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You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism | Benn Jordan | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism
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Core Theme
The content argues that traditional capitalism, driven by profit and the velocity of money, is evolving into a new economic system characterized by a rent-based economy, control of information, and the prioritization of power over profit, potentially resembling a modern form of feudalism.
in early 2020 I started becoming
increasingly interested in finance I
know but this was mostly trying to make
sense of the logic behind what the
Federal Reserve did in response to co
which I'll get into later but the more
and more I learned the less and less it
made sense so I started deeply analyzing
stocks from companies that I was
personally and professionally familiar
with such as curiosity stream and
Spotify which led to me starting a
private fund that strategically shorted
those companies I even ended up getting
hired as a freelance consultant for
Venture Capital firms me a musician with
no higher education whatsoever and the
more time that I spent looking at and
studying the big picture the more that I
doubted myself as if the only two
options were option A me being unable to
understand what every 25-year-old day
trader understands or option b I'm right
and every hedge fund manager and
billionaire is wrong but what if there's
a third option what if capitalism's
death wasn't a mistake or something that
the ultra wealthy were trying to avoid
what if the pesky burden of labor laws
and Taxation could be avoided by
deprioritizing the goal of financial
profit or maybe even money itself this
video is going to explain or explore
what I and an increasing number of
economists think is happening or has
already happened to capitalism more
importantly I'm going to try to
encapsulate the unsettling socioeconomic
reality that we're living in as so much
has happened in the last decade that it
you can't fairly describe capitalism
without mentioning its predecessor
feudalism and feudalism was a power
structure in kingdoms where wealth was
defined by the control of land rather
than money and our history books tell us
that feudalism ended sometime in the
late 15th century but there's a much
more recent version of it that would be
a much better example for the purpose of
this video when the Civil War ended or
when the first American Civil War ended
depending on how far into the future
you're watching this video a lot of
former slaves were offered a deal where
they could continue living and farming
on the same land where they were slaves
in exchange for a portion of the crops
in many cases they would only be able to
sell their remaining crops through the
plantation store and with that income
they could participate in trade which
would allow them to buy more tools and
negotiating power and Hope to eventually
buy land for themselves by the late
1930s 2third of sharecroppers were
actually White and the Great Depression
had shut down enough Farms that many of
the tenants migrated to large cities to
become Factory workers it would be
important to note that sharecropping is
not technically outlawed today it's just
that American capitalism's growth made
it obsolete the former definition of
capitalism is a system in which
individuals and private parties control
the means of production and profits are
the key driver of economic activity and
it's important to note that within a
closed system with no new variables
capitalism success can almost
exclusively be measured by the velocity
of money the classic example is the
farmer and the mechanic this tiny
economy has $50 total the farmer trades
$50 to the mechanic for tractor repair
and then the mechanic trades $40 for
corn from the farmer and then buys a
barn cat for $10 from the farmer and in
this cycle $100 has changed hands so the
velocity of money is measured as two
this is calculated as the velocity
within a time period equals the total
sum of transactions over the total of
money in that economy in a larger modern
economy the classic way to increase the
velocity of money is to reduce interest
rates but when spending becomes Reckless
and leads to higher prices and reduced
currency value the classic move is to
make borrowing more expensive
governments around the world either
control or have a lot of influence in
interest rates and some people think
that because of this the Federal Reserve
should be abolished and nobody could
predict exactly what would happen if the
Federal Reserve was abolished but it
would almost certainly result in a lot
of turbulence in the market that would
leave a lot of victims in its wake
around the world a really useful way to
understand how wealth is distributed is
to stop using money as a commodity and
use something that people actually use
or consume let's say a a can of Coke
Zero from a 12-pack a person with
$100,000 and a traditional investment
fund like Vanguard would come out to
about 312,000 cans of Coke Zero in 2019
that same investment untouched is worth
about 330,000 cans of Coke Zero now so
sweet 8 15,000 cans of Coke Zero for
free now on the other hand a person
working for minimum wage full-time in
Iowa would have made
43360 cans per year before taxes in 2019
today in 2025 they're making
22,170 cans somehow this person got a
49% wage cut while the person with the
market fund got free soda amazingly
through the miracle of inflation the
money decreases in value for everyone
while the actual wealth itself moves up
to the top
the concept of the stock market was
