May 23, 2023 • 34 mins
Mia sits down with Robert and Garrison to discuss perennial right-wing boogeyman George Soros, what he actually did and what he didn't do, and why conservatives won't shut up about him.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Oh yeah, it could happen here a podcast where I
just made my colleagues I can see them through the
zoom deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with with with
a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace. I'm
Robert Evans. Joining me today is Mia Wong and Garrison
(00:27):
Davis me. I take it from here.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Oh boy, So it's been a you know, this is Okay,
So this, I guess is now like last week's Twitter thing.
But okay, so also not this is this is this
is not a Twitter thing? No, well it kind of is.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
It kind of is, but like let's not let's not
frame this as a Twitter thing.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, okay, okay, So what this is we we are okay,
we have been experiencing in the last you know, like
half decade, actually belonging from that, because it's like this
seventy eight years now, like the the sort of incredible
rise in casual American anti semitism and the level of
anti semitism that you could just do in in sort
of public discourse and it's quote unquote fine. And one
(01:11):
of the sort of biggest indicators of this is the
like the the extent to which it's now socially acceptable
to just do the most like absolutely like unhinged, like
antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. And specifically the thing
(01:31):
that specifically was like, Okay, I need to do this
episode was last week Elon Musk like compared George Soros
to Magneto and then said, quote, you assume they are
good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the fabric,
the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity. And this
is just like the mainstreamline of the Republican Party now
(01:53):
like they just all do this. You can just sort
of I mean, and this and honestly like as bad,
like you know, this is like the stuff that Elon
Musk is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere
near as bad as it goes. Like it's pretty common
to just sho these people like talking about the Satan
(02:14):
Sorrow's agenda and shit. Now like it's it has gotten
unbelievably unfathomably out of control. And so today I wanted
to take a look at, Okay, who George Soros actually is,
like the real human being and not the sort of
like caricature projection that has been created of him on
(02:35):
the right, and I wanted to also sort of look
at why the right hates him so much. And you know,
Soros is kind of an interesting figure because he falls
like right in the middle of like our two shows
about people, because he's not he's not really like a
cool person. He does cool stuff, but though he does
stuff that's cool sometimes, but he's not also like a
bastard properly.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
So though he's done some bastardy stuff too.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Oh he has, We are going to talk about that.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah, he said, he's a Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Most of what this episode is about, he's.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
I would say he's like twenty percent more complicated than
the average billionaire A on a more Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I think I think like twenty or thirty percent. Yeah,
there's somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah, you know, and I
think there's three George Soros's. Two of them are real
and one of them is fake. There is you know.
So George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist, right, and you know,
so that means that he has a sort of billionaire
(03:30):
side and a philanthropist's side, and they are very often
working across purposes. Sometimes they're not working sometimes there he
aligns them together, sometimes he doesn't. And so the way
I've sort of structured this is like the first episode
we're gonna be talking about the sort of billionaire side
and how he did that, and the second episode is
going to be more about the philanthropist's side, and how
(03:51):
both of these basically have been kind of accidentally structured
in such a way that the right was like, oh
my god, this is the perfect guy to do atise
medic conspiracy theories about. And then there's also the third
George Soros is like the one who's just literally the
devil who the Republicans have made up And yeah, so
(04:11):
George Soros was born to a Jewish family in Hungary
in nineteen thirty, which is not not a good time
to be born into a Jewish family in Hungary.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
No, really, there's not a good time to be born
to a Jewish and family in Hungary until like I'm
gonna get I'm gonna say sometime in the fifties.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, you know, I will say that it gets way
like it it is way worse when he is born
than it was in like even like the eighteen nineties,
which is like not a great time, but it's gotten
significantly worse. He is fourteen when the Nazis invade Hungary
nineteen forty four, and this is the point at which
(04:53):
we get to our first Soros conspiracy, which is that
there's this, there's this.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
It's a little more complicated than that. It's not really
the Nazis, and well it's a little more complex than
when extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community begins really in
nineteen forty four.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, yeah, And so there's a thing that happens. I
don't know. He and his dad have a kind of
complicated like set of things they survive. And there's a
part of the story that gets picked up by the
right that gets if you've ever heard Alex Jones talk
about sorows, like the second or third thing he will
(05:32):
say is that like Soros is a Nazi collaborator, was
like a willing collaborator with the Nazis, which is not true.
