0:06

Oh yeah,

0:08

it could happen here a

0:11

podcast where I just made my colleagues

0:14

I can see them through the zoom deeply

0:16

uncomfortable by opening this podcast

0:19

with with with a sound that you shouldn't

0:22

make in the workplace. I'm Robert Evans.

0:24

Joining me today is Mia Wong

0:27

and Garrison Davis me. I take

0:29

it from here.

0:30

Oh boy, So it's been a you

0:34

know, this is Okay, So this, I guess is now like last

0:36

week's Twitter thing. But

0:39

okay, so also not this is this is this

0:41

is not a Twitter thing? No, well it kind

0:43

of is.

0:44

It kind of is, but like let's

0:46

not let's not frame this as a Twitter thing.

0:48

Yeah, okay, okay, So what this is we

0:50

we are okay, we have been experiencing

0:52

in the last you know, like half

0:55

decade, actually belonging from that, because it's like this seventy

0:57

eight years now, like the the sort

0:59

of incredible rise in casual

1:01

American anti semitism and the level of anti semitism

1:04

that you could just do in

1:06

in sort of public discourse and it's

1:08

quote unquote fine. And

1:11

one of the sort of biggest indicators of this is

1:14

the like the the extent to which it's now socially

1:16

acceptable to just do

1:19

the most like absolutely

1:24

like unhinged, like

1:26

antisemitic conspiracy theories about George

1:29

Soros. And specifically

1:31

the thing that specifically was like, Okay, I need to do this episode

1:33

was last week Elon Musk like

1:37

compared George Soros to Magneto and then

1:39

said, quote, you assume they are good

1:41

intentions. They are not. He wants to erode

1:44

the fabric, the very fabric of civilization.

1:46

Soros hates humanity. And

1:49

this is just like the mainstreamline of the

1:51

Republican Party now like they

1:54

just all do this. You

1:57

can just sort of I

1:59

mean, and this and honestly like as bad,

2:01

like you know, this is like the stuff that Elon

2:03

Musk is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's

2:06

not even anywhere near as bad as

2:08

it goes. Like it's pretty common to

2:10

just sho these people like talking

2:13

about the Satan Sorrow's agenda and shit.

2:15

Now like it's it has gotten

2:19

unbelievably unfathomably out

2:22

of control. And so

2:24

today I wanted to take a look

2:27

at, Okay, who George Soros

2:29

actually is, like the real human being

2:31

and not the sort of like caricature

2:33

projection that has been created of him on the right,

2:36

and I wanted to also sort of look at why

2:38

the right hates him so much. And

2:40

you know, Soros is kind of an interesting figure because he falls

2:43

like right in the middle of like our

2:45

two shows about people, because he's

2:47

not he's not really like a cool person. He does cool stuff,

2:49

but though he does stuff that's cool sometimes,

2:51

but he's not also like a bastard properly.

2:55

So though he's done some bastardy stuff

2:57

too.

2:57

Oh he has, We are going to talk about that.

3:00

Yeah, he said, he's a Yeah, I mean.

3:01

Most of what this episode is about, he's.

3:03

I would say he's like twenty percent

3:05

more complicated than the average billionaire

3:08

A on a more Yeah.

3:10

I think I think like twenty or

3:12

thirty percent. Yeah, there's somewhere

3:14

in that neighborhood. Yeah, you

3:17

know, and I think there's

3:19

three George Soros's. Two of them are real

3:22

and one of them is fake. There is

3:24

you know. So George Soros is a billionaire

3:26

philanthropist, right, and you

3:28

know, so that means that he has a sort of billionaire

3:30

side and a philanthropist's side, and they are very

3:33

often working across purposes. Sometimes they're not

3:35

working sometimes there he aligns them

3:38

together, sometimes he doesn't. And

3:40

so the way I've sort of structured this is like the first episode

3:42

we're gonna be talking about the sort

3:45

of billionaire side and how he did that, and

3:47

the second episode is going to be more about the philanthropist's

3:49

side, and how both of these

3:51

basically have been kind

3:54

of accidentally structured in such

3:56

a way that the right was

3:58

like, oh my god, this is the perfect guy

4:00

to do atise medic conspiracy theories about. And

4:03

then there's also the third George Soros

4:05

is like the one who's just literally the devil who

4:08

the Republicans have made up And yeah,

4:11

so George Soros was born

4:13

to a Jewish family in Hungary in nineteen thirty,

4:15

which is not not a

4:17

good time to be born into a Jewish family in Hungary.