proposed in 1792 but it wasn't until
1830 when the first stock was sold on
the New York Stock Exchange it was
initially filled with railroads and
Banks but by the next decade everybody
with a business idea wanted to have
their name list this rapidly stimulated
both technological and economic growth
and by the end of the century the middle
class was getting more and more familiar
with investment by the 1920s you might
be seen as a fool for not being involved
in stock trading in fact you might be
seen as a fool for not borrowing money
to stocks many middleclass investors
were borrowing with a 1:3 ratio meaning
that they would borrow $300 for every
$100 they invested this sounds
absolutely insane but it didn't seem as
risky due to the introduction of Futures
in the mid- 1800s the Chicago Board of
Trade had a pretty great idea to make
grain trade a lot more reliable and a
lot less volatile rather than grain
Farms having to guess what demand would
be at the end of the season they could
sell it at a discount in advance a
future is not a stock or share but a
contract guaranteeing a future
transaction it just so happens that I
have a whole bunch of healthy female
chicks who will shower me with more eggs
than I know what to do with in about 3
months and I really could use a little
bit of extra money to build an addition
to their Coupe so they could have room
to run around with and be healthy egg
layers when they become adults so you
being an opportunist and a capitalist
can buy my egg Futures off of me and
then sell eggs to restaurants in the
summer at a profit and make money
without ever having to shovel the
heaping amounts of chicken that
I'll have to shovel all right let's go
back to the 1920s by 1919 due to the
popularity of Futures and people's
willingness to borrow money to buy them
a farmer could get $2.9 for a bushel of
wheat this was inflationary to say the
least and even made the sharecropping
economy I mentioned earlier more
desirable for a brief period of time it
started getting really out of hand so
the grain Futures Administration was
formed and implemented a large mandatory
Daily Ledger and Reporting System for
Traders the US Secretary of Agriculture
would repeatedly suspend the Reporting
System creating more volatility and more
opportunists taking advantage of that
volatility then in October of 1929 as
there was more money out on the loan
than there was circulating in America at
the time and as more wheat was being
produced than the population could ever
hope to eat the elephant in the room
woke up and took a giant on the
floor everybody tried to get ahead of
the crash which more or less caused the
crash and by the end a bushel of wheat
was only worth 49 and for the next 12
years capitalism was a failed experiment
well wait actually for the next 20 years
we like to think that capitalism made
its great comeback during the second
world war but by today's standards that
was I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to
say this word in public anymore without
being arrested communism but we didn't
just go from the freezer to the frying
pan immediately Franklin D Roosevelt's
New Deal founded the SEC to protect
investors moving forward it also
introduced the Social Security Act and
the fair labor standards act and
prohibited child labor while securing a
national minimum wage and workers rights
to unionize successful fellas with even
a fraction of the wealth that Elon Musk
or Jeff Bezos has would have paid a 79%
income tax and companies like Tesla and
Amazon would have paid a corporate tax
rate of 15% but the seword wouldn't come
until the US got involved with World War
II to say that the war effort stimulated
the American economy would be a vast
understatement but this was under a
closely guiding hand from the federal
government and it was every free market
capitalists worst nightmare by today's
standards many companies were told what
they would be producing and how much of
it they would be producing and how much
they would be paying their labor force
American citizens got ration books and
stamps and were only allowed to buy
specific amount of staple consumer items
like bread and sugar and if you wanted
to buy a car or gasoline you had to
justify a need to the government most
consumer items that came in metal
containers which was like everything
back then could not be purchased again
unless you recycled the container first
this rationing more or less lasted until
1947 and into the 1950s fellas like Elon
and Bezos would have had their income
taxed as much as 92% and again yes in
modern times this sounds like a
capitalist SCE nightmare but it resulted
in a 37% growth over the next decade and
made America the richest country on
Earth it is now literally referred to as
the Golden Age of American capitalism
and despite a few brief bumps in the
road things just kept growing and
growing and growing exponentially making
in the early 2000s capitalism got so
complicated that investors didn't fully
understand what they were buying and
that's not an exaggeration this was by
Design there were trillions of dollars
to be made by OB fisca what Commodities
were being sold in Your Average stock
market transaction a great example
everybody watching this has heard the
term subprime mortgage but I'd guess
that not everybody knows exactly what it
means it means a risky mortgage if
you've ever purchased a house you may
have witnessed the wild auction that
takes place without your consent or
knowledge the moment you sign the
mortgage papers and the average mortgage
is sold two to three times before it's
paid off here's an example of a 2005
style mortgage it's an expensive house
