The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now

You noticed it too, haven't you?We've been exposed to controversies and warnings and just non -stop bad news our entire lives, but this hits different.Beneath all of these chaotic headlines that we see every single day, it just feels like something bigger is happening.Do me a favor.Try and think of one, just one, general thing in your life that has improved in the last 10 years.Has your quality of healthcare improved?

How about your quality of education?Your cost of living, your insurance coverage, your privacy, your freedom?Do you have more time to do what you want to do today than you did in 2016?On this day, one decade ago, the Dow Jones closed at around 18 ,000 points.Since then, it has skyrocketed, closing today at 51 ,000 points.So congratulations, unless of course your quality of life is not 2 .83 times better, In that case, I made a video for you to watch.

But this video isn't about evil CEOs or how capitalism and wealth inequality are out of control.You probably already knew those things.This is a theory.Maybe a conspiracy theory, but a theory nonetheless that I've been sharing and discussing and refining for years.For you, it's merely some lenses that you can try on when reading your newsfeed.It's an introduction to what comes after capitalism.

Something I can only call Leveragism.Capitalism on paper is dependent on economic and technological growth.On paper, the idea is that everybody gets a slice of the pie, and if we make a really, really, really big pie that keeps growing, then everybody can get fat.And not only is that example kind of a literal one when we look at the American obesity epidemic, but capitalism also led to agriculture.innovation and global supply chains and wealth creation in developing countries that played a huge part in decreasing global hunger.It's worth recognizing that in 1970, one third of the people on this planet were starving, and now that number is down to about 8 .2%.

How much of that achievement can be awarded to capitalism can be debated, but ignoring that this drop in famine happened in a time when all but four countries rely on a capitalist structure would be disingenuous.Let's revisit that on -paper part.So, like, even if we limit our examples to Coca -Cola, who I seem to frequently use for economic examples for some reason, capitalism leads to a lot of evil shit.In 1954, Coca -Cola financially and politically supported a CIA -backed military coup of Guatemala.Then, in the early 2000s, Coca -Cola was suspected to have hired right -wing paramilitary death squads to assassinate union leaders.Latin America and India by depleting local aquifers.

They have bottling partners that have been repeatedly accused of human rights violations and suppressing union organization.They have Israeli franchises that have sourced their resources from occupied Palestinian territories, which is considered illegal under international law.Is the existence of capitalism the problem here?Most progressive people would answer that question with a resounding yes.I think it's debatable.I would argue that most of these things that Koch did violate the rules written by capitalist governments, and the problem is greed, which is a byproduct of jealousy.

Since capitalism is frequently associated with hoarding more resources than your neighbors, we tend to associate capitalism with being a douchebag, and that's totally fair.So much so that we even get popular memes and fake Karl Marx quotes like, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, which is a completely sane and reasonable thing to shout at lemonade stands and farmers markets.The reason I'm discussing this to begin with is to highlight what American capitalism means on paper and how apparently nobody has seen that paper in decades.One thing that I regret not covering enough in my last video was what happened between the Great Depression and the 2000s.Let's go back to 1933 and I think we need a whole tone scale for this.Hey, I'm in 1933.

Shit sucks.Nobody has any money.I've been eating shit like dandelions and potato soup and a bunch of poorly thought out ways to eat hot dogs.All this happened because a bunch of people got really greedy and borrowed more money than they could ever pay back and invested it in wheat.What is the deal with that?Franklin D Roosevelt's administration was both aware of capitalism's potential to increase the American quality of life, but also its potential to cannibalize itself.

And it is truly remarkable to me that nearly 100 years ago, they saw the exact same mechanism that's playing out today.And this was at a time when some of your baseball -watching and apple pie -eating Americans were still on the fence about communism, and they had solid representation via the CPUSA.A lot of American citizens believed that the Soviet Union was a rising egalitarian society that was immune to the Western economic crisis, that they were experiencing.The New Deal took this into serious consideration and ultimately wasn't about social services or directly addressing wealth inequality like the Soviet Union, but instead about sticking to the whole freedom thing and redefining capitalism in a way that would allow Americans to organically solve these problems using their own capitalist motivations.All of this kicked off with the Glass -Steagall Act of 1933.No longer would a commercial bank that provided consumer and business loans be allowed to deal with, underwrite, or invest in private securities.