And also like he's fourteen, like you know, like I.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Don't really call even like fourteen year olds and the
Hitler youth willing collaborators because they're children. Yeah, you have
to have a lion at some point, even with Nazis,
where if their kids they're not really morally responsible either way.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, and like, you know, so the speific thing that
he does, there's these notices that are sent up by
the government that's like telling Jewish people to like go
like to a place and if you go to the place,
you're gonna get routed up and killed. And basically, so
the thing that actually happened is that so Georg Ros's
dad is told to do this, and he gives it
(06:18):
to George Soros and is like, go tell these people
that they've been called for this and that if they go,
they're like they're gonna get taken away. And this has
been transformed by you know this that is this is
a nightmarish thing and these people are surviving. This has
been transformed by a bunch of the worst people wh've
ever lived into Nazi collaboration. Which is also you know,
the part of the story that never gets told, even
(06:38):
even when people sort of like do the like dive
into like oh this is fake, is that the thing
that like Soros's family spends the rest of the war
doing is basically getting like counterfeit papers to Jewish families
that like says that they're Christian, and you know, they
like they stay legitimately save a bunch of families from
dying in the Holocaust, and.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
You know the ship that Joeanes pulls on them as
like part of this because of like the job this
guy who's like saving young George Soros has involves like
basically like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced
out of their homes. He's like they were profiting off
of the holl No, they were like doing whatever job
kept them under the radar while they attempted to help.
(07:20):
Like it was the Holocaust, it was messy. Yeah, but
like it's almost like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage
of slave labors. Well, no, it's actually what Schindler was
doing was not that. Yeah, Like he was using the
trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people.
It's quite different from just enslaving people.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah. I think the thing that's really desturbing about the
stow right is like, Okay, like this is like Alex
Joses Alex Jones, Right, he's just gonna say the worst
shit you've ever heard. But like this is like a
thing that mainstream right wingers just say. Now, yeah, and
it's just unbelievably horrible and it sucks and it's just
like not true. But fortunately for George Soros, his family
(08:02):
makes it through the Holocaust, well his immediate family does,
and they like get out and they end up in
the US. And this is where, Okay, this is something,
this is something that I think is very important to
the story that isn't told very much. So Soros is
like a finance whiz, right, he is very very very
(08:25):
good at finance. And we're gonna be talking a bit
about like how like the things that he figured out
to let him do this, because it's interesting. But he's
also not from the sort of like American or the
British financial elite, Like if I don't there's like a
certain kind of person, right who like goes into finance,
and you know it's like like like wasp frat brose
or like in bred British aristocrats, right, And George Soros
(08:49):
is like a hung is a Hungarian immigrant, right. He
he is not sort of from these people. He is
like and and you know this is this is gonna
be a really big deal when he like goes up
against a British financial elite later on. But you know,
he threw sort of like he's able to turn like
a job doing door to door salesman into like a
(09:10):
way into a firm, and he's able to sort of
work his way up to a point where like he
has suddenly like has his own hedge fund, and he
is really really good at this. He's one of the
sort of early people who does hedge funds. There's a
great book called The Influence of Soros, Politics, Power, and
the Struggle for an Open Society by Emily Tampkin, who
(09:32):
did a lot of really great work, like interviewed Soros,
interviewed an enormous number of the people who were around him,
and I want to read a passage of this about
like how he figured out how to sort of beat
the market. He's talking about this guy named Carl Popper,
who's like a philosopher of science who also wrote this
book called The Open Society that we'll talk about next
(09:53):
episode more. Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the
role of misconceptions in financial markets. Decades later, people believe
that markets don't lie and shouldn't be and should be trusted,
but that isn't true. Sorow's knew markets react to humans
and humans are fallible. Instead of looking at the money
being made, or as Sebastian Malaby put it, in more
(10:14):
money than God, his book on the history of hedge funds,
the psychology that drove investors' appetites, Soros looked at how
one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the
other forward until the trust were so completely overvalued that
a crash was inevitable. And this is this is really smart,
like if you even today, right, you know, if you're
(10:37):
able to understand that, you know, like the way a
lot of hedgehoon people tend to think about the market
as like the market, you know, especially in this period,
is this is this sort of dogmatic, neo lible thing
of like the market is like a perfect condvance of
price signals and Sorow's just like no, it's made out
of people. And those people like get greedy. They have
emotional stuff they like they give get into these like
(11:00):
fomo like fear of missing out stuff. You know, they
like intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees the assets
like expensive, so everyone like you know, rushes to buy it,
and like this is something like like even now right,
this is this is like a very smart way to
understand finance. He's figured this out in like the seventies,
and if you, if you, if you're able to do
this kind of stuff and like use this to understand
(11:23):
how the market works in the seventies, you are going
to look like a god among men. And he starts
a hedge fund in nineteen seventy three, but by nineteen
eighty one he has a fund that is worth three
(11:43):
hundred and eighty one million dollars in like nineteen eighty
one money. I don't know what that is in modern money,
but I assume it's a lot. I'm a hack of
a fraud. I should actually figured this out.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, that's like a billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, And like he personally is like has like for