it had ninja verification which means no
income no job or assets the credit score
is around 500 and it has an 8% or higher
interest rate that's an arm loan meaning
that it will be adjusted to the market
in the future the delinquency rate of a
mortgage like this in 2008 was 25% so
anyway if you want to buy it I'll just
take 2% % of the overall value and
you'll still make a bunch of money when
the loan is paid off why don't you want
to buy it hang on I have an idea let's
make this a little bit of a safer bet
let's mix it up with some other
mortgages here and I'll get somebody who
depends on me for business to give it a
rating and then we can just call it a
mortgage backed security which is a type
of bond and it's a bit like a future but
it's even better because you can exit
the investment whenever you want just by
reselling it [Music]
[Music]
now look at this if that little risky
mortgage forecloses the loan will still
be backed by all of the others and I bet
you can't even make out which one was
the original loan and this isn't like
some risky stock this is an investment
on housing and land and you and I both
know that God ain't making any more land
right it is the Bedrock of American
capitalism and it's a safe place to put
youry it's
gone a lot of batshit insane things
happened in the 2008 financial crisis I
bet you could probably make some really
successful Hollywood movies about it I'm
Jack to the
test good ultimately in just 6 months
the Dow Jones Lost 54% of its value
massive Banks perished Washington Mutual
Bear Sterns Fanny May Leman Brothers toy
name a few we needed another New Deal
before people's bank accounts were wiped
and this time we tried something a
little bit different these are not normal
normal
circumstances the market is not
functioning properly instead of doing
something utterly Reckless list like
revamping and updating laws to protect
workers or creating programs to help the
middle class so we could be you know on
par with the rest of the developed world
we figured that if we just gave $700
billion in bailouts to banks that money
would trickle down and more or less
accomplish the exact same thing now
you're never going to believe this but
it did not ultimately while unemployment
and foreclosure skyrocketed the banks
experienced a generous heaping spoonful
of socialism and to pay for this we
borrowed money and we printed money in
2006 the Federal Reserve print at $148
billion in currency by 2012 that number
had increased to $380 billion the
inflation was immediately reflected in
home prices and even more so in the
great awkwardly socialist rebound of the stock
stock
market in 1994 Jeff Bezos was a hedge
fund manager who wanted to start an
online bookstore which was already a
hard pitch at the time why would anybody
want to buy books online when they could
just go to the library but it was even
worse he was allegedly transparent to
his investors and told them that he
intended to prioritize growth over
profit for a very long time all in all
he had 60 meetings offering 1% of
ownership for $50,000 and the biggest
investors were his parents buying up 6%
with 22 investors amazon.com got off the
ground with a million dollars by 1999
Amazon was selling everything from books
to DVDs to household goods to
electronics and soon after the company
transitioned from being a retailer to an
online Gateway for other retailers
Amazon customer could pay a low annual
membership fee for unlimited free 2-day
shipping and both retailers and
manufacturers began to become dependent
on that convenience retailers weren't
the only ones with the dependency
problem here's three stats that will
probably up your whole day by 2021
it was estimated that 60% of the US
population were part of an Amazon Prime
membership it is now estimated that only
1% of Amazon Prime members compare
prices with other online retailers and
Incredibly while Amazon refuses to
confirm this there are thousands of
reports of people finding examples where
prices for the exact same products are
higher for Amazon Prime subscribers does
that sound like free market capitalism
to you Walmart had to resort to
emulating Amazon's business model in an
attempt to keep up a decade ago Amazon
had surpassed Walmart's market cap
despite Walmart having over
10,000 massive theme parks size stores
worldwide Walmart is far from the only
company trying to mimic Amazon's growth
and chokepoint strategy and that's a
vast understatement is fast scaling and
Blitz scaling has become a normal game
plan for startups the definitions vary a
little bit but fast scaling generally
means to prioritize growth initially
with an open-ended plan to make a profit
later so for example if I wanted to fast
scale a lemonade stand I would make a
pitch deck for Venture Capital investors
that proposed selling lemonade at 50% of
what it costs for me to make it this
would grow my customer base
significantly and starve out the
neighborhood children who I'd be
competing with and then once I disrup
rupted the lemonade Market successfully
i' work out a volume deal with lemon
plantations and lower my costs while
slowly raising prices for the customers
so a profit could be realized blit
scaling on the other hand is a lot more
Reckless and assertive my VC proposal
would be to sell lemonade at half the
cost but buy out all of the neighborhood
children for their stands and then I'd
buy some lemon plantations and I'd pay
$100 million to have the local football
stadium renamed Ben's lemonade stadium
and every person in attendance would be
given free lemonade if they downloaded
my app you may be asking how on Earth
that would ever make a profit but we're