And investment banks would no longer be able to take consumer deposits.So to give you an example, JP Morgan was forced to start a separate business for all the risky stuff and that eventually became Morgan Stanley.This act also created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or FDIC.This guaranteed that if you had money in a commercial bank and that bank failed or went out of business, you would be guaranteed reimbursement up to a specified limit.All ofthis, combined with a whole lot of historically progressive labor laws and a tiny little skirmish called World War II, set America up to make the most savvy financial move in the history of trade.

You know those crazy conspiracy stories where the elite Illuminati members will meet up somewhere in the woods and decide how they'll control the world?That actually kinda happened.And to some degree, the economic fate of you and your family was decided in that meeting.Towards the end of the Second World War in July of 1944, delegates from 44 allied nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, with the goal of designing and negotiating a post -war financial system.At the time, pretty much the entire world was economically devastated, but due to our size and geographic isolation, American soil was mostly untouched by the war.We also held between 70 and 80 % of the world's gold reserves and were easily the largest largest manufacturing economy on the planet.

The Bretton Woods Compromise offered a way that countries could facilitate international trade with a trusted currency without having to lug literal bars of gold everywhere.The United States pegged the U .S.dollar strictly to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce, and it was guaranteed that any foreign bank could turn in $35 and receive a physical ounce of gold from Fort Knox.Then, every other nation in this agreement pegged their individual currency to the U .S.

dollar, which was then used exclusively commodities such as oil with one another.Normally, if a country spends more money than it takes in, their currency and spending power would devalue, which would cause domestic inflation.But now, the world would need to use U .S.dollars to conduct any form of trade.And over time, the U .

S.started printing more and more dollars to import commodities like consumer goods and oil from other nations without having to worry about the U .S.dollar losing value.Another advantageous side effect of this was a unique type of stagnation.While watching America go on a shopping spree, other nations realized that their U .

S.dollars would lose value just sitting in a pool.somewhere, so their safest option at the time was to buy U .S. TreasuryS.Treasury bonds.This created and inflated an extraordinary global demand for U .

S.government debt, allowing us to borrow money for absurdly low interest rates to fund our infrastructure and become the most powerful military in the history of the world.By the late 1960s, the world started losing confidence in this system.Economists like Milton Friedman and Robert Triffin saw this as a flawed and dangerous economic rule set.One of the US gold standard's sharpest critics was French President Charles de Gaulle, who frequently publicly condemned the monetary system, calling it an exorbitant privilege.And de Gaulle called the U .

S.out on their bluff and demanded to trade massive amounts of U .S.dollars for American gold.Between 1963 and 1966, 24 secret boat trips supervised by the French Navy and several flights crossed the Atlantic Ocean, carrying back a total of 3 ,313 tons of gold from America.This would be worth nearly half a trillion dollars today.

After printing and spending incredibly reckless amounts of money on the Vietnam War, the American government knew that the jig was up.The wild conspiracy theory that the American dollar wasn't actually in parity with American gold was now a frequent public discussion by international leaders.Nobody knows how far out of parity gold and U .S.dollar was, but it wouldn't exactly be a stretch of the imagination to think that if England or Japan or any other large nation decided to cash in their currency like France did, there'd be no more gold left to give them.So instead, on August 15, 1971, President Nixon addressed the nation and told Americans that they were, in fact, the victims of the Bretton Woods Agreement.

The speculators have been waging an all -out war on the American dollar.I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators.

He ambiguously villainized and referred to West Germany and Japan as international speculators and accused them of creating economic crisesto rob money from Americans.He drew vague parallels between himself and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he announced a new deal of his own.In order to protect Americans from these international speculators, the U .S.dollar, the currency in which world trade almost exclusively took place, would no longer be backed by gold or anything tangible.

just as much tomorrow as it is today.

Over the next few years, the inflation rate of the U .S.dollar doubled, and the U .S.and most of the Western world entered into a severe recession.OPEC, or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, tried to price oil against gold to create international economic stability, but this led to even less stability.

This made previous oil production complications much worse, and oil prices quadrupled from $3 per barrel to $12 per barrel overnight.And by the end of the decade, crude oil prices skyrocketed by roughly 1 ,000%.As a result, gas stations could no longer afford to resupply their storage tanks, and in many places, Americans would spend entire days waiting to fill up their vehicles.In the North, many people reverted to heating their homes with wood -burning stoves, and in an effort to save fuel, Nixon ordered that the maximum speed limit be set to 55 miles per hour nationwide.This led to truckers going on strike, and they started coordinating via citizen -banned radios, inventing their own slang and terms to confuse law enforcement.Many of those who were on strike spent their time slashing tires, shooting trucks, and dropping cinder blocks from bridges on non -participating truck drivers.