himself like one hundred million dollars, right, and he you know,
at this point he starts to become sort of very
famous in finance circles because you know, I mean he's
just like absolutely destroying the market. Now, okay, this is
where things get. You know, up until this point, he's
kind of like he's been doing a lot of sort
(12:17):
of finance stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly
just been him, like ripping off other finance people, which
I'm entirely okay with, like that's just very funny. But
he starts to get into currency speculation, and in nineteen
eighty five he has one of his big breaks, which
is he predicts the Plaza Chords. Now, okay, Aplasa chord
(12:39):
is something we've talked about on the show before, but
I need to talk about it a bit more because
unfortunately it's we have to talk about the Asian financial
collaps this episode. And this is a like one of
the key moments of the Asian financial collaps even though
it was like a decade earlier. So in nineteen eighty five,
Ronald Reagan is trying to like revive the US as
a domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying, and you know,
(13:04):
and the reason part of the like a big part
of the reason is dying is that they're getting absolutely
destroyed by sort of German and like West German and
Japanese manufacturers. And part of what's happening here is that
particularly Japan's currencies are worth way currency is worth way
less than the dollar. This is called having a weak currency,
and having a weak currency is really good for if
(13:25):
you have like an export based manufacturing economy. And so
Reagan basically like walks into a meeting with like the Germans,
Japanese government, the British and like few other people and
just basically just like not quite in so many words,
but basically just says like you are all American military protectorates,
and because you're all American military protectorates, like I can
I can force you to increase the value of your
(13:45):
currency like or else capital O, capital e. And they do,
they comply, and this is this, this becomes this is
a thing called the Plaza Cords and this this, you know,
weakens the value of the dollar versus a bunch of
other currencies. And this like literally handedly like restores the
profitability of American manufacturing like through the nineties, which is
(14:06):
really wild. But the the other the important thing for
this story is that I I don't know how he
did this, but like George Soros predicts that this is
gonna happen, and she makes an unbelievable amount of money
basically like no, no, like basically doing currency speculation because
he knows what, like currencies are going to increase in value,
(14:27):
which you know, he knows that like uh. For example,
he knows that like the Japanese yen is going to
increase in value. So he makes an enormous amount of
money doing this stuff, and he gets very famous for
like he'll like make it much of money, and then
I'll lose it again, and then he'll make it again.
And this all culminates in Okay, so they're they're okay.
(14:51):
He starts taking ah, truly enormous bets, like against national currencies,
and there's one of these that's just funny, and there's
one of these that's really bad. So we're gonna do
the funny one first, which is so in nineteen ninety
two Soros And this is the other part that they
ever gonna talked about. It's like it's not just Soros
(15:11):
doing this stuff. He has like allies because like as
big as Soros as for MBA is right, he can't
him and his ally is gonna take a fifteen billion
dollars short position on the pound, and even he doesn't
have like nobody like this is like fifteen billion of
nineteen nineties money, right, Like you need a bunch of
firms working together in order to do this. But he
basically takes this massive bet the pound is gonna go down,
(15:35):
and because of the way that these these bets work,
like the actual value of the pounds like collapses, and
the British Central Bank like like doesn't have enough. And
the reason we're able to do is they figure out
that the British Central Bank doesn't have enough money to
stop them, like they don't have enough money to like
maintain like they don't have enough reserves to like maintain
the value of the pound. And so he gets like
(15:56):
completely blamed for this, even though again there's like other
people involved in this, right, Like the front page of
the Daily Mail is literally his face in the title
I made a billion crashing the pound baste, which is
I okay, so like an anti British level, this is
very funny. It's no, there's a bunch of arguments about
(16:20):
like what does this mean for like the world economy
and for national sovereignty. Soros thinks that like currency speculation
is necessary evil and he has this sort.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Of tay to think that when you're making that much money,
yeah right, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Now, okay, this this like specific thing which is like
a a a bank. A banker comes in and is
able to manipulate the value of a currency. This is like,
this is like absolutely like this is the fodder for
(16:55):
like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of the anti Semitic right.
Like it's this sort of like rootless cosmopolitan banker like
attacks the good and righteous like noble people of Britain thing.
And this is how it gets framed in the press,
who are like the press is I mean it's the
British press, right, Like the British are not known for,
you know, not being anti Semitic, so they just like
(17:17):
go wild with this. But you know, like this particular
thing he's doing against the British. Part of what's happening here, right,
is there's this sort of there's this kind of like
national populist equation thing going on here, where there's this
assumption that like the Bank of Britain, like the bank,
like the British Central Bank is like an entity that
(17:37):
is identifiable with like an ordinary person in Britain, and
like no, like the British Central Bank is run by
just unbelievably in bred aristocrats, right, and you.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Know I think they're pretty believably in bred.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Oh that's fair.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
We're just talking about like like zero point five six
of a Habsburg unit, you know, a hack. The Habsburg
is the international unit for measuring how inbred someone is.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
If you're if you're unaware, Yeah, yeah that that seems
like a reasonable amount of inbred for these specific people.