4:20

No, really,

4:23

there's not a good time to be born to a Jewish

4:25

and family in Hungary until like I'm

4:27

gonna get I'm gonna say sometime in the fifties.

4:30

Yeah, you know, I will

4:32

say that it gets way like it

4:36

it is way worse when he is

4:38

born than it was in like even

4:40

like the eighteen nineties, which is like not a

4:43

great time, but it's

4:45

gotten significantly worse. He is fourteen

4:47

when the Nazis invade Hungary nineteen forty four,

4:51

and this is the point at which we

4:53

get to our first Soros conspiracy, which is that there's

4:55

this, there's this.

4:56

It's a little more complicated than that. It's not really the Nazis,

4:59

and well it's a little more complex

5:01

than when

5:04

extermination of the Hungarian Jewish

5:06

community begins really in nineteen

5:08

forty four.

5:09

Yeah, yeah, And so there's

5:11

a thing that happens. I

5:14

don't know. He and his dad have

5:17

a kind of complicated

5:20

like set of

5:22

things they survive. And

5:24

there's a part of the story that gets picked up by the

5:27

right that gets if you've ever heard Alex Jones talk about

5:29

sorows, like the second or third

5:31

thing he will say is that like Soros is a Nazi

5:33

collaborator, was like a willing collaborator with the Nazis,

5:35

which is not true. And

5:38

also like he's fourteen,

5:41

like you know, like I.

5:43

Don't really call even like fourteen

5:46

year olds and the Hitler youth willing collaborators

5:48

because they're children. Yeah, you have

5:50

to have a lion at some point, even

5:53

with Nazis, where if their kids they're

5:55

not really morally responsible either way.

5:57

Yeah, and like, you know, so the speific thing that he does,

6:00

there's these notices that are sent up by the government that's

6:02

like telling Jewish people to like go

6:05

like to a place and if you go to the place, you're gonna

6:07

get routed up and killed. And

6:10

basically, so the thing that actually

6:13

happened is that so

6:15

Georg Ros's dad is told to do this,

6:17

and he gives it to George Soros and is like, go tell these

6:19

people that they've been called for this and that if they

6:21

go, they're like they're gonna get taken away. And

6:25

this has been transformed by you

6:27

know this that is this is a nightmarish

6:29

thing and these people are surviving. This has been transformed by

6:32

a bunch of the worst people wh've ever lived into Nazi

6:34

collaboration. Which is also you

6:36

know, the part of the story that never gets told, even

6:38

even when people sort of like do the like

6:41

dive into like oh this is fake, is that the thing

6:43

that like Soros's family spends the rest of

6:45

the war doing is basically

6:49

getting like counterfeit papers

6:51

to Jewish families that like says that they're Christian, and

6:53

you know, they like they stay legitimately

6:55

save a bunch of families from dying in the Holocaust,

6:58

and.

6:58

You know the ship that Joeanes pulls on

7:00

them as like part of this because of like the

7:02

job this guy who's like saving

7:05

young George Soros has involves like

7:07

basically like itemizing stuff left

7:10

behind by Jewish families forced

7:12

out of their homes. He's like they were profiting

7:14

off of the holl No, they were like doing whatever

7:16

job kept them under the radar while they

7:19

attempted to help. Like it was the Holocaust,

7:21

it was messy. Yeah, but

7:23

like it's almost like saying like

7:25

Oscar Schindler took advantage of slave

7:27

labors. Well, no, it's actually what Schindler

7:30

was doing was not that. Yeah,

7:32

Like he was using the trappings of

7:34

this slave labor system in order to rescue

7:36

people. It's quite different from just enslaving

7:39

people.