More than a few people were killed over these disputes, and the entire country suffered enormous supply chain disruptions.And then Nixon had another one of his brilliant ideas.In 1973, he signed a bill extending daylight savings time to last the entire year.As violent crime rates rose to the highest point in recorded American history, and children walked to school in total darkness because there was not enough fuel for their school bus, Americans rightfully started wondering if the people in charge had no f***ing idea what they were doing.But it would turn out that some people, like Treasury Secretary William Simon, did know what they were doing.He would take top -secret trips to Saudi Arabia to negotiate another deal that would give the American economy the asymmetrical leverage it needed to become whole again.

In 1974, the U .S.and Saudi Arabia quietly forged an alliance.It was not announced to the public or foreign leaders, but was conducted as a highly calculated and secretive economic handshake.The Saudi Kingdom, who was by far the top oil producer in the world, agreed to price and sell every drop of its crude crude oil exports exclusively in U .S.

dollars.And because the entire world needed oil to industrialize, every nation on earth was suddenly forced to build up massive reserves of U .S.dollars just to continue operating.But it gets far more calculated than that.hardware training, and an implicit promise that the American military would intervene and protect the Saudi royal family and their oil fields from any threat.

And in return, the Saudis agreed to recycle their excess oil profits directly back into the U .S.economy by purchasing billions upon billions of dollars in U .S.treasury bonds.And in this same decade, between 1970 and 1980, Saudi Arabia's GDP went from $4 billion to $164 billion.

That's like earning $15 an hour at McDonald's, and, within the next decade, earning $615 an hour at McDonald's.The GDP per capita in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE eclipsed the earnings of even the wealthy class of people in America and Europe.If you've ever watched footage showcasing insane, tacky levels of wealth in Dubai, now you know where that wealth originated.But for the context of this video, this creation of what is now called the petrodollar put America back on their chariot of asymmetrical leverage,the rest of the world would have to, you know, cut down forests and mine materials and make shit to sell.If you're on the side of bringing manufacturing back to the US, this may be the most important argument I'll ever have to give you.

The aforementioned insane amounts of privilege from the gold standard and petrodollar allowed America to outsource most of the things that we don't feel like doing.Mining, drilling, refining, working long hours in a factory.Instead of pilfering our natural resources and letting it degrade our citizens' quality of life, we instead adjusted our ties and thought of ideas and intellectual property that other countries could make for us to consume.Like, try and conceptualize this.I live on land that has a whole lot of iron and pyrite on it.And then we have a small river with virtually unlimited water just down there.

But I live in an economic reality with so much privilege that not once have I ever considered digging up these resources and selling them.I literally live on a farm.I don't grow plants to sell and I literally give my chicken eggs away to friends and neighbors.And if I have a big surplus, I just throw them at a tree and then the chickens eat them.

Let's just use copper production as an example as it's pretty much available everywhere on earth.

In Congo, an average of 6 .8 tons of copper is extracted or processed per square mile.In China, it's an average of 6 .5 tons.In Mexico, it's 1 .76 tons.But here in America, with our vast, enormous copper deposits, it's 12 pounds of copper processed per square mile.Instead, we import the majority of the copper we use from other places so we can keep our land looking pretty and our air smelling clean.So when I hear billionaires squawking about bringing manufacturing and mining jobs back to the U .

S.and then advocating for the removal of immigrants are willing to do those jobs, I think to myself, did they somehow miss the last 80 years of economic prosperity?Is it f***ing possible that they don't understand how any of this works?Or is it entirely possible that they do understand how this works, and the problem is actually that too many Americans are too comfortable?And that probably sounds crazy, but stick with me, because first we need to philosophically understand leverage.Leverage is a term frequently used by economists, although maybe not frequently enough.

Studying leverage on an investment is about as fun as writing down thousands of metrics and using logistic regression to predict a fight instead of just betting against Jake Paul and then watching him get knocked unconscious and you winning $100 in the process.So you decide to rent a home in a small town where every house costs exactly $100 ,000 and you're saving up to buy one.I decided to move to the same town as well, but not just to live there.I'm going to try and make as much money as possible.I happen to have a hundred thousand in cash, so I buy a house.A year goes by, property value increases by 10%, and I sell the same house for $110 ,000, making 10 % profit on my equity.

But then I get a better idea.I take $100 ,000 from the sale of my house and use it as five $20 ,000 down payments on five houses.Another year of 10 % value increase will earn me 50 % return on investment.So why don't I do this in real life?Why don't I own dozens of properties?Well, because this isn't some sort of infinite money glitch.