going to figure that part out when we've
dominated 80 to 90% of the lemonade
market and have millions of lemonade
drinkers right now we just need to
concentrate on disrupting that probably
still sounds like a terrible investment
but if you buy into the initial seed
round of the investment you'll have the
opportunity to sell that Equity at a
premium in a series a or series b or
even better during an IPO launch when
the company enters a stock market valued
at I don't know $15 billion to investors
in this stage it's much less about
profit and more about a lucrative and
risky game of hot potato an excellent
example that we're all familiar with is
Uber here's the original pitch deck
proposing the disruption of the taxi cab
industry it's nearly delusional claiming
that a city's Medallion system for cabs
is a monopoly and that licensed cab
drivers paying for the medallions have
no accountability in the future digital
taxi cab hailing can make I guess
lifting up your hand unnecessary and
when they say luxury they mean
prestigious Vehicles like used Priuses
and these Priuses driven by
non-employees who sign up can be used to
drop your kids off at school or
transport the elderly Uber has had over
25 rounds of funding that it is used to
Raw Dog its way into the cab economy and
pay for everything from lobbying local
governments to settling hundreds of
lawsuits naturally once the traditional
cab industry was more or less destroyed
the prices got jacked way up and between
2018 and 2021 the average price for an
Uber ride Rose 92% those early pre seed
investors who unloaded Equity when the
company went public will obviously never
have to work again public investors did
not Faire so well and the great Uber IPO
launch crash show made some of us
think that maybe finally people are
learning not to be bullish about
companies that have an annual operating
income of negative billions of dollars
and despite this by 2019 the American
Stock Market gained an impressive 30%
baby well Co is a Hot Topic for debate
these days between scientists and cult
members let's try and remember how
utterly terrifying 2020 actually was for
us the economy obviously screeched to a
halt and many Industries have still and
probably never will fully recover as
Society was forced to change their
economic habits and while the stock
market initially crashed in 2020 within
one year it had risen to over 30% of its
prepandemic levels despite the economic
Apocalypse happening around the world
this is because on March 23rd 2020 the
Federal Reserve announced that it would
be launching a bunch of new programs
like the primary corporate credit
facility which would buy new corporate
bonds and other programs that would buy
existing corporate bonds mortgage back
Securities and asset back Securities
filled with student car credit card and
business loan debt the federal fund
effective interest rate dropped to
0.05% and all of this was before any
person or local government received so
much as a dime in relief the following
month the car's Act was announced which
was a free $1,200 check sent out to
every American making under $75,000 a
year regardless of their circumstances
with no questions asked on how or where
it would be spent this would be the
first of three such checks that American
citizens received with a federal tab
totaling $814 billion and for those of
my viewers who have been longing for an
explanation for the massive increase in
Hammock sales that year now you have
your answer these stimulus checks were
just a tiny sliver of the overall $5
trillion that the American government
spent on subsidizing the economy and you
would be right in assuming that the list
of recipients was outrageous Airlines
received more money than snap or food
assistance programs payroll tax
exemptions got more than housing
programs and Farmers combined massive
loans and grants were given to the likes
of Kanye P Diddy Jared Kushner the
Church of Scientology but more
importantly for the purposes of this
video a huge portion of that money went
to fintech lenders investment firms and
Venture Capital groups like injuries and
horowits which was immediately
repurposed into investments into a new
rapidly growing type of economy that
as to help properly explain post
capitalism I need to remind you of the
utter absurdity of just having a billion
dollars not only is it impossible to
spend on even the most lavish things
that you would desire but it's also very
much not like having a garage full of
cash for example if Elon Musk with his
value of $450 billion at the time of me
recording this if he negotiated a deal
to buy South Africa with its total gross
domestic product valued at $381 billion
he wouldn't be able to afford it due to
the value of his Holdings dropping
significantly as he liquidated the
equity if 13% of Tesla's shares
immediately went for public sale it
would create an enormous Surplus and the
company's value would crash all net
worth does is oisc things cash is only
powerful when you're broke and it's only
valuable when you need or want something
that you otherwise couldn't get without
cash what I instead want my viewers to
be concerned with is your personal
levels of power or control over the
things that you earn consume and trade
in 1996 the US Stock Market had around
8,000 companies listed and since then
our economy has grown by over $25
trillion and now our stock market boasts
nearly 4,000 companies in that same
period of time the number of of listed
companies around the world went from
around 24,000 to 51,000 so what is
happening here why would our variety of
public Securities dropped by 50% while
the rest of the world's doubled