7:40

Yeah. I think the thing that's really desturbing

7:42

about the stow right is like, Okay, like this is

7:44

like Alex Joses Alex Jones, Right, he's just gonna

7:46

say the worst shit you've ever heard. But like this

7:48

is like a thing that mainstream right wingers just say. Now,

7:51

yeah, and it's just unbelievably

7:53

horrible and it sucks and it's

7:55

just like not true. But

7:59

fortunately for George Soros, his

8:01

family makes it through the Holocaust, well

8:04

his immediate family does, and

8:07

they like get out and

8:10

they end up in the US. And this

8:13

is where, Okay, this is something, this is something that I

8:15

think is very important

8:17

to the story that isn't

8:20

told very much. So Soros is like a finance

8:22

whiz, right, he is very

8:24

very very good at finance. And we're gonna

8:27

be talking a bit about like how like the

8:29

things that he figured out to let him do this, because it's

8:31

interesting. But he's also not from

8:33

the sort of like American or the British financial

8:36

elite, Like if I don't there's

8:39

like a certain kind of person, right who like

8:41

goes into finance, and you know it's like

8:43

like like wasp frat brose or like

8:45

in bred British aristocrats, right, And

8:48

George Soros is like a hung is a Hungarian immigrant,

8:50

right. He he is not sort of from these

8:53

people. He is like and

8:56

and you know this is this is gonna be a

8:58

really big deal when he like goes up against

9:00

a British financial elite later on. But

9:04

you know, he threw sort of like

9:06

he's able to turn like a job doing

9:08

door to door salesman into like a

9:10

way into a firm, and he's able to sort of work

9:13

his way up to a point where like he has suddenly

9:15

like has his own hedge fund, and

9:18

he is really really good at this. He's

9:21

one of the sort of early people who does

9:23

hedge funds. There's a great book called

9:25

The Influence of Soros, Politics, Power, and

9:28

the Struggle for an Open Society by

9:31

Emily Tampkin, who did a lot of really

9:33

great work, like interviewed Soros, interviewed

9:35

an enormous number of the people who were around

9:37

him, and I want to read

9:39

a passage of this about like how he figured

9:42

out how to sort of beat the market. He's

9:45

talking about this guy named

9:47

Carl Popper, who's like a philosopher of science who

9:49

also wrote this book called The Open Society

9:51

that we'll talk about next

9:53

episode more. Popper's philosophy

9:56

made me more sensitive to the role of misconceptions

9:58

in financial markets. Decades later,

10:01

people believe that markets don't lie and shouldn't

10:03

be and should be trusted, but that isn't true.

10:05

Sorow's knew markets react

10:08

to humans and humans are fallible. Instead

10:10

of looking at the money being made, or as

10:12

Sebastian Malaby put it, in more money than

10:15

God, his book on the history of hedge funds,

10:17

the psychology that drove investors' appetites,

10:20

Soros looked at how one impacted

10:23

the other, predicting that each would drive

10:25

the other forward until the trust were so completely

10:27

overvalued that a crash was inevitable. And

10:31

this is this is really smart, like

10:34

if you even today, right,

10:36

you know, if you're able to understand

10:38

that, you know, like the way

10:41

a lot of hedgehoon people tend to think about

10:43

the market as like the market, you know, especially

10:45

in this period, is this is this sort of dogmatic, neo

10:47

lible thing of like the market is like a perfect condvance

10:49

of price signals and Sorow's just

10:51

like no, it's made out of people. And those people like

10:55

get greedy. They have emotional

10:57

stuff they like they give

11:00

get into these like fomo like fear of missing out

11:02

stuff. You know, they like intensely

11:05

overvalue assets because everyone

11:07

else sees the assets like expensive,

11:09

so everyone like you know, rushes to buy it,

11:11

and like this is something like like even now right,

11:14

this is this is like a very smart way to understand finance.

11:16

He's figured this out in like the seventies,

11:19

and if you, if you, if you're able to do this kind

11:21

of stuff and like use this to understand

11:23

how the market works in the seventies, you are going

11:25

to look like a god among men. And

11:38

he starts a hedge fund in nineteen seventy three, but by

11:40

nineteen eighty one he has a fund

11:42

that is worth three hundred and eighty one million

11:45

dollars in like nineteen eighty one

11:47

money. I don't know what that is in modern money, but I

11:49

assume it's a lot. I'm a hack

11:51

of a fraud. I should actually figured this out.

11:53

Yeah, that's like a billion dollars.

11:55

Yeah, And like he personally is like

11:57

has like for himself like one hundred

11:59

million dollars, right, and he

12:02

you know, at this point he starts to become sort of very famous

12:04

in finance circles because you know, I

12:06

mean he's just like absolutely destroying the

12:08

market. Now,

12:11

okay, this is where things get. You know, up until

12:13

this point, he's kind of like he's

12:16

been doing a lot of sort of finance

12:19

stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly just been him,

12:21

like ripping off other finance people,

12:23

which I'm entirely okay with, like that's

12:26

just very funny. But

12:28

he starts to get into currency

12:30

speculation, and in

12:33

nineteen eighty five he has one of his

12:35

big breaks, which is he predicts the Plaza

12:37

Chords. Now, okay, Aplasa chord is something

12:39

we've talked about on the show before, but

12:42

I need to talk about it a bit more because

12:44

unfortunately it's we have to talk about the Asian

12:46

financial collaps this episode. And this is a like

12:49

one of the key moments of the Asian financial collaps

12:51

even though it was like a decade earlier. So

12:54

in nineteen eighty five, Ronald Reagan is

12:56

trying to like revive the US as a domestic

12:58

manufacturing industry because it's like

13:01

dying, and

13:04

you know, and the reason part of the like a big part of the reason

13:06

is dying is that they're getting absolutely destroyed by sort

13:08

of German and like West German and Japanese manufacturers.

