would have inevitably ended up also a rich man.
And the Protestant work ethic, that's not Sam Vaknin, that's Weber and so on. The Protestant work ethic infiltrated, permeated the modern version of capitalism, so that today we believe that if you are rich it's by virtue of who you are and by virtue of some outstanding attributes or some outstanding investment or whatever.
And I'm referring to Piketty and other works, the fact is that about 40% of all wealth is inherited, not self-generated. And rich people, most rich people are born to rich people.
In other words, social mobility is very, very minimal. The higher the inequality, the lower the social mobility. These are the facts.
Piketty published a book of 600 or 700 pages long. And just look at the table. He went back to the French Revolution. It's a masterpiece, absolute masterpiece.
And these are the paths. Rich people are rich people because their fathers and mothers were rich people and their forefathers were rich people. That's as simple as a, I would say that being rich is an intergenerational transmission mechanism. It has very little to do with entrepreneurship and skills and hard work and this is nonsense.
And it's not correlated with education by the way, which is a very bad sign, an extremely bad sign in a society where education is actually inversely correlated to wealth. That's an exceedingly bad sign because education is social capital. It's the only pass forward thing, the only conduit to the future, the only bridge to the future.
So if you succeed to make money without any education, without it, then it shows you the system is manipulative. It's a form of extended core artistry, you know?
Yes. Shortcuts. Simply shortcuts.
So, no, great points. So I completely agree with everything you said, and I can...
That's worrying.
It is. It is, and I mean, I can expand upon everything you just said. I can expand on every point until my face turns blue. I mean, I can do nothing but ramble about how capitalism is a complete and utter disaster and a failure on economic level is causing inequality. Environmental, destroying the environment, you know, water pollution, resource depletion, you know, not to mention wars for profit.
I mean, Jesus, talk about a profitable venture the amount of money going to a military as opposed to education or to renewable energy is nothing compared to you know what we're doing and all the you know the major polluter of the world the u.s military the major contributor to climate change the U.S. military.
And, you know, as far as happiness, like you said, you know, these countries with amass inequality. The people are more miserable inside of them because there's less, what you said, social capital, which means trust. People trust each other less, you know.
And so all these factors when compared, like when you look at a country like America or Saudi Arabia or like England or, yeah, like compare them to like these socially democratic capitalist economies like Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, they're far more effective.
However, I would argue that the reason why Scandinavian countries are able to be prosperous is because you cannot duplicate that model throughout the entire global economy.
Because the same way that we have rich nation, the same way we have the rich and the poor in a country like America, vast inequality. Well, the global economy is actually an expression of that same microcosm of what happens in a given country.
We have the wealthy countries which exploit the poor countries. The poor countries were pretty much there as servants to do the bidding of the powerful economies.
And then we have the more middle class economies, which are those of Europe and Scandinavia.
And that is the way it has to be. We cannot change that under the current paradigm. We cannot change that. That's just the way it is.
Unless we actually have a counter-revolution to change the foundation of our economy and our society, which I can go into.
But basically, you know, and these countries are not so innocent. These Scandinavian countries, a big part of their profits are actually selling weaponry you know and they've done their part of destroying the environment in the past and robbing poor nations and colonialism we still live in a post-colonialist era where like even though we say oh incomes are rising across the board it's actually there's the amount of free labor and free resources that the West and the global north has stolen from the global south.
If you were to like work very hard, you would need decades and decades for that to be repaid. We're talking about trillions of dollars of theft of free labor or resources that were exploited from those poor countries.
So, you know, not to ramble on that too much.
We live in a society, a global economy where the rich have to exist, the poor have to exist for the rich to exist, and the middle class is the Scandinavian countries.
Now, I would only say, I would just want to expand on that, that, you know, the terms can be confusing, I guess, if we talk about capitalism, markets, neoliberalism.
I would say to make things simpler, I call it the system of trade strategizing dominance, because that literally is the root foundation.
Regardless of what capitalist variation we look at, you know, of free markets or whatnot, the free market is still a manifestation of the foundation of society, which was founded upon about 12,000 years ago, was the institution of private property and trade laws.
And like, I often say that trade is actually, trade is the problem.
I come from the perspective where I think trade and markets are actually the problem.
Because when you have a system where everyone's competing for market share, you know, and they're all competing players, well, it really isn't much different than capitalism in the sense that you're still trying to eliminate your competition.
There is still that desire, that anxiety of somebody wanting to eliminate their competitor.
And so, you know, trade, you know, here's a simple example.
Like, let's say I walk into a store. I want to buy something. Okay, me as the purchaser, ideally, I want to pay the least amount of money and get the most amount of things for my buck.
The person is selling it to me, ideally, if they're being honest with themselves, they want to sell the least amount of stuff for the highest amount of value.