doubled [Music]
[Music]
private private Equity the term private
Equity means more or less what you would
expect it to mean these days it's
usually a larger company or firm that
buys smaller companies and either
transforms them from public comp
companes to private companies or just
keeps them as private companies as
opposed to a publicly traded company
that has a lot more obligations with the
Securities and Exchange Commission in
the 1990s it was estimated that about 2%
of the businesses in the US were owned
by private equity and that number has
since grown to over 25% and this
includes everything from chemical
companies to Farms to vets to grocery
store chains to food delivery apps to
gyms to medical facilities to drug
companies and many of these related
businesses are owned by the same
investor M firms or their Partners which
sets the stage for an entire gallery of
anti-competitive business practices and
tax shielding using tactics like
dividend recapitalization in fact this
is almost unnecessary these days as a
newer trend is private Equity firms
literally giving one of their portfolio
companies a value and then selling it to
themselves but the classic private
Equity business model is borrowing and
raising as much capital is possible to
buy and sell companies at a profit and
the faster this process is done the
better as this be the velocity of money
demonstration that I gave you earlier in
this video you can argue that these are
just complex capitalist Maneuvers or
perhaps late stage capitalism a term
that's been used since Warner some Bart
coined it in 1928 but even that is not
happening anymore the velocity of these
transactions is slowing down
significantly and the average private
Equity holding time is the longest that
it's been in 20 years the co stimulus
and the market effect from it led to an
enormous boost of Acquisitions in 2020
and even though we're now past the
median average private Equity holding
period of 3 to 5 years exits have been
stagnant what's more alarming is that in
2020 many workers proved to corporations
that they don't need to come into the
office at all which also proves to
corporations that many of them can be
replaced by labor by anybody in the
developing world who speaks English that
is a private Equity investors's wet
dream so what gives does nobody like
money anymore the point of all this
maneuvering is decreasingly about
turning a profit and increasingly about
transitioning to a rent-based economy
that hedges inflation right after the
2008 financial crisis investment firms
started betting big on Farmland
typically hiring local farmers to manage
them but more frequently offering lease
backck programs where the farmer
continues working but rents the land
ultimately losing control over their
working budget and circumstances
otherwise since then and especially
since 2020 in almost all cases
investment is not attracted to
Innovation or profitability but to
business models that act as a middleman
offering subscriptions to products or
Services you would otherwise buy
directly for example uh software movies
video games parcel pizza delivery
headphones cell phones groceries
clothing underwear heated car seats
pregnancy a rent-based economy has
always been present in real estate but
if you're an American homeowner then
you've probably had an annoying amount
of investment groups asking if you'd
like to sell your house and it's not
unusual for those investment groups to
pay over market value for single family
homes it also shouldn't surprise you to
hear that home ownership has been
declining particularly for millennial
with nearly two out of three people
under the age of 40 being renters many
argue that this is primarily due to
inflation and sluggish wage increases
but the cost to income ratio has risen
for renters and dropped for homeowners
the wealth gap between renters and
homeowners has widened by over 50% in
the last decade in lower and middle
class households white people are nearly
two times more likely to be homeowners
than people of color meaning that
younger minority groups are likely to be
increasingly disproportionately punished
in the future when you take olve this
data into consideration profit and even
money itself is only really valuable
when it buys power and if a societal
system can be engineered to gain power
without profit or money capitalism
begins to exist as something to exploit
within that system under its umbrella
The Sounds hyperbolic but it needs to be
said a lot more often most of us do not
realize that we are in a constant battle
with billionaires who don't want us to
own things but rent them and when we
don't own things we lose control over
our own budgets lives decisions and
ultimately our own Destinies here's a
pertinent example did somebody that you
know send you a link to this video or
did you type in Ben Jordan new video and
find it that way or was it recommended
to you by an algorithm or was it placed
on your sidebar or did it autoplay when
another video ended this next and final
chapter is very much about the type of
transaction that you and I are having
right now me working without benefits
guaranteed pay or protections to make
something to use as bait to get you to
either watch targeted advertisements or
pay $14 a month without even being
offered a chance to indefinitely play
the video file offline on your own
device and while you do that your every
move is being harvested for data to
empower the company let's take a look at
this definition again and let me know
how well it describes our little
transaction here capitalism is formally
described as an economic system in which