13:12

And part of what's happening here is

13:15

that particularly Japan's

13:17

currencies are worth way currency

13:20

is worth way less than the dollar. This is called having

13:22

a weak currency, and having a weak currency is really

13:24

good for if you have like an export based

13:26

manufacturing economy. And

13:28

so Reagan basically like walks into a meeting

13:30

with like the Germans, Japanese government, the British

13:33

and like few other people and just basically

13:35

just like not quite in so many words,

13:37

but basically just says like you are all American

13:39

military protectorates, and because you're

13:41

all American military protectorates, like I can I can

13:43

force you to increase the value of your currency

13:46

like or else capital O, capital

13:48

e. And they

13:50

do, they comply, and this is this, this becomes

13:52

this is a thing called the Plaza Cords and this

13:54

this, you know, weakens the value of the dollar versus

13:57

a bunch of other currencies. And this like literally

14:00

handedly like restores the profitability

14:02

of American manufacturing like through the nineties,

14:06

which is really wild. But the

14:09

the other the important thing for this story

14:11

is that I I don't

14:13

know how he did this, but like George Soros

14:16

predicts that this is gonna happen, and she makes

14:18

an unbelievable amount of money basically

14:21

like no, no, like basically doing currency

14:23

speculation because he knows what, like

14:25

currencies are going to increase in value, which you know, he knows

14:27

that like uh. For example,

14:30

he knows that like the Japanese yen is going to

14:32

increase in value. So he makes an enormous amount

14:34

of money doing this stuff,

14:37

and he gets very famous for like he'll

14:39

like make it much of money, and then I'll lose it again, and

14:42

then he'll make it again. And

14:45

this all culminates in Okay,

14:49

so they're they're okay. He starts

14:51

taking ah,

14:55

truly enormous bets,

14:57

like against national currencies, and

15:00

there's one of these that's just funny, and there's one of

15:02

these that's really bad. So

15:05

we're gonna do the funny one first, which

15:07

is so in nineteen ninety two Soros And this is the

15:09

other part that they ever gonna talked about. It's like it's not just Soros

15:11

doing this stuff. He has like allies because

15:15

like as big as Soros as for MBA is right, he

15:17

can't him and his ally

15:19

is gonna take a fifteen billion dollars short

15:21

position on the pound, and even he

15:23

doesn't have like nobody like this is like fifteen

15:25

billion of nineteen nineties money, right, Like

15:28

you need a bunch of firms working together in order

15:30

to do this. But he basically

15:32

takes this massive bet the pound is gonna

15:34

go down, and because of the way that these

15:36

these bets work, like the actual value

15:38

of the pounds like collapses, and

15:42

the British Central Bank like

15:44

like doesn't have enough. And the reason we're able to do is they figure

15:46

out that the British Central Bank doesn't have enough money to stop them,

15:49

like they don't have enough money to like maintain like

15:51

they don't have enough reserves to like maintain the value

15:53

of the pound. And so he gets

15:55

like completely blamed for this, even though again there's

15:57

like other people involved in this, right,

16:01

Like the front page of the Daily

16:03

Mail is literally his face in

16:05

the title I made a billion crashing the

16:07

pound baste, which

16:10

is I okay, so like an anti British level,

16:13

this is very funny. It's

16:17

no, there's a bunch of arguments

16:19

about like what does this mean for like

16:21

the world economy and for national sovereignty.

16:24

Soros thinks that like currency speculation is

16:26

necessary evil and he

16:29

has this sort.

16:30

Of tay to think that when you're making that much

16:32

money, yeah right, you know.

16:35

Now, okay,

16:38

this this

16:40

like specific thing which is like a

16:43

a a bank. A banker

16:45

comes in and is able to manipulate the value

16:47

of a currency. This is like, this

16:50

is like absolutely like

16:54

this is the fodder for like the absolute most

16:56

paranoid fantasies of the anti Semitic

16:59

right. Like it's this sort of like rootless

17:01

cosmopolitan banker like attacks the good and righteous

17:03

like noble people of Britain thing.