It's a high risk maneuver.In fact, it's asymmetrical against me, because if those properties would lose 20 % of their value before I sell them, then I would lose 100 % of my investment and be broke.But there's a whole lot more to this.Long before George Soros was known for paying everybody in the world to be mean to Alex Jones and Donald Trump, he wrote a classic and important book called The Alchemy of Finance, which was published in 1987.This book introduced and popularized the theory of reflexivity, which is now arguably cited more in anthropology than it is in finance, continuing with my pedantic little example here.absorb the housing market losing value, I'd be able to tip the scales in a way where I'm not as exposed to the asymmetrical risk.

If I buy enough of these houses in this little town, I'mnot only contributing to the increase in the appraised property value, but I'm able to maneuver the local economy to my benefit.I could perform a little magic trick called the dividend recap.I could create a shadow company and then sell the houses to myself far below their actual value.Then, when this causes comparable houses to be appraised at a lower value, I can buy them and rent them at higher prices until I create a housing shortage, which will then inflate the value for when I decide to sell.By the way, none of this is hypothetical.

This is exactly what Blackstone did via invitation homes after the 2008 financial crisis.

And Blackstone, for example, is now the largest owner of individual houses in the United States.And then we're renting them to people as opposed to selling them.It's a good business for us, it's a new thing, but it's also good for America.And it's good to be able to provide housing for those people who need it.

In fact, they built a highly sophisticated algorithm to scan real estate markets and intentionally overpaid for houses to price out families who wanted to live in them.Over the years, plenty of white papers commissioned by private equity firms openly detail these theories.They describe housing as a supply -constrained asset with inelastic demand that can systematically block the working class from building generational wealth through homeownership.Instead, this guarantees that workers' income can be siphoned back into Wall Street equity.In 2026, this is now commonplace in nearly every industry.Nearly every price tag tag you see is partially hypothetical, obfuscating the objective value that the commodity holds.

The consumer sees a product, service, company, or rental property.Private equity sees a debt service.Let's visit another painful real world example that you'll probably remember.In 2004, Toys R Us and Babies R Us were profitable and due to the real estate holdings, considered stable with a B plus rating by standard and poor.Their financial flexibility was rated as adequate, but due to big box stores like Walmart and Target, they needed to make some changes to remain stable.way.

But then, KKR, Bain Capital, and Vornado Realty Trust smelled their favorite type of blood and took the company private.It didn't exactly take a clairvoyant to see that Amazon was going to be another big threat to Toys R Us as they had just launched a dedicated toy warehouse, but Toys R Us had about $100 million per year to reinvest into growing an e -commerce platform that could compete against or integrate with Amazon.But instead, they used that money to leverage more debt.so much debt that nobody with a calculator could ever imagine them being able to carry it.So much debt, in fact, that the interest rates were four times higher than the $100 million they would otherwise be using to reinvest in growth.This massive pile of borrowed money would pay for over $470 million in management fees and dividend recapitalizations, not revitalizing the business.

That's because this private equity buyout was never about making Toys R Us more profitable or selling more toys.It was about using the company as a debt service.12 years the store downsized.Employees were underpaid and eventually terminated.Buildings once associated with children's Christmas gifts acting as anchor stores for entire malls now rotted as they sat vacant.And it's worth noting that these same vampiric shitbags did the exact same thing to KB Toys, Gymboree, and Sports Authority.

It's almost as if they have a fetish for suffocating our child retail nostalgia.The transition from a growth -based economy to an authoritarian one is difficult when your life is part of it, but this clears up when you zoom out over a period of years to examine the business models.It's a play that's not dissimilar to private equity's manipulation of the housing market, but instead of robbing your family of an opportunity to build generational wealth, it robs you of the opportunity to consume information freely.And of course, an incredible example of this would be AI.But I need to make an important disclaimer here.I'm not really big on anti -AI rants.

AI is a broad term covering technology that has, for example, legitimately transformed medicine and healthcare research.It's also transformed how effectively insurance companies can deny claims for people who need life.-saving treatment.And in a way, I'm not even talking about AI, but about the mechanism in which it's being used to exploit multiple industries and the world economy itself.Last September, Nvidia announced a $100 billion investment into OpenAI, which is a little weird as OpenAI, from their own optimistic projections, is on track to burn more cash than any company in history.But this starts to make a little more sense when you take into consideration that Nvidia has monopolized the expensive hardware used in data centers, as OpenAI would be spending a whole lot of that investment buying NVIDIA GPUs.