individuals and private parties control
the means of production and profits are
long before the pandemic the foundation
had already been laid for an economy
that transcended goods and services
Facebook's Cambridge analytica Scandal
where 87 million users were
psychologically profiled without consent
and served political ads was hugely
associated with both the 2016
presidential election and the brexit
referendum many people believe including
whistleblowers who worked in the data
centers that without Cambridge analytica
the UK would still be part of the
European Union better yet here's a
leaked debriefing slideshow from
Cambridge analytica giving themselves
credit for using mind personal data in
combination with misinformation
campaigns to win an election As
Americans were concerned and distracted
by claims of voter fraud and hacked
machines we forgot to notice that
Democratic elections don't work when
news and information are no longer
democratized for example in most
dictatorships the government will have
an office that permits or denies which
stories can run in the newspaper in 2025
every piece of news that the average
voter sees is manipulated by a third
party aggregator even if you go to
something like Google news and select
the generalized headline areas your feed
will be different than mine this
disequilibrating of information was
concerning enough when it was being done
for ad revenue and profit but now it's
about a lot more than that whether
capitalism is healthy or unhealthy at
any given point point in time it has
always provided the framework for
negotiation between profit and labor in
Carl Marx's critique of political
economy labor is broken into two
subcategories there's abstract labor
which is what I'm doing right now when
making this video I'm learning I'm
gaining experience I'm sharing
information and overall I'm just feeding
my passion and the other is concrete
labor which is what somebody would be
doing if they were holding a boom mic
over me or making me coffee capitalism
obviously requires concrete labor but it
thrives on abstract labor as it it
provides organic growth and the problem
is is that you can't just snap your
fingers and get abstract labor you can't
even buy it because someone's passion
and happiness is more valuable to them
than a commodity so corporations
classically try to generate it through
morale boosting corporate programs and
Retreats and parties this has been a
major challenge since the Industrial
Revolution even when you're paying a
competitive salary health insurance 401k
and bonuses but when you hire gig
workers that have no benefits labor
protections or even guaranteed income
which by the way is often below minimum
wage how can you expect to extract
abstract labor an abstract labor in
value is extremely high in Creative
Industries how can you expect musicians
to on average spend more in fees to give
you their music than you'll ever pay
them in royalties how can you expect an
app or game developer to give you 30% of
their income when you're not even
offering support or advertisement or
how can you expect somebody to buy
thousands of dollars of camera equipment
to start a competitive YouTube channel
okay other side of the coin why would I
a YouTuber take a modest salary to
produce shoot and edit short stories for
I don't know the New York Times when I
can have full control over my content
where I'll be rewarded appropriately for
all of my hard work or why would
somebody work for a chauffeur company
when they could set their own hours
depending on how much money they needed
in any given week according to YouTube's
2024 culture and Trends report 65% of
gen Z identify themselves as a content
creator and YouTube doesn't exactly hide
why this is such good news for
advertisers who intend on capitalizing
on this societal Snowball Effect but we
can assume that if and when that
generation enters the labor force they
won't exactly be bringing high levels of
abstract value to the car insurance
claims adjuster cubicle but this is
nothing new long before the pandemic the
labor force participation rate had
dropped significantly from its peak in
2000 and you can see the decline growing
exponentially as big Tech entered the
economy it obviously crashed during the
pandemic and now even though labor force
participation was at a 35-year low in
2019 we still haven't even recovered to
that level meanwhile in 2024 36% of us
workers were participants in the gig
economy it is projected that by 2027
that number will have grown to over half
of the entire American Workforce hm I
wonder what could possibly make
everything that I told you in this
chapter a 100 times
worse in the late 1990s we quickly
realized how powerful marketing could be
with the innocently named cookies which
simply track a user's activity with the
primary goal of optimizing targeted
advertising when Facebook introduced the
like button in 2009 the power of
sentiment analysis was realized and it
would only be a few years before you
telling your aunt that you bought a new
grill would lead to you seeing ads to
get you to subscribe to meet
subscription Services hey look there's a
coupon for the annual plan
congratulations for the next year of
your life the meat you grill will be
chosen for you it won't be graded like
the meat you get from the butcher it
won't be FDA approved and you'll pay
more while a farmer on the other side of
the world earns less but it wouldn't be
until the recent AI boom when sentiment
analysis would become sci-fi levels of
terrifying Facebook has lost popularity
while young users migrated to Instagram
and Tik Tok now to participate in your
social group you are required to create