17:06

And this is how it gets framed in the press, who are

17:08

like the press is I mean it's the British press,

17:10

right, Like the British are not known for,

17:13

you know, not being anti Semitic, so

17:15

they just like go wild

17:18

with this. But you know, like

17:20

this particular thing he's doing against the British.

17:23

Part of what's happening here, right, is there's this sort

17:25

of there's this kind of like national populist

17:28

equation thing going on here, where

17:31

there's this assumption that like the Bank of Britain,

17:33

like the bank, like the British Central Bank

17:35

is like an entity that is

17:37

identifiable with like an ordinary person

17:40

in Britain, and

17:42

like no, like the British Central

17:44

Bank is run by just unbelievably

17:47

in bred aristocrats, right, and you.

17:49

Know I think they're pretty

17:51

believably in bred.

17:53

Oh that's fair.

17:56

We're just talking about like

17:58

like zero point five six of a

18:00

Habsburg unit, you know, a hack. The

18:03

Habsburg is the international unit for measuring

18:05

how inbred someone is.

18:06

If you're if you're unaware, Yeah,

18:09

yeah that that seems like a reasonable amount

18:12

of inbred for these specific people. But

18:14

you know, like but this is what I was talking about, Like at the very beginning,

18:16

I was talking about sort of like Sorrow's not being from

18:19

this sort of like normal class of

18:22

finance people. And the thing

18:24

is, like the normal class of finance people are fucking terrible

18:26

at their jobs, right, like these amber British

18:28

aristocrats and like the fucking American like

18:31

cocaine frat boys like like just like

18:33

doing lines of cocaine off each other's as cracks. Like these

18:35

people all suck at their jobs. And

18:37

George Soros is like smart and is good

18:39

at his job. And so she just

18:41

like absolutely goes through these

18:44

people like a fucking flaming chainsaw, and

18:46

she just like, you know, and the maneuvers

18:49

that he's doing here, she just like absolutely

18:51

humiliates all of the people

18:53

at the at the British Central Bank.

18:55

He's humiliating like and not just those guys too,

18:58

it's humiliating the Tories. He's humiliating like

19:00

all of the people who are seriously

19:03

important in the real economy, in the sort

19:05

of real British economy. And

19:08

he can do this right because like his

19:10

opponents are you know, people

19:12

who are like they're they're they're promoting, they're like

19:14

they're they're they're okay, they take in like their people from

19:17

college, right, and they're promoting the base off how good they are

19:19

at golf. And

19:22

so when when he just sort of like like walks

19:24

in and just makes it like makes like billions

19:27

of dollars just like destroying these people, he

19:31

makes just a permanent enemy

19:33

of a very very powerful like

19:35

faction of the British ruling class and

19:37

the British ruling class. Like I

19:39

don't know, they they it

19:42

is hard to find people who will beat the British ruling

19:44

class in an anti Semitism off. And

19:46

this is this is one of the things that sort of you know, if you're

19:48

looking at like why Sorrow

19:51

specifically is the guy who

19:53

all of these sort of right wing conspiracies wind

19:56

up being about, like part of it is because he

19:58

pisses off these specif people.

20:01

Yeah, these guys who's like dads were

20:03

all friends with the King of England, who

20:05

was like a close personal buddy with

20:08

Hitler. Like there it's a bunch

20:10

of like, it's a bunch of guys who are already

20:12

pretty bigoted and then they get beaten at

20:14

their own stupid financial game. And

20:16

so like the fact that

20:18

it's a Jewish dude who does it means that they're going

20:20

to be even more racist

20:22

than they already were. And the fact

20:24

that there's plenty of international

20:27

anti semitism and that George

20:29

Soros after this starts funding liberal

20:32

and you know, vaguely progressive causes

20:34

like yeah, it's not this is not a it's

20:36

not surprising that this is the way things went.