But you know, like but this is what I was
talking about, Like at the very beginning, I was talking
about sort of like Sorrow's not being from this sort
of like normal class of finance people. And the thing is,
like the normal class of finance people are fucking terrible
at their jobs, right, like these amber British aristocrats and
(18:29):
like the fucking American like cocaine frat boys like like
just like doing lines of cocaine off each other's as cracks.
Like these people all suck at their jobs. And George
Soros is like smart and is good at his job.
And so she just like absolutely goes through these people
like a fucking flaming chainsaw, and she just like, you know,
and the maneuvers that he's doing here, she just like
(18:51):
absolutely humiliates all of the people at the at the
British Central Bank. He's humiliating like and not just those
guys too, it's humiliating the Tories. He's humiliating like all
of the people who are seriously important in the real economy,
in the sort of real British economy. And he can
do this right because like his opponents are you know,
(19:12):
people who are like they're they're they're promoting, they're like
they're they're they're okay, they take in like their people
from college, right, and they're promoting the base off how
good they are at golf. And so when when he
just sort of like like walks in and just makes
it like makes like billions of dollars just like destroying
these people, he makes just a permanent enemy of a
(19:33):
very very powerful like faction of the British ruling class
and the British ruling class. Like I don't know, they
they it is hard to find people who will beat
the British ruling class in an anti Semitism off. And
this is this is one of the things that sort
of you know, if you're looking at like why Sorrow
specifically is the guy who all of these sort of
(19:54):
right wing conspiracies wind up being about, like part of
it is because he pisses off these specif people.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Yeah, these guys who's like dads were all friends with
the King of England, who was like a close personal
buddy with Hitler. Like there it's a bunch of like,
it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted
and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game.
And so like the fact that it's a Jewish dude
who does it means that they're going to be even
(20:21):
more racist than they already were. And the fact that
there's plenty of international anti semitism and that George Soros
after this starts funding liberal and you know, vaguely progressive
causes like yeah, it's not this is not a it's
not surprising that this is the way things went.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, and you know, and again, like I can't under
emphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically
the reaction to British media class. Who I mean, we
know now that those people are psychos, Like we have
seen them see a transperson at a boat race and
like like ten years ago and like like draw a
gi things circling them in a boat and making it
(21:01):
a front page news story. Those people in the nineties
were like sure, they are biological biologically better at navigation.
That is that has actually been improved. Yeah, but then
they're like justice, they're they're they're just a sort of
feral and like terrifying lead bigoted then as they are now.
(21:22):
And this means that like like just if you're a
regular British person and you are like walking down the
street and there's a newspaper sand you are seeing like
like they truly unbelievably terrifying anti Semitic shit, like just
literally everywhere. And this this will have no consequences whatsoever.
(21:44):
Uh yeah, it's all good, nothing bad ever happens. And
speaking of no consequences, I do you know what we
can promise about about training services? Twenty three minutes in?
You know, look you're welcome, Damnan. Okay, we're back and
(22:11):
we have to talk about Okay. So the doing it
to the British economy was mostly just really funny because
the British economy is going to be fine. And it's
the funny part about she was doing it to the
British economy is that this actually unfortunately helps the British
economy because it forces the British to like abandon some
truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they were doing.
(22:36):
But then he does it to Thailand, and that is
a lot less justifiable. So it in this is five
years later, this is nineteen ninety seven. Sous brings in
some economists, Arminio Fraga, like Roddy Joe's David Kowitz. Uh
(23:00):
he he brings He's bringing in people who are sort
of experts in like developing market uh economics. And that's
never no one has ever brought in a developing market
economist for like a good reason. And what they what
they realize is that they start doing analysis of Southeast Asia,
(23:23):
like the Southeast Asian markets, and they realize very quickly
that Thailand is fucked. They they figure out that Thailand
has Thailand has his currency pegged to the dollar and this,
but you know, they don't have the reserves support this,
and the tie like actual tai currency isn't strong enough
to maintain like like stay being pegged to the dollars.
(23:45):
It's not a strong enough currency. And so they do
a two billion dollars short of of of like Thailand's currency.
And I mean, I'm gonna read from the Influence of
Sorrows again about like the process of this. It was
a debate we had. Jones told me we'd gone to
work in Asia, and here you are taking large scale
(24:05):
short positions in countries with institutional fragility. Going for the
juggular in the United Kingdom was one thing doing the same,
and Thailand was another. The Bank of England would surely recover.
Thailand was a developing economy and it was unclear what
impact outside investors could have. Soros has justified speculation with
the idea that it could serve as a kind of
warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the bot needs to devalue.