content and when you do that AI analyzes
the sentiment of the content and if it's
not saying or showing anything that
isn't of interest to the platform for
example talking about a government Coupe
on Tik Tok then it is viewed by users
who have shown interest in that topic
the content would then be graded by the
amount of time that users would spend
looking at it before moving on to the
next photo or video and the higher it
scores the more people it's shown to and
once it's graded as a useful video it is
shown to people who are most likely to
feel rewarded by watching it an
algorithm priority and optimized
placement in the cycle can be purchased
at a premium in which case Tik Tock also
takes between 10 and 15% Commission of a
sale so if I wanted to make some edgy
catchy t-shirt that said I don't know
rip capitalism for example and sell it
in this vacuum of an economy that Tik
Tok has I'd go through a Drop Shipping
service like printify who would then act
as a middleman for finding a printer and
printify of course offers a subscription
too and they make money from both the
printers and the designers in this cycle
abstract labor is either unpaid or paid
Pennies on the dollars in comparison to
the wealth that their labor generated
this isn't exactly a speculation or a
prophecy either as of 2025 one out of
three young people have shopped on
social media in the last week and
another study of 14,000 Global consumers
has shown that 91% of people prefer
buying Cosmetics on social media 81% of
the people in that study prefer buying
clothing that way while only 57% even
bother trying clothing on before
purchasing them and again one could
argue that this is merely capitalism on
methamphetamines but a store like Kohl's
employs 96,000 people printify employs
760 people call sales have declined for
11 consecutive quarters and it can be
expected that their payroll will shrink
along with it the reason I'm using
clothing as an example here is to show
you how powerful sentiment analysis is
at converting consumers to this new
economy 15 years ago if you propos the
idea that the value of a video app would
be higher than I don't know seeing how
your clothing looks or fits on you
before buying it you'd be laughed at the
majority the income from these everyday
transactions adds up and now goes to
firms that were subsidized with venture
capital and I can only imagine that
being an actual manufacturer is less and
less desirable which may additionally
explain why labor participation is at
historic lows in the last 2 years as AI
was being shoved in my face virtually
everywhere as I'm sure you have
experienced as well my Google searches
now open a sidebar telling me about my
previous search that I don't have
patience to sort out or if I want to
make sure that a replacement vacuum hose
works with my model of shop back on
Amazon instead of searching through
reviews and answers I now have to talk
to a bot named Rufus about it this is
happening with emails with messaging
apps image editors everything I was
initially really really confused by this
because virtually nobody likes it it
changes Familiar workflows of users
which risk somebody leaving your
ecosystem and it's really expensive just
one round of training an llm or large
language model can cost over $200
million and that's not to mention the
hugely increased processing power that
needs to be done every time that you
query that model and all of this is just
happening automatically just to beg us
to use it why the reason that so many
cloud-based companies are dumping so
much money and resources into pushing
this technology on everyone is to
capture the part of our routine that
comparison shops or researches or asks
for advice or arrives at a logical
conclusion about something if you become
friends with chat GPT or gemini or Rufus
or Siri and you consult with their vast
informational resources on a more
personal and Casual level you're not
only supplying them with the purest form
of sentiment analysis but you're helping
them build a system that will further
control not only your decisions on what
to buy or subscribe to but what hobby
you'll take up next summer not only is
it influencing your decision on where to
buy an engagement ring or where and when
to go on vacation to propose to your
partner there's nothing stopping it from
influencing your decision on whether you
should get married at all it would be
very naive to think of digital
assistance as your assistance they are
very much not there to help you but to
help their owners and the conclusion
that most of us has is that they're
there to help their owners make more
money but in the case of things like the
Cambridge analytica Scandal or Twitter
quite literally and intentionally
becoming an interactive right-wing
propaganda tool there's a lot more to be
money what we ultimately have is money
being extracted to systems that do not
grow or scale the way a capitalist
system does by expanding the assembly
line or opening more chain restaurants
or researching and patenting a new type
of refrigerant and I am personally
convinced that the market will crash
again and more money will be borrowed
and printed that will ultimately be
invested into the further transformation
into a rent-based economy during World
War I America's debt to GDP ratio was
35% in World War II as we strained every
single resource that we had it
skyrocketed to 121% meaning that we had
21% more debt than value as a nation our
debt to GDP ratio once again skyrocketed
after the 2008 crisis and it just kept
rising and right now we are at
123% higher than it has ever been in the
history of our economy our national debt