OpenAI spent investment on securing exclusive purchase agreements with top memory component suppliers like Samsung, cornering as much as 40 % of global DRAM production capacity, which has now made it effectively impossible for consumers and small businesses to buy or build computers that could use AI locally.And it's nearly impossible to even buy new high -speed drives to store large amounts of data.This has caused major problems in the video game industry, as even titans like Sony and Microsoft are considering delaying console launches due to unreasonable production costs and limitations, which then gets even more absurd when you consider that Microsoft holds a 27 % equity stake in OpenAI's for -profit arm valued at $135 billion.In that same month as NVIDIA's OpenAI deal, they paid $6 .3 billion to purchase CoreWeave's unsold data center capacity through 2032, despite owning 7 % of the company at the time and being their GPU supplier.Obviously, at this point, no visualization could possibly describe this clusterfuck, and I'm just using them because it's funny.Simply calling this an AI bubble is far too forgiving.

This is, in the opinion of many economists, unprecedented and rampant investment fraud.I'm sure this isn't news to any of my viewers, but Google has deprioritized its functionality as a search engine and replaced your experience with Gemini.I suppose to an extremely optimistic user, this is an evolution of a search engine.Now, instead of having to look around and sort through important context, you are instead served an answer to your question whetherdesire this feature or not.Here's an example, and I literally just tested this on the first try.

Yesterday, The Verge published a short interview with me where I was asked, what is your happy place online?So let's just skip the chore of reading an article and ask Google.It turns out that my happy place online is a VR game for MetaQuest called Walkabout Minigolf, which is weird because I have no idea what the fuck that is.This is because Gemini has confused me with Roger the creator of the MPC drum machine.My actual answer to this question was a free music programming language called Strudel, and this information is literally in the metadata of the first link in the actual Google search.There are some differences between my actual life and my Gemini life.

Gemini claims that I married some lady named Jackie in 2021.And approximately seven years ago, I started bleaching my eyebrows platinum blonde to match my hair.Then I switched to shaving after reading about the chemicals in the dye.But I now really like having no eyebrows because it allows my eyes and lips to stand out more.This is all innocent and amusing until it's not.In 2025, Hasan Piker was viewing one of my videos on a stream and someone in the chat speculated on my stance on Israel.

Stop, you guys are, no, no, no, no, no, I don't, No, I don't want to believe it.Shut up.You're lying.

The following day, I had received a ton of messages expressing disappointment for me having made a video detailing my support for Israel after taking a trip there to interview IDF soldiers.The problem with this is, I've never been to Israel in my life.In fact, decades ago.When on tour in the region, I would intentionally avoid Israel due to the apartheid conditions.And I've repeatedly been both a vocal and financial supporter of Palestinian statehood for the length of my public presence on the internet.But Google's Gemini was, for some reason, mixing me up with a Newsmax reporter who I share virtually nothing in common with, and then prioritizing that absurd level of misinformation over the actual search results.

Even after multiple news outlets covered and published Gemini's monumental f*** up in detail, searching Ben Jordan Israel didn't bother identifying that Geminiitself caused this problem and claimed that I had addressed it over a year before it even happened.So right now you're probably thinking, why is this guy not literally suing Google right now?In the case of Robbie Starbuck, who Gemini had wrongfully claimed was a sexual predator, Google's defense in a request to dismiss his lawsuit called the case misleading because there was no evidence that anyone didn't know that they were hallucinations.They even went to the extent of accusing him of misusing the platform to create the AI hallucinations as evidence because they weren't technically documented or immediately reproducible.These are not rare glitches.

These types of hallucinations happen a lot almost the majority of the time.Last October, the BBC and European Broadcasting Union published a study that showed that 45 % of AI news queries produced, and I quote, erroneous answers.This is an enormous problem and liability that breaks the very thing that these AI models are supposed to be doing.These companies are enormous multi -billion dollar conglomerates with strategists and economists and massive legal teams.So why in the world would this profoundly and confidently unreliable technology not only be recklessly prioritized, but forced on users of virtually every major technical platform.Because it's clearly intellectual property theft.

The Verge paid Terrence O 'Brien to reach out to my manager and set up an interview and then write a short article to accompany it.News sites like The Verge also pay for errors and omissions insurance in case Terrence said something erroneous that would damage my career.And they pay for this with subscriptions and ad revenue.But Google said, eh, we don't feel like paying that writer for any of the other shit, but we do want that ad revenue.So we'll just have a bot scan the information in the article and then prioritize our regurgitation of it ahead of the actual link.And if we make a completely insane mistake that no reporter would actually make, then we'll shrug and say, we didn't do it, it's AI.