20:39

Yeah, and you know, and again,

20:42

like I can't under emphasize the

20:44

extent to which this is also very specifically the reaction

20:47

to British media class. Who I mean, we

20:49

know now that those people are psychos,

20:52

Like we have seen them

20:54

see a transperson at a boat race and

20:56

like like ten years ago and like

20:59

like draw a gi things circling them in

21:01

a boat and making it a front page news story. Those

21:03

people in the nineties were like sure,

21:06

they are biological biologically better

21:08

at navigation. That is that has

21:10

actually been improved. Yeah,

21:12

but then they're like justice, they're

21:14

they're they're just a sort of feral and

21:18

like terrifying lead

21:20

bigoted then as they are now. And this means

21:22

that like like just

21:25

if you're a regular British person and you

21:27

are like walking down the street and there's a newspaper

21:29

sand you are seeing like

21:32

like they truly unbelievably

21:35

terrifying anti Semitic shit, like just

21:38

literally everywhere. And

21:41

this this will have no consequences whatsoever.

21:44

Uh yeah, it's all good, nothing bad

21:46

ever happens. And speaking of no consequences,

21:48

I do you

21:51

know what we can promise about about

21:54

training services? Twenty three minutes

21:56

in? You know, look you're

21:59

welcome, Damnan. Okay,

22:10

we're back and we have to talk about Okay.

22:14

So the doing it to the British economy was

22:16

mostly just really funny because the British

22:18

economy is going to be fine. And it's the

22:21

funny part about she was doing it to the British

22:23

economy is that this actually unfortunately helps the

22:25

British economy because it forces

22:28

the British to like abandon

22:30

some truly spectacularly

22:33

not very good financial policy they were doing. But

22:39

then he does it to Thailand,

22:42

and that is a

22:44

lot less justifiable.

22:48

So it in this is five

22:50

years later, this is nineteen ninety seven. Sous

22:53

brings in some economists, Arminio

22:57

Fraga, like Roddy Joe's David Kowitz.

23:00

Uh he he brings He's bringing in people who

23:02

are sort of experts in like developing

23:05

market uh economics. And

23:09

that's never no one has ever

23:11

brought in a developing market economist

23:13

for like a good reason. And

23:17

what they what they realize

23:19

is that they start doing analysis of Southeast

23:22

Asia, like the Southeast Asian markets, and they realize

23:24

very quickly that Thailand

23:27

is fucked. They

23:30

they figure out that Thailand

23:32

has Thailand has his currency pegged

23:34

to the dollar and this, but

23:37

you know, they don't have the reserves support this, and the

23:39

tie like actual tai currency isn't

23:41

strong enough to maintain like

23:43

like stay being pegged to the dollars. It's not

23:45

a strong enough currency. And so they do a

23:48

two billion dollars short of

23:50

of of like Thailand's

23:52

currency. And I

23:55

mean, I'm gonna read from the Influence of Sorrows again about

23:57

like the process of

23:59

this. It was a debate

24:01

we had. Jones told me we'd gone

24:03

to work in Asia, and here you are taking large scale

24:05

short positions in countries with institutional

24:08

fragility. Going for the juggular

24:10

in the United Kingdom was one thing doing

24:12

the same, and Thailand was another. The Bank

24:14

of England would surely recover. Thailand

24:16

was a developing economy and it was unclear

24:18

what impact outside investors could have.

24:21

Soros has justified speculation

24:24

with the idea that it could serve as a kind of warning

24:26

to governments. Look,

24:28

Thai government, the bot needs to devalue.

24:31

Change your policy now before a currency collapses,

24:33

devastating for your people. The trouble

24:35

is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead,

24:38

it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves

24:40

to buy Tai bot. When it finally ran out

24:42

in early summer nineteen ninety seven, the value

24:44

of the bot plunged thirty two percent against

24:46

the dollar and millions of people lost Thai

24:49

people lost their livelihoods. The Soros

24:51

fund made seven hundred and fifty million dollars.

24:54

Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look,

24:57

yes, I made a lot of money selling

24:59

heroin to those middle schoolers.

25:01

But really, when you think about it, it was a

25:03

warning to those schools that it

25:06

was too easy for me to bribe the janitor

25:08

to sell heroin to kids there. You

25:10

know, I was actually performing a public

25:13

service. So true,

25:15

Robert, It is just like that, you

25:18

know.

25:19

To be fair, you know, I'm not going to every money.

25:21

I'm not going to finish that thought. That's probably for

25:23

the best.

25:24

Yeah, we need we need one person

25:26

to remain uncanceled here to keep the lights

25:28

on.

25:30

Oh God, doesn't have to be me.

25:32

Oh no, yeah, no, legally it does.

25:34

It's really bad. Yeah, no more joking,

25:37

but yeah, we can't. We can't suffer any

25:39

other jokes.

25:40

Yes, somebody's gotta upload this

25:42

episode.