as of February 2025 is $ 36.5 trillion
and our total debt is 102 trillion I
would say that we're well past the point
of no return but I don't even know what
that is because this is so unprecedented
and I assume that it would be easier to
change the value and concept of money
than it would be to repay that level of
debt and it's worth pointing out that
the primary owner of that debt isn't
China or Japan or even our own Federal
Reserve it's us investors as this cycle
continues to snowball money will be less
and less valuable not only because of
inflation but in principle when the
government is so closely entangled with
the people who have benefited the most
from this Mass extraction of wealth from
a capitalist economy it stops making
sense to think of wealth is money hear
me out here's a helpful metaphor from
the book stalen the court of the red SAR
there's a story where Stalin and his
powerful Entourage of officials was
traveling by motorcade when they came
across a peasant woman struggling to
push her cart up a hill Stalin saw this
and ordered the cars to stop and
inquired about her situation he wanted
to give her some money to help her but
not one person in his entire Entourage
had a single Ruble of cash on them and
that's because their wealth was in
ideological power and influence they
didn't need cash because no matter how
lavished their appetite whatever they
desired would be given to them it wasn't
until the Deep organized experiment of
Communism fell that the Soviet ruling
class had to convert their wealth to a
tradable commodity as oligarchs
unfortunately for oligarchs money can't
buy everything money alone can't change
laws it can't force people to dress the
way you want them to dress or to
identify in a way that aligns with how
you see them it can't make ideologies
against the law it can't allow you to
change the race culture or ethnicity of
your neighbors you can't buy someone
else's choice to be or not be a parent
to graduate or transcend from those
unfathomable limits of what money's
wealth can get you you need to control
the power of information so that you can
manipulate the world that you live in
and I believe that that is exactly
what's happening and unfortunately I
think it's going to get a lot worse
before it gets better if you've stuck
with me this long to listen to and
consider my entire Manifesto here thank
you and all I ask is that you consider
the information in this video when you
make personal decisions read the news or
spend your precious time on this planet
participating in the post capitalist
economy I suppose you want some advice
on how to educate yourself about current
events when an exceeding amount of news
organizations are owned by billionaires
and sometimes even governments well
ground news come here I'll show you it's
an app and website that collects news
articles from around the world and
organizes them by political bias
reliability and potential conflicts of
interest such as media ownership ground
news elves are independently owned and
funded by subscribers like myself and
they're vetted by three different
Independent News monitoring
organizations so here's an example one
that'll probably be a sequel to this
video Trump announces strategic crypto
Reserve including Bitcoin salana xrp and
more that's from CSNBC it's owned by the
Roberts family very high factuality
Center bias let's head over to the right
shall we Trump moves crypto strategic
Reserve forward promises to elevate
industry Fox Business owned by a media
conglomerate the Murdo family High
factuality and it leans right all right
going left Trump's crypto Reserve is a
payoff for loyalists published by fast
company which is individually owned High
factuality and leans left but my
favorite is the blind spot feed which
shows you news that the left or right is
just completely unaware of for example
left leaning news organizations don't
seem too interested in telling you that
the EU spends more money on Russian
energy than Ukraine Aid and
unsurprisingly right leaning news
organization don't really want to tell
you about an analysis that shows that
Trump tariffs will cost the average US
family $1,600 or more per year anyway if
this is something you're interested in
you could go to the link below or go to
ground. newb and if it jives with you
that link also gets you 40% off the
unlimited Vantage plan which will
probably be the cheapest subscription
that you use and once again just like
last time proceeds from the sponsorship
will go to UNICEF Ukraine which delivers
essential supplies and education to the
most vulnerable in war regions children
just because our leaders have given up
on them does not mean that we have to
this video took a lot of research and
factchecking and was an immense
intimidating long-term project for me
that very few of my viewers expected
much less asked for despite all the
factchecking that I did a lot of this
video is kind of philosophical and I'm
open to being wrong I do think that what
I said in this video is worth
consideration as there are some very
real statistics and scenarios that will
affect your life in some way way shape
or form most of all I want to thank you
for your valuable time and I also want
to thank my supporters videos like this
are part of my nonprofit and are almost
always funded by viewers like yourself
through patreon and if you'd like to
support future videos and be part of an
amazing healthy and inspiring Community
then we'd love to have you ironically
it's another damn subscription service
but it's a worthy one and you can join
for as little as $1 thank you for
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