That's exactly what they do with image generators.Why take photos when you can make money from other people's photography?Why bother paying a musician royalties when you can just scan their music and sell it?regurgitated versions of it?Why license a book and pay a writer when you can just regurgitate the text inside the book?And at the same time as this happens, the same government and Justice Department that literally imprisons people for sharing music files, classifies critique of generative AI as anti -tech extremism in the most recent US counterterrorism report.

When news organizations, software companies, record labels, or any type of IP -based business lose enough revenue to AI theft, then they'll have to lay off the workers who created the IP, and then they'll be incentivized to integrate AI into their company to keep things going.And if all goes to plan, then, across the board, your devices will fully use AI to summarize and organize articles written by or assisted by AI.And the data centers required for this transition, even after inflation adjustment, exceed the cost of building America's railroads and highways.According to Forbes, by 2030, the cost for this expansion will exceed $1 .7 trillion.amount of burned cash and investment unlike anything any economy has ever experienced.It's far more than the estimated cost to permanently end world hunger.

It is then, on the other end of this transition, when you cannot access media or information without their infrastructure, that you will be required to chip in and pay the debts.It is then when tech will have done to intellectual property what private equity firms had done to Toys R Us.This isn't my wild theory.That's literally the pitch.These companies are openly scaling AI to 100 % adoption.But that's why the investment keeps coming and the largest bubble in history hasn't popped.

So good to us musicians.Oh my gosh, please don't force society to reinvent how news is shared.It's been working so well for democracy.Please don't encourage us to create a completely free and open decentralized internet.What the hell are we gonna do without this system you provided?Just stop playing your games and spend time with our loved ones?

I'm getting increasingly worried that there's a much more sinister plan in place to deal with this liberating ideology, though.Stick with me.If Elon Musk and his entourage of private security pulled up my driveway right now and he rolled down his window and said, Hey, I love your channel style.I'll give you $10 million to make a video about the dangers of transgender culture.I'd tell him to get the fuck off my property.This isn't some edgy precedent either.

This same situation plays out with nearly every brand that emails this channel.I know what I want in life.And I know that I'll be happier not making a video I don't want to make than I would be with $10 million.But that's a privilege that I've worked extremely hard for.But like, what if something happened?What if I had a child that had cancer and couldn't afford the treatment?

Or what if I was behind on my property taxes and was expecting the county to evict me any day now?Well, then my integrity might be more compromisable and I might swallow my pride and make propaganda or insincere content for my subscribers.A really fascinating and important study called Income and Emotional Wellbeing, A Conflict Resolved, zeroes in on the root of this very thing.These researchers found that money and happiness are closely intertwined, but this usually flattens out between $60 ,000 and $90 ,000.a year.This also happens to be the average income where a person or family of comparable earners can turn their income into wealth.

They can own a house, they could start a business, they could save for retirement.Of course, people in this range still have to work and they would still be affected by setbacks, but for the most part, they've escaped complete financial control.They can afford to take the risk of reporting sexual harassment, or they could start a union without the immediate threat of being homeless if they're illegally fired as a result.What's fascinating, though, is that those making $130 ,000 per year are generally generally just as happy as those making 80.,000 per year.They don't need to be wealthy.

They can live in a small suburban home and have to keep the AC off on a warm day to keep the power bill down.They can drive a mid -range vehicle and eat generic cereal, and they're just as happy as the people who don't have to make those compromises.It's almost as if economic happiness is defined solely by having just enough income to say f*** you when you're mistreated.SpaceX IPO goes, Elon Musk's net worth will land somewhere between $800 billion and a trillion dollars.So let's just say $900 billion.And this is the total purchasing power of the city of Austin, Texas and every person who lives there.

$268 billion.This includes everybody's earnings, investments, business revenue, real estate, and so on.Now, if we were to draw a line representing the point in which Elon Musk's purchasing power dipped below the amount he needed to live a comfortable life, we would quite literally need to use a microscope on on a single marble.But if we go by that study that I mentioned earlier versus Austin's GDP per capita, that line for the combined people in Austin is right here.If their purchasing power suddenly dropped below this level, the average family would not be able to accumulate wealth.Their life in Austin, Texas would be spent working from paycheck to paycheck, hoping for some sort of windfall or miracle to get them past the vicious cycle of debt.