(24:31):
Change your policy now before a currency collapses, devastating for
your people. The trouble is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead,
it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves to buy
Tai bot. When it finally ran out in early summer
nineteen ninety seven, the value of the bot plunged thirty
two percent against the dollar and millions of people lost
Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made seven
(24:51):
hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes,
I made a lot of money selling heroin to those
middle schoolers. But really, when you think about it, it
was a warning to those schools that it was too
easy for me to bribe the janitor to sell heroin
to kids there. You know, I was actually performing a
public service. So true, Robert, It is just like that,
(25:18):
you know.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
To be fair, you know, I'm not going to every money.
I'm not going to finish that thought. That's probably for
the best.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Yeah, we need we need one person to remain uncanceled
here to keep the lights on.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Oh God, doesn't have to be me.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Oh no, yeah, no, legally it does.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
It's really bad. Yeah, no more joking, but yeah, we can't.
We can't suffer any other jokes.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yes, somebody's gotta upload this episode.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
All right here, here, here, here's the next joke. Soros
actually doesn't make money off of the speculation, if off
of a speculating in Southeast Asia, because he loses basically
the same amount of money taking like a long position
in Indonesia.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took
a long position on doing cocaine in my bathroom with
the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids.
You know, we're a lot alike, him and me, we're
a lot of like.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Well, okay, to be fair, to be fair, and this
is okay, this is the thing. The reason I wanted
to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay, like
to this day, if you look under sort of if
you if you every once in a while, someone someone,
there'll be a tweet that's like, what did George Sorrows do?
And immediately there will be a bunch of people talking
(26:33):
about how he like deliberately destroyed all of the economies
in Southeast Asia. Yeah, and that's not really what happened.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
And that would be for one thing, too much to
put on one guy fucking around with a cup.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah. Yeah, And I wanted to actually kind of walk
through this a little bit in depth just because okay,
there's a really really easy way to think about the
economy that is bad. It leads you into anti Semitic traps,
which is like, hey, here is like one banker who
wanted to make money, and because he wanted to make money,
he like destroyed all these economies. And like, on the
(27:07):
one hand, yeah, like like Sorrow's betting against like the
tai currency is bad, right, like this is this is
not a thing you should have been doing. On the
other hand, you know, okay, so that's like the sort
of level one thing. But the thing about that, you know,
this is the sort of this is the sort of
like great Man, anti anti Semitism theory of collapse. And
this is the theory that a lot of the sort
of regional leaders take, you know, because and this and
(27:30):
this is sort of a crucial thing, right, this position
very conveniently allows them to just like not think about
capitalism in general or like their role in this in
this crisis, which is not insignificance. And so in order
to figure out what what actually happened here, we need
to look at so so Sorow sort of like tip
(27:50):
like tip some dominoes, right, but the dominoes were already
there and they were going like regardless even if Soros
had never existed, right, Like, they were going to fall.
And they're going to fall because ironically of the plaza coords.
So you know, when we talked about the plaza courds earlier.
The US forces Japan to increase the value of its
currency relative to the dollar. Okay, so this is great
(28:12):
for the American economy. This nukes the Japanese economy, I
mean the Japanese economy, you know. And we'll talk about
this in a bit too. It was already kind of
doing bad. When the US does this and its manufacturer
economy just like implodes it. It guts the Japanese economy.
It has The Japanese economy has never recovered from this.
It probably will never recover really into what it was.
(28:37):
And you know, the effect this has is that now
the government of Japan has to figure out how to
grow their economy without having any way to make money
that grows your economy. But now they have a stronger currency,
and so their solution is, Okay, what did they all
the central banking people look around each other and they go,
what is a strong currency good for housing speculation? And
(29:01):
so they they start like they start, they start slashing
interest race, and they start basically building an entire economy, uh,
based on the assumption that housing prices will always go up,
and so you should just take out loans so you
could buy houses because the value of the housing will
because you know, highing prices will always go up, so
you can you can have all of these assets based
and mortgages. H This is this may may or may
(29:24):
not be sounding familiar to everyone who literally thousand and
eight I and so you know, in in like in
like nineteen eighty two, the entire Japanese economy implodes sort
of again because they they literally built the two thousand
and eight machine. And so this this forces the US
to do something called the reverse Plaza Cords, where they
(29:47):
take the original Plaza records and they reverse it and
they increase the value of the American dollar. American manufactury
dies like it's never recovered, it's never coming back. And
this for a this kind of this stabilizes the Japanese
a to be a little bit, but it means that
the US now no longer has a functional economy. And
so we do. Our solution to this is we need
(30:07):
two thousand and eight. Right, we build an entire economy
also on the Japanese model of currency speculat of you know,
of like housing price speculation, ceculation of like or like
the rising prices of like stocks. Right, we build an
economy completely made a bullshit. But you know, okay, but
what does this have to do with the Asian market collaps? Okay?
The problem is that like all of the countries and
(30:28):
in East Asia and like Southeast Asia also do this.