Okay, now look at the workplace. The employer who signs up to work for a company, the employee, the worker wants to do the least amount of work to get paid the most amount of money. I mean, that's just common sense.
And the employer, the person who's giving you the job, they want to make you do the most amount of work and give you the least amount of money. This is just common market logic. And this is inbuilt into the system of this monetary trade system.
Now, I would call that class warfare. That is by definition, class warfare, because when you have this kind of mentality where you're trying to get the most for least investment and you are trying to make them do the most work with the least amount of money, well, that may look innocent and, you know, arbitrary.
When you look at the simplistic, you know, well, that might look innocent and, you know, arbitrary. And we look at the simplistic, you know, example by example basis.
But when you extrapolate that to a larger, massive global economy where there's massive strong players like state economies and corporations and militaries, well, then we look at the world today, which is so destroyed, I think it's a class war type of a system.
And, you know, to make things actually easy to understand is the fact that we don't have to live with the market anymore.
You know, my argument and my work as an activist and a sustainability advocate is that my argument is, let's get rid of all the confusion and all the needless complexity.
We don't need markets anymore. We don't need trade anymore because trade only exists in a situation of real scarcity.
If there's real scarcity, then those have to strategize for gaming strategies to obtain those scarce resources, have the best so-called, I guess, deservingness to have a right to those resources in a scarcity-based environment.
And even that, that actually makes capitalism look even more ridiculous because capitalism says, oh, the scarce resources, we have to compete and you have to put in labor for scarce resources.
But on the same time, let's have an infinite growth system.
So it's actually so delusional on that level, too, because it's a paradox.
Because capitalism says, the scarce resources, you have to work for a living nothing should be given to you for free oh but oh let's keep endlessly growing the economy so it's a complete paradox when you look at it like that.
But when you look at the 21st century, our scientific and our technological understandings of the universe and of life and of human beings and what we come from and our environment, we don't have to live within the markets anymore.
What I talk about is that if we strategize resource efficiency and we create a new goal system where the goal is not growth, it's not labor for income, it's not job creation, but the goal is actually less jobs, more time, more free time, which we can do right now because of automation.
We can create a new paradigm where humanity doesn't care anymore to endlessly exploit and compete for resources and materialism and vanity and, you know, endless desire.
We have a society where people are actually satisfied and happy about going about their life, but the economy is actually democratically run by algorithms, which we can do today very easily. We can set up algorithms which are the oversight mechanisms of resource, you know, intelligent resource distribution and optimized resource usage to make sure that we're doing things economically on a sustainable level andproviding obviously a high standard of living to all the population without anybody being you know living in poverty or whatnot you know
and i would love to like be able to explain that further to you you know if you're interested in what are your thoughts on that like that really trade is um trade is only necessary in a situation of scarcity if you think about it trade so the idea behind trade especially international trade but not all is that people acquire skills and expertise and people specialize so that they can produce the same goods more cheaply.
And so they have an advantage. And so they trade the advantages. You can do something better than I can, and I can do something else better, and then we can trade our goods and services in a way that would benefit both of us because I can maximize or optimize my performance, you can maximize, optimize, optimize, and so on so forth.
If I were to insist on doing everything by myself, I may be able to become self-sufficient, but I would never become efficient. Trade is about efficiency. I don't think it's about scarcity. It's about efficiency. Mostly about efficiency. China is much better at producing cheap cars. America is much better at producing, God knows what. And so they trade. My focus is not so much on trade. I say nothing wrong with trade, you know. My focus is not so much on trade. I see nothing wrong with trade, honestly. If trade is embedded, as you said, in a paradigm of happiness and collectiveness and, you know, I see nothing wrong with trade. I mean, you know how to make shoes better than I do. I know how to make bread better than you do. Why not trade? I mean, I don't see any.
The problem starts with three philosophical pillars of capitalism and even of market economies.
Number one, nothing works without an asymmetry. You need asymmetry. If you have symmetry, everything stagnates. If you have equality, everything dies. So equality is the antidote to life. A symmetry is the antidote to incentive and entrepreneurship. Symmetry. So you need asymmetry. Some people need to be richer than other people. Some people need to be more innovative than other people. You need this asymmetry. These are asymmetries keep the system going.
If everyone is the same, everyone is incentivized the same way, everyone produces the same things, everyone is rewarded the same, then no one would have an incentive to invest, to innovate, to work. So this symmetry, inequality, destroy incentives, disincentivize. That's a foundational tenet of market economies and capital. Both. The second is focus on the present because we know we can, we know nothing about the future. Like Aristotle said that sentences about the future have no truth value. So because you can know nothing for certain about the future and you can know everything or close to everything about the present focus on the present you even have it in psychology there are schools known as mindfulness focus on the present forget the past forget the future so capitalism is capitalism inhabits an ever-present state. It doesn't care about the consequences of actions, the course, it doesn't have a long-term view. It's bottom line oriented and the bottom line becomes more and more compressed. Used to be one year, annual. Now it's quarterly. Next thing, you will have daily bottom lines.