So this, combined with having enough purchasing power to eclipse a major city you live in, creates a completely different mechanism of wealth.Whether it's a company or an absurdly wealthy individual, when a single actor's purchasing power is comparable to entire communities, it is more valuable to them to remove billions of dollars from here than it is to add billions of dollars to here.All of a sudden, some of the confusing and chaotic things that are happening in the world start to make sense.Capitalism doesn't work without growth.That is in its core definition, whether it's the industrial revolution or agrarianism or a crack deal, Here's a question that I've been screaming for years.and have not once seen it asked on any debates or news channels.

Why the f*** would so many capitalists support closed borders and contribute to political campaigns that lower the population?Even if they were evil Mr. Burns -style capitalists, wouldn't they want underpaid Latin Americans mining steel and aluminum and then going home and buying more groceries and prescription drugs without insurance and renting their private equity -owned apartments?I really want to believe that so many conservatives and fake libertarian billionaires are so weirdly racist that it somehow conflicts with and defeats every capitalist principle that defined their entire lives.I want to believe that Trump and Elon and Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman are stupid and the ruling class is somehow exclusively filled with morons who failed upwards over and over and over again.I want to believe it because it awards me a lot of social credit to do so.I want to believe it because it allows me to roll my eyes at the last two decades.

I want to believe that in 20 years we'll point to this page in our history books as the stupid wild ride that we can't believe actually happened.But I don't actually believe that, because it makes way more sense that they're using xenophobia as a scapegoat to create a labor and supply shortage that forces the middle class to pay twice as much for products using these materials.I want to believe that things will go back to normal at some point.But I don't think that they will.Consider that four out of five of the wealthiest people in the world attended the presidential inauguration, and the fifth, Larry Ellison, was in the White House the following day.Or consider that the wealthiest person in history spent nearly $300 million on the presidential election, illegally paying between $47 and $100 to people who promised to register to vote in swing states.

He then selected right -wing registered voters at random and awarded them with $1 million checks.Then the wealthiest person in history, equipped with zero minutes of government managerial experience was given his own government department that fired hundreds of thousands of government employees terminated 15 ,000 grants and gutted the Department of Human Services.The administration then terminated the food stampof 4 .3 million Americans and expanded work requirements to people over 55 years of age.And all of the money we saved from this is eclipsed by the amount of our tax dollars that were spent on ICE, Border Patrol, and a rapid expansion of mass government surveillance.In fact, just from the first three months of our involvement in the Iran conflict, the economic impact on the American economy is actually higher than what the entire country pays for food assistance programs for for the entire year.

So most people's retirement savings and 401ks are in things like passive index funds and ETFs.And passive index funds are traditionally safe, conservative investments for people who like dying on a mattress more than they like gambling.They're very mainstream and diversified, and they don't rely on an investment manager to make decisions.Instead, they rely on benchmarks.In fact, they're legally required to buy mainstream stocks listed on the Nasdaq 100 to diversify investments and reduce human error.So the Nasdaq 100, or NDX, has historically had a strict index methodology to try and prevent fraud.

So, for example, if you had a startup and you wanted to bring it public and have it listed on the Nasdaq 100, you would have to go through a mandatory three -month seasoning period so your stock could shake out early speculators and get closer to its actual value on the market.And if you're like most people and you don't know how the ins and outs of how an initial public offering or IPO works, let's just dig into that for one second for some context.So before a company launches an IPO on an index like the Nasdaq, they have an underwriter, which is usually a large investment bank like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley.a bit volatile and chaotic, and so if that stock launches and things aren't going so well, an underwriter will buy shares at a higher value to create an artificial floor to keep it from crashing.Doing this is really risky, and propping up a company's entire public market cap for a period of 3 months or more could be extremely detrimental to the underwriter.Well, with the SpaceX IPO launching at an unheard of $2 trillion valuation, last month the Nasdaq 100 changed this 3 month safety

period to 15 days.This means, literally, that on July 6th, 2026, your passive index funds will be contractually required to start spending your savings on buying up massive blocks of SpaceX stock to track the index.And then, when your 401k is forced to buy up this brand new stock that may be artificially propped up by underwriters, the siphoning of your life savings may commence.So how's that for a real -world example of leverage being used to rob you blind.Every single time you look at the news, when you come across yet another story that perplexes you or makes you wonder how the most powerful people in the world could consistently make such terrible decisions, it's worth asking yourself, to me working my entire life only to be left with just enough money to die on a mattress.Because for those of my viewers who are lucky enough to have accumulated some form of wealth, even if it's your 401k or a house that you're still paying off, once you see this pattern, you can't stop noticing that the majority of policies or change that's been made by the government in the last decade create a new pathway to siphon that wealth from you.