They also do the thing where they're like, oh, we're
gonna we're gonna, we're gonna ba We're okay, so our
manufacturing economies are declining, right, so we're gonna we're gonna
base our entire economy on housing prices going up. And
you know that's and it's not George Soros. That's the
thing that actually destroys like the sort of that's something
(30:50):
that like that like actually destroys all of these economies.
And you know, and I wanted to sort of run
through this, and you know, this is like a lot
of like sort of econ shit, right, But the reason
I wanted to run through this is that I think
I think he gets at the sort of truly the
truly horrifying thing about how our economy works that is
(31:12):
really difficult to face, and is I think it's at
least a part of why people really really want there
to just be one guy who is running anything everything,
whether that's the CIA, whether that's Soros, whether that's like
the New World Order. Yeah, right, because if there's if
there's like a guy who's doing this, right, you can
(31:33):
stop him. But the great horror of this world is
that there is no deep state, right, there is no sataniscoball,
there's no one pulling the strings at all. The only
thing that is there is just sort of the cold,
lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital, and that logic
is moving all of us, right, all you know, the
people who are doing the conspiracies, insofar as they exist,
(31:53):
are being moved by this. All of the rulers are
being moved by capital. All of us, the subjects, are
being moved by capital. But that like sucks, right, Like
the fact that all of these economies are destroyed not
by like the individual actions of people, but by the
fact that, like returns are less good in Thailand than
they are in China. And this is just sort of
(32:14):
the inectable logic of the entire economic system we have.
This is, you know, this is absolutely terrifying, and faced
with this sort of reality, right, like, people who want
to protect capitalism because you know, they have a bunch
of assets in it, right, retreat into this sort of
like they you know, they they use Soros as a
smoke screen for like why everything is suddenly going wrong.
(32:39):
But sort of simultaneous to this, right, this is also
a real problem for George Soros because he's, like, you know,
when he's not sort of in his role as like
capital He's like not a piece of shit. He's like
a person who wants the world to be better. And this,
(33:00):
you know, this causes a sort of there was a
contradiction in his ideology, right, which is that he wants
the world to be a better place, and simultaneously he's
also a capitalist, and these two things are sort of
warring with each other. Even as early as even as
early sort of the nineties, he's giving speeches about how
like his open society that he wants. It's just sort
(33:20):
of like this liberal democratic society of like laws and
norms and human rights. The greatest danger Twitter ceased to
be communism, it's now capitalism. But he can't do anything
about it because he is also a capitalist. And next episode,
we're going to watch Soros like through his philanthropic endeavors,
attempt to solve the problems that his economic system has
(33:42):
caused and fail catastrophically and become the sort of boogeyman
and the the anti sementic spector of every conspiracy theory
in the world.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah, so check out that next time. And you know,
if you're hanging out around Clark Middle School and you
have forty dollars. I can hook you up with some
some of that sweet black tar, so you know, give
me a ring. My phone numbers posted in the show
notes of every episode It.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, Updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Oh yeah, it could happen here a podcast where I
just made my colleagues I can see them through the
zoom deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with with with
a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace. I'm
Robert Evans. Joining me today is Mia Wong and Garrison
(00:27):
Davis me. I take it from here.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Oh boy, So it's been a you know, this is Okay,
So this, I guess is now like last week's Twitter thing.
But okay, so also not this is this is this
is not a Twitter thing? No, well it kind of is.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
It kind of is, but like let's not let's not
frame this as a Twitter thing.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, okay, okay, So what this is we we are okay,
we have been experiencing in the last you know, like
half decade, actually belonging from that, because it's like this
seventy eight years now, like the the sort of incredible
rise in casual American anti semitism and the level of
anti semitism that you could just do in in sort
of public discourse and it's quote unquote fine. And one
(01:11):
of the sort of biggest indicators of this is the
like the the extent to which it's now socially acceptable
to just do the most like absolutely like unhinged, like
antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. And specifically the thing
(01:31):
that specifically was like, Okay, I need to do this
episode was last week Elon Musk like compared George Soros
to Magneto and then said, quote, you assume they are
good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the fabric,
the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity. And this
is just like the mainstreamline of the Republican Party now
(01:53):
like they just all do this. You can just sort
of I mean, and this and honestly like as bad,
like you know, this is like the stuff that Elon
Musk is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere
near as bad as it goes. Like it's pretty common
to just sho these people like talking about the Satan
(02:14):
Sorrow's agenda and shit. Now like it's it has gotten
unbelievably unfathomably out of control. And so today I wanted
to take a look at, Okay, who George Soros actually is,
like the real human being and not the sort of
like caricature projection that has been created of him on
(02:35):
the right, and I wanted to also sort of look
at why the right hates him so much. And you know,
Soros is kind of an interesting figure because he falls
like right in the middle of like our two shows
about people, because he's not he's not really like a
cool person. He does cool stuff, but though he does
stuff that's cool sometimes, but he's not also like a
bastard properly.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
So though he's done some bastardy stuff too.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Oh he has, We are going to talk about that.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah, he said, he's a Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Most of what this episode is about, he's.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
I would say he's like twenty percent more complicated than
the average billionaire A on a more Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I think I think like twenty or thirty percent. Yeah,
there's somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah, you know, and I
think there's three George Soros's. Two of them are real
and one of them is fake. There is you know.