25:43

All right here, here, here, here's the next

25:45

joke. Soros actually doesn't make

25:48

money off of the speculation, if off

25:50

of a speculating in Southeast Asia, because

25:52

he loses basically the same amount of money

25:55

taking like a long position in Indonesia.

25:57

Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took

26:00

a long position on doing cocaine

26:02

in my bathroom with the money that

26:04

I made selling drugs to all

26:06

those kids. You know, we're

26:09

a lot alike, him and me, we're a lot of

26:11

like.

26:12

Well, okay, to be fair, to be fair, and this is

26:14

okay, this is the thing. The reason I wanted

26:16

to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay,

26:20

like to this day, if you look

26:22

under sort of if

26:25

you if you every once in a while, someone someone, there'll

26:27

be a tweet that's like, what did George Sorrows

26:29

do? And immediately

26:32

there will be a bunch of people talking about how he

26:34

like deliberately destroyed all of the economies

26:36

in Southeast Asia. Yeah, and that's

26:39

not really what happened.

26:41

And that would be for one thing, too much to put

26:43

on one guy fucking around

26:45

with a cup.

26:46

Yeah. Yeah, And I wanted to actually

26:48

kind of walk through this a little bit in depth

26:50

just because okay, there's

26:53

a really really easy way to think about

26:55

the economy that is bad. It leads you into

26:57

anti Semitic traps, which is like, hey,

26:59

here is like one banker who wanted

27:01

to make money, and because he wanted to make money, he

27:04

like destroyed all these economies. And

27:07

like, on the one hand, yeah, like like Sorrow's

27:09

betting against like the tai

27:12

currency is bad, right, like this is this

27:14

is not a thing you should have been doing. On

27:16

the other hand, you know, okay, so that's like the sort

27:18

of level one thing. But the thing about that,

27:20

you know, this is the sort of this is the sort of like great Man,

27:22

anti anti Semitism theory of collapse.

27:25

And this is the theory that a lot of the sort of regional leaders

27:27

take, you know, because

27:30

and this and this is sort of a crucial thing, right, this

27:32

position very conveniently allows

27:34

them to just like not think about capitalism

27:37

in general or like their role in this

27:39

in this crisis, which is not insignificance.

27:43

And so in order to figure out what what actually

27:46

happened here, we need

27:48

to look at so so Sorow sort of like tip

27:50

like tip some dominoes, right, but

27:53

the dominoes were already there and they were going

27:55

like regardless even if Soros had never existed, right,

27:57

Like, they were going to fall. And

28:00

they're going to fall because ironically of

28:02

the plaza coords. So

28:05

you know, when we talked about the plaza courds earlier. The

28:08

US forces Japan to increase the value of its currency

28:10

relative to the dollar. Okay,

28:12

so this is great for the American economy. This nukes

28:15

the Japanese economy, I mean the Japanese

28:17

economy, you know. And we'll talk about this in a bit

28:19

too. It was already kind of doing bad. When

28:21

the US does this and its manufacturer economy

28:23

just like implodes it. It guts

28:26

the Japanese economy. It has The Japanese economy

28:28

has never recovered from this. It probably

28:31

will never recover really into

28:34

what it was. And

28:37

you know, the effect this has is that

28:39

now the government of Japan

28:41

has to figure out how to grow their economy

28:44

without having any way to make

28:46

money that grows your economy.

28:49

But now they have a stronger currency, and so their

28:51

solution is, Okay, what did they

28:54

all the central banking people look around each other and they

28:56

go, what is a strong currency good for housing

28:59

speculation? And

29:01

so they they start like they

29:03

start, they start slashing interest race, and they start basically

29:06

building an entire economy, uh, based

29:09

on the assumption that housing prices will always go up,

29:11

and so you should just take out loans so you could buy

29:13

houses because the value of the housing will

29:18

because you know, highing prices will always go up, so you can you

29:20

can have all of these assets based and mortgages.

29:23

H This is this may may or may not be sounding

29:25

familiar to everyone who literally thousand and eight I

29:28

and so you know, in in like in like nineteen

29:30

eighty two, the entire Japanese economy implodes

29:33

sort of again because

29:37

they they literally built the two thousand and eight

29:39

machine. And so this

29:41

this forces the US to

29:44

do something called the reverse Plaza Cords, where they

29:47

take the original Plaza records and they reverse it and they

29:49

increase the value of the American dollar. American manufactury

29:52

dies like it's never recovered, it's never

29:54

coming back. And

29:56

this for a this kind of this stabilizes

29:59

the Japanese a to be a little bit, but it

30:01

means that the US now no longer has

30:03

a functional economy. And so we do.