The paranoid conspiracy theory that I cannot get out of my head is that this isn't happening to steal your money, it's happening to steal your autonomy.When you combine all of this with the enormous amount of your tax dollars paying for unprecedented levels of government surveillance, how much more will it take to make you too vulnerable to fight back when you're mistreated?How much more will it take to make you feel like your family's survival is at risk when you attend a protest?At what point will you feel weary to attend a city hall meeting to voice opposition to a proposed data center?Or to make you scared to tell a joke about the president?Or even comment on videos like this one or share it on your social media?

media.How far are we right now from the point in time when you will feel like you can't afford the risk or potential punishment for voting to replace your elected leaders?I once read a book that I expected to be really corny.The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.It was written by Bronnie Ware, who was a hospice nurse who spent years talking to people at the end of their lives.The most common regret from people who knew that their lives were about to end and they were about to leave this world.

I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.To put it more bluntly, when you are at your wisest, equipped with the most memories and the most context, looking back at every single thing that you've experienced in your entire life, you will not give a f**k.about a single statistic in this video, and what you will regret is spending a single second of your life concerning yourself with it.Circling back to where this started, the things I've mentioned in this video make me miss the capitalism I grew up with, but Contrary to that, they highlight the core problem that is seemingly always coupled with capitalism itself.And that's existing or being forced to exist in a constant state where you are valuing yourself by your earnings and belongings, and doing so in a way that is unfairly asymmetrical.There's simply no denying that capitalism creates a world where a deadbeat dad with a trust fund is respected more than a single parent who works two low -wage jobs to provide for their family.

If we're to think about it logistically,the asset that everybody should be hoarding and protecting the most is time.And I don't mean this in the time is money sense.Maybe it's something that happens in your 40s, but if I order something and it requires four hours of my life to assemble it, I'm just sending it back.Like, sure, this cabinet looks really nice and it's worth the $250 that I paid for it, but I want to play guitar or look at stuff under the microscope for four hours more than I want a nice -looking cabinet.And then you just realize that it's all ironically coming back full circle.

Like, 30 years ago, if my grandfather ordered a new coffee table and a little thin, heavy box showed up with a 22 -page assembly manual, he would absolutely lose his shit.That kind of thing would be absolutely unacceptable to consumers in the 1980s.In fact, it would be seen as such an egregious scam that it would be on the evening news.This time theft isn't just some annoyance that old men bitch about in their yards.In economics and sociology, its clinical name is shadow work.It describes the uncompensated and unpaid labor that the ruling class have quietly outsourced to the consumer under the guise of convenience or innovation.

In a classic market, you've exchanged money so somebody else could spend their time processing a service for you.The post -capitalist mechanism works by charging you the full price and forcing you to act as an unpaid employee.Also, at some point we have to admit that this is our own fault.We drove to Ikea and picked out the bedroom set and then searched the warehouse for the parcel number and then lifted the boxes and rented the truck to transport them and then assembled the furniture in our own homes with our own tools.Instead of laughing at the very proposal of being expected to do a these things on our own free time without compensation, we felt like it could save us a few bucks.And we were greedy about the wrong thing.

We were greedy about the thing that wildly changes value without our control.The thing that is controlled by people who don't care about us, but who repeatedly, throughout history, time and time again, break our social contracts with them.time.just to keep the lights on, or literally the wealthiest person in the history of civilization, it seems like capitalism's flaw is a very abstract one.It robs us of the ability to prioritize the appreciation of living.Let me tell you about this video's sponsor.

Wouldn't this be like the most amazing time to do an ad read for an app -based high -interest savings account or some bullshit?Unfortunately, making videos like this tends to cost a lot of money, and traditionally getting money requires one to spend time doing things that they don't want to do, and while I do have to do that from time to time, in this case, I don't have to do that because fortunately, this video is sponsored by you, my viewers.I'm a one -man band in videos like this, but this channel not only produces YouTube videos, but this year I'm actively getting involved in using my knowledge and resources to help political campaigns that are willing to push back against things like mass surveillance and the rapid expansion of data centers.And we're off to a great start, and I think it's making a big difference in how these things will play out.So if you want to chip in and be involved in this, or if you want to join a healthy Discord community, or if you just want to play with my field recordings, audio assets, and plugins I make in my spare time, then my Patreon is for you, and you can join for as little as $1.Thanks for listening to my economic manifesto.

And as always, whatever you do, keep creating.