So George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist, right, and you know,
so that means that he has a sort of billionaire
(03:30):
side and a philanthropist's side, and they are very often
working across purposes. Sometimes they're not working sometimes there he
aligns them together, sometimes he doesn't. And so the way
I've sort of structured this is like the first episode
we're gonna be talking about the sort of billionaire side
and how he did that, and the second episode is
going to be more about the philanthropist's side, and how
(03:51):
both of these basically have been kind of accidentally structured
in such a way that the right was like, oh
my god, this is the perfect guy to do atise
medic conspiracy theories about. And then there's also the third
George Soros is like the one who's just literally the
devil who the Republicans have made up And yeah, so
(04:11):
George Soros was born to a Jewish family in Hungary
in nineteen thirty, which is not not a good time
to be born into a Jewish family in Hungary.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
No, really, there's not a good time to be born
to a Jewish and family in Hungary until like I'm
gonna get I'm gonna say sometime in the fifties.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, you know, I will say that it gets way
like it it is way worse when he is born
than it was in like even like the eighteen nineties,
which is like not a great time, but it's gotten
significantly worse. He is fourteen when the Nazis invade Hungary
nineteen forty four, and this is the point at which
(04:53):
we get to our first Soros conspiracy, which is that
there's this, there's this.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
It's a little more complicated than that. It's not really
the Nazis, and well it's a little more complex than
when extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community begins really in
nineteen forty four.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, yeah, And so there's a thing that happens. I
don't know. He and his dad have a kind of
complicated like set of things they survive. And there's a
part of the story that gets picked up by the
right that gets if you've ever heard Alex Jones talk
about sorows, like the second or third thing he will
(05:32):
say is that like Soros is a Nazi collaborator, was
like a willing collaborator with the Nazis, which is not true.
And also like he's fourteen, like you know, like I.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Don't really call even like fourteen year olds and the
Hitler youth willing collaborators because they're children. Yeah, you have
to have a lion at some point, even with Nazis,
where if their kids they're not really morally responsible either way.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, and like, you know, so the speific thing that
he does, there's these notices that are sent up by
the government that's like telling Jewish people to like go
like to a place and if you go to the place,
you're gonna get routed up and killed. And basically, so
the thing that actually happened is that so Georg Ros's
dad is told to do this, and he gives it
(06:18):
to George Soros and is like, go tell these people
that they've been called for this and that if they go,
they're like they're gonna get taken away. And this has
been transformed by you know this that is this is
a nightmarish thing and these people are surviving. This has
been transformed by a bunch of the worst people wh've
ever lived into Nazi collaboration. Which is also you know,
the part of the story that never gets told, even
(06:38):
even when people sort of like do the like dive
into like oh this is fake, is that the thing
that like Soros's family spends the rest of the war
doing is basically getting like counterfeit papers to Jewish families
that like says that they're Christian, and you know, they
like they stay legitimately save a bunch of families from
dying in the Holocaust, and.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
You know the ship that Joeanes pulls on them as
like part of this because of like the job this
guy who's like saving young George Soros has involves like
basically like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced
out of their homes. He's like they were profiting off
of the holl No, they were like doing whatever job
kept them under the radar while they attempted to help.
(07:20):
Like it was the Holocaust, it was messy. Yeah, but
like it's almost like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage
of slave labors. Well, no, it's actually what Schindler was
doing was not that. Yeah, Like he was using the
trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people.