So focus on the present. The third element, which capitalism and market, the market economy accommodate, is the existence of psychopaths and narcissists. Even if you were to establish a new paradigm, which is human, because capitalism and the market economy are not human, that is not Vaknin, that is Adam Smith, they're not human. They're death cults in the sense that they...
Absolutely.
They prefer material possessions to human beings.
When you prefer objects to human beings, you're engaging a death cult.
Okay.
Yes.
Okay.
So even if you were to change a paradigm and render it more human, more equitable, more everything.
You would still have a problem because something like five, six, maybe 10% of a population are narcissists and psychopaths.
What are you going to do with these people?
It is narcissists and psychopaths who accumulate wealth, subjugate people, exploit them, initiate wars, and there's not just a sentence out there.
There are studies that show that the prevalence of psychopaths among chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies is at least three times the prevalence in the general population.
In other words, psychopaths gravitate to managerial position.
Yeah.
And they do.
And politics and others.
So what do you do with these people?
What are you going to do with these people? Are you going to construct concentration camps, keep them out of the economy, keep them out of the system?
It's a major problem because they are the natural leaders and because they are subjects for emulation, imitation and envy.
So if you take the three things together, the need for asymmetry, relative positioning, I'm better than you, I'm stronger than you, I'm wealthier than you.
So asymmetry is a motivator, asymmetry as an incentivizer.
And then you add to it the other elements that I mentioned, psychopathy and narcissism, and the focus on the present, sacrificing the future for the present.
I believe that any alternative paradigm would be undermined by this.
I believe that these are actually figments of human nature. In other words, I believe human nature has created the market and capitalism, not the other way.
Okay, okay. I would disagree with that. I don't think it's human nature to create a market system.
It's not an expression of who we are because, look, in large part, I agree with all the things you mentioned.
You're limited to disagree. That's what makes a dialogue.
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
So like we look back at human history. Like, there's a couple of things I talk about as examples of why the market is not a will of human nature, but rather a perversion of human nature.
But like, okay, so human beings can be many things, right? We can be anything.
The most important thing is our environment.
Even I would argue in large part what makes a psychopath is in the environment in which that person is raised in. It's not so much to be hanged on genetics.
I think environmental studies of human behavior, epigenetics has shown that even our environment can greatly change our genetic expression as well and that there's historical examples to show that humans are not naturally built in to want to compete or to consume or, you know, to dominate others.
If you look at Hunter Gather societies, there's this vast literature on this, that 95% of human history was conducted in that manner, this egalitarian setting where women had much more rights, they're women leaders, and a leader did not actually wasn't somebody who hoarded more resources, a leader was somebody was simply a wise person that they would go to for help, and that they guided the rest of the community to go along.
And so I would argue that the majority of human history was not like this. This was a sad and unfortunate turn of events that humanity decided to go in this direction to engage in trade-based and debt-based economics.
Because like, you know, you mentioned trade as something that benefits both parties.
Well, what trade even takes place if the other person have nothing to give?
Let's say I'm giving somebody apples, but the other person is like, look, I'm sorry, I have nothing to give back to you. Nothing.
Okay, so that's not trade. That's actually called gift giving, you know, gift exchange, you know?
Yeah.
And I would argue that I would say giving, you know, gift exchange. Yeah.
And I would argue that I would say that, you know, that majority of human history, which I mentioned has been broken down in great detail by anthropologists. They lived in those kind of gift economies, gift giving and mutual aid, which means mutual aid is basically each person giving to the best of their abilities and everyone conducting that same manner.
And if somebody has a little bit short, it's okay, we still take care of them. We don't leave them out to dry.
And that is a complete opposite of trade. Trade assumes that both parties are better off, but in reality it's not true.
You know, when a person is going to work for a large corporation, they're trading their labor for money being given to them, but they're being exploited 100%, because their labor is being extracted, surplus values being extracted from their labor.
If I'm going to a store, I'm paying, I don't know, $100 for a t-shirt, well, I'm trading my money for that t-shirt. But that t-shirt was made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh that cost them, I don't know, 10 cents to make.
So the idea that trade delivers a good outcome for both parties satisfies everyone's needs, I think it's a delusion. I think it's not true.
And the very mentality of trade which comes from indebtedness which is the feeling of reciprocal obligation which means that one person has to give something in return if they don't give something in return forget about it we're not engaging in trade with that person.
Oh, I think, okay, think...
Okay, so your definition of trade is different. I thought you meant international trade.
Sorry.