30:06

Our solution to this is we need two thousand and eight. Right,

30:08

we build an entire economy also on

30:10

the Japanese model of currency speculat

30:13

of you know, of like housing price speculation, ceculation

30:15

of like or like the rising prices of like stocks.

30:18

Right, we build an economy completely made a bullshit.

30:23

But you know, okay, but what does

30:25

this have to do with the Asian market collaps? Okay? The problem

30:27

is that like all of the countries and in East Asia

30:29

and like Southeast Asia also do this. They

30:31

also do the thing where they're like, oh, we're gonna we're gonna, we're

30:33

gonna ba We're okay, so our manufacturing economies are

30:35

declining, right, so we're gonna we're gonna base our entire economy

30:38

on housing prices going up. And

30:41

you know that's and it's not George

30:43

Soros. That's the thing that actually destroys

30:47

like the sort of that's

30:50

something that like that like actually destroys all of these economies.

30:53

And you know, and I wanted to sort

30:55

of run through this, and you know, this is like a lot of like sort

30:58

of econ shit, right, But the reason I wanted

31:00

to run through this is that I think I

31:02

think he gets at the

31:05

sort of truly the truly horrifying

31:07

thing about how our economy

31:09

works that is really

31:13

difficult to face, and is I think it's

31:15

at least a part of why people really

31:18

really want there to just be one guy

31:20

who is running anything everything, whether that's the CIA,

31:22

whether that's Soros, whether that's like the New

31:25

World Order. Yeah,

31:27

right, because if

31:30

there's if there's like a guy who's doing

31:32

this, right, you can stop him. But

31:35

the great horror of this world is that there

31:37

is no deep state, right, there is no sataniscoball,

31:39

there's no one pulling the strings at all. The only

31:41

thing that is there is just sort of

31:43

the cold, lifeless and inexorable death logic

31:45

of capital, and that logic is moving

31:48

all of us, right, all you know, the people

31:50

who are doing the conspiracies, insofar

31:53

as they exist, are being moved by this. All

31:55

of the rulers are being moved by capital. All of

31:57

us, the subjects, are being moved by capital. But

32:00

that like sucks, right, Like

32:03

the fact that all of these economies are

32:05

destroyed not by like the individual

32:07

actions of people, but by the fact

32:09

that, like returns are less good in Thailand

32:11

than they are in China. And this

32:14

is just sort of the inectable logic of the entire economic

32:16

system we have. This is, you

32:18

know, this is absolutely terrifying, and

32:22

faced with this sort of reality, right, like, people

32:24

who want to protect capitalism because

32:26

you know, they have a bunch of assets in it, right, retreat

32:30

into this sort of like they you know, they they

32:33

use Soros as a smoke screen for like why everything

32:35

is suddenly going wrong. But

32:39

sort of simultaneous to this, right, this is

32:41

also a real problem for George Soros

32:43

because he's, like,

32:46

you know, when he's not sort of in his role

32:49

as like capital He's like

32:52

not a piece of shit. He's like a

32:54

person who wants the world to be better. And

32:59

this, you know, this causes a

33:01

sort of there

33:05

was a contradiction in his ideology, right, which is that he

33:07

wants the world to be a better place, and simultaneously

33:10

he's also a capitalist, and these

33:12

two things are sort of warring with each other. Even

33:14

as early as even as early sort of the nineties,

33:16

he's giving speeches about how like

33:18

his open society that he wants. It's just sort of like

33:21

this liberal democratic society of like laws

33:23

and norms and human rights.

33:25

The greatest danger Twitter ceased to be communism,

33:27

it's now capitalism. But

33:29

he can't do anything about it because he is also a

33:31

capitalist. And next

33:34

episode, we're going to watch Soros

33:36

like through his philanthropic

33:38

endeavors, attempt to solve the problems that

33:40

his economic system has caused and fail

33:43

catastrophically and become the

33:46

sort of boogeyman and the the

33:49

anti sementic spector of every conspiracy theory in

33:51

the world.

33:52

Yeah, so check out that

33:54

next time. And you

33:57

know, if you're hanging out around Clark

33:59

Middle School and you have forty

34:01

dollars. I can hook you up with

34:04

some some of that sweet black tar,

34:06

so you know, give me a ring.

34:09

My phone numbers posted in the show notes of

34:11

every episode

34:16

It.

34:16

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