Yeah, no, I mean, trade on, I mean, I'm saying. You're talking about exchange. Exchange. Exchange of any kind, but I would argue of any kind. International, personal.
Okay, okay. That's not fair. Trade is, in economic theory, is usually international thing.
Okay.
Okay, yeah. I'm just, yeah. I'm just, yeah. I'm just, but I'm describing that type of exchange that exists.
So we have mutual aid and we have trade, you know? Mutual aid is, I think, way more productive and more progressive. And it's a much more evolutionary kind of a backdrop.
Less transactional. Yeah, less transactional. I think that the idea of making life a transactional reality is actually quite disruptive because, you know, human beings want to give, you know, children want to give, children want to exchange and give freely, give to one another.
And the biggest example I always say is the people who have made our lives so much better, so much of the technology and the things we take for granted that are improved our lives so much were developed by people who are usually poor inventors and great thinkers like Nikola Tesla should have been the world's first billionaire considering how much incredible things he invented.
But because he didn't have this business mentality of knowing how to strategize and game everything correctly, he died of poverty, poor guy, you know, and he was only allowed to live to old.
Then in the few minutes we have left, how do you explain the transition of a country like China from proper communism to capitalism? Why did they make this choice, one and a half billion people?
To go for, from what to what?
From communism to capitalism. Why did they choose capitalism? Or market economy.
Sorry, not capitalist. Market economy.
Yeah.
I mean, I always say that America set a precedent for the rest of the world to follow. America's aggressive economic policies of expansion and growth and gaming strategies has influenced the rest of the world.
Like China is really, I think, I personally think, I might be incorrect, but I personally think China's behaving from learning from what America has done to pretty much, China wants to dominate the global economy.
They want to dominate it's good, but they think it's good.
I mean, there was a value judgment. They said what America is doing is great. We should emulate America.
I think in a lot of time, a lot of parts, because the world is we live in a global capitalist order where every country is trying to maximize their self-interest for their players.
And China has a lot of billionaires. China has a lot of billionaires, which I'm sure behind the scenes influence the direction of their economy and their society.
And I would even argue, man, that communism in its pure form has never existed, really if you think about it.
Because communism is a moneyless, a moneyless stateless classless society when have we ever had that other than other than like if we look at the revolution in Paris and the revolution in Spain which I love that example of 1939 the workers revolution which led to an anarchist society, which I think, I consider myself to be more of an anarchist than a communist or socialist, that anarchism, which is the idea of a horizontal power structure where people engage in mutual trade, there was no money.
Actually, in that time in history, there was no money, no class, no police, no military, no government.
But they were doing fantastic.
They were doing absolutely, and there's tons of testimonial from people living in that period.
And Noam Chomsky actually talked about this.
They were doing fantastic. Who destroyed them?
Not their society, the society was doing perfect.
The communists and the fascists, they all got together and destroyed it.
The capitalist destroyed it.
And that was what's been going on throughout history over and over and over again.
So capitalism is a failure.
I think systems of trade are a failure.
Mutual aid, gift-giving economies are the future, and they're going to be the future.
I hope you're right.
I hope you're right.
And my work as an activist is trying to educate people about the transition. And I'm making videos.
Why don't we spend the last two minutes, last remaining two minutes, tell us a bit about yourself and what you're doing and so and so forth.
Great, yeah.
So I mean, I'm a fitness coach. I have a business in Brooklyn where I train people on nutrition, exercise, and living better, and I'll also sprinkle in a little bit of anti-capitalist stuff with all my clients.
They all know me that I'm the crazy trainer who always talks about society because I often say that if you don't have a healthy mind, there's no point having a healthy body. Everything should start with a healthy mind and educated values. That's why it's so important to educate people on their values.
And then we can talk about the fitness and nutrition and all that stuff.
But I'm also, I became an activist about 15 years ago. I went through a lot of physical, a lot of trauma and difficult things in my life that made me really step back and think, okay, why is society the way it is? Why is there so much suffering in the world?
So I watched a few documentaries and that got me very motivated to join a global sustainability organization called the Zeitgeist Movement, which I'm a part of. I'm an organizer for them.
And how is this movement connected to the two Zeitgeist movies?
So Zeitgeist, the first movie was about religion and exposing government.
Yeah, but we know the movies, but how is it connected to the movies?
So, yeah, Zeitgeist two and three were created by the same person, and that person pretty much launched the initiative to create a Zeitgeist movement.
So Zeitgeist number two, which is called addendum, that's actually what created the Zeitgeist movement, you know, which I'm a part of.
And so pretty much that's my work, and I'm hoping to continue with my advocacy for sustainability until I die. You know, leave my mark on this planet. You know, I'll do the best I can.
It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
Okay, take care. I'll upload it to my channel later.
Thank you. Thank you. Bye.