It's quite different from just enslaving people.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah. I think the thing that's really desturbing about the
stow right is like, Okay, like this is like Alex
Joses Alex Jones, Right, he's just gonna say the worst
shit you've ever heard. But like this is like a
thing that mainstream right wingers just say. Now, yeah, and
it's just unbelievably horrible and it sucks and it's just
like not true. But fortunately for George Soros, his family
(08:02):
makes it through the Holocaust, well his immediate family does,
and they like get out and they end up in
the US. And this is where, Okay, this is something,
this is something that I think is very important to
the story that isn't told very much. So Soros is
like a finance whiz, right, he is very very very
(08:25):
good at finance. And we're gonna be talking a bit
about like how like the things that he figured out
to let him do this, because it's interesting. But he's
also not from the sort of like American or the
British financial elite, Like if I don't there's like a
certain kind of person, right who like goes into finance,
and you know it's like like like wasp frat brose
or like in bred British aristocrats, right, And George Soros
(08:49):
is like a hung is a Hungarian immigrant, right. He
he is not sort of from these people. He is
like and and you know this is this is gonna
be a really big deal when he like goes up
against a British financial elite later on. But you know,
he threw sort of like he's able to turn like
a job doing door to door salesman into like a
(09:10):
way into a firm, and he's able to sort of
work his way up to a point where like he
has suddenly like has his own hedge fund, and he
is really really good at this. He's one of the
sort of early people who does hedge funds. There's a
great book called The Influence of Soros, Politics, Power, and
the Struggle for an Open Society by Emily Tampkin, who
(09:32):
did a lot of really great work, like interviewed Soros,
interviewed an enormous number of the people who were around him,
and I want to read a passage of this about
like how he figured out how to sort of beat
the market. He's talking about this guy named Carl Popper,
who's like a philosopher of science who also wrote this
book called The Open Society that we'll talk about next
(09:53):
episode more. Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the
role of misconceptions in financial markets. Decades later, people believe
that markets don't lie and shouldn't be and should be trusted,
but that isn't true. Sorow's knew markets react to humans
and humans are fallible. Instead of looking at the money
being made, or as Sebastian Malaby put it, in more
(10:14):
money than God, his book on the history of hedge funds,
the psychology that drove investors' appetites, Soros looked at how
one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the
other forward until the trust were so completely overvalued that
a crash was inevitable. And this is this is really smart,
like if you even today, right, you know, if you're
(10:37):
able to understand that, you know, like the way a
lot of hedgehoon people tend to think about the market
as like the market, you know, especially in this period,
is this is this sort of dogmatic, neo lible thing
of like the market is like a perfect condvance of
price signals and Sorow's just like no, it's made out
of people. And those people like get greedy. They have
emotional stuff they like they give get into these like
(11:00):
fomo like fear of missing out stuff. You know, they
like intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees the assets
like expensive, so everyone like you know, rushes to buy it,
and like this is something like like even now right,
this is this is like a very smart way to
understand finance. He's figured this out in like the seventies,
and if you, if you, if you're able to do
this kind of stuff and like use this to understand
(11:23):
how the market works in the seventies, you are going
to look like a god among men. And he starts
a hedge fund in nineteen seventy three, but by nineteen
eighty one he has a fund that is worth three
(11:43):
hundred and eighty one million dollars in like nineteen eighty
one money. I don't know what that is in modern money,
but I assume it's a lot. I'm a hack of
a fraud. I should actually figured this out.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, that's like a billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, And like he personally is like has like for
himself like one hundred million dollars, right, and he you know,
at this point he starts to become sort of very
famous in finance circles because you know, I mean he's
just like absolutely destroying the market. Now, okay, this is
where things get. You know, up until this point, he's
kind of like he's been doing a lot of sort
(12:17):
of finance stuff that's kind of shady, but it's mostly
just been him, like ripping off other finance people, which
I'm entirely okay with, like that's just very funny. But
he starts to get into currency speculation, and in nineteen
eighty five he has one of his big breaks, which
is he predicts the Plaza Chords. Now, okay, Aplasa chord
(12:39):
is something we've talked about on the show before, but
I need to talk about it a bit more because
unfortunately it's we have to talk about the Asian financial
collaps this episode. And this is a like one of
the key moments of the Asian financial collaps even though
it was like a decade earlier. So in nineteen eighty five,
Ronald Reagan is trying to like revive the US as
a domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying, and you know,
(13:04):
and the reason part of the like a big part
of the reason is dying is that they're getting absolutely
destroyed by sort of German and like West German and
Japanese manufacturers. And part of what's happening here is that
particularly Japan's currencies are worth way currency is worth way
less than the dollar. This is called having a weak currency,
and having a weak currency is really good for if
(13:25):
you have like an export based manufacturing economy. And so
Reagan basically like walks into a meeting with like the Germans,
Japanese government, the British and like few other people and
just basically just like not quite in so many words,
but basically just says like you are all American military protectorates,
and because you're all American military protectorates, like I can
I can force you to increase the value of your
(13:45):
currency like or else capital O, capital e. And they do,
they comply, and this is this, this becomes this is
a thing called the Plaza Cords and this this, you know,
weakens the value of the dollar versus a bunch of
other currencies. And this like literally handedly like restores the
profitability of American manufacturing like through the nineties, which is
(14:06):
really wild. But the the other the important thing for
this story is that I I don't know how he
did this, but like George Soros predicts that this is
gonna happen, and she makes an unbelievable amount of money
basically like no, no, like basically doing currency speculation because
he knows what, like currencies are going to increase in value,
(14:27):
which you know, he knows that like uh. For example,
he knows that like the Japanese yen is going to
increase in value. So he makes an enormous amount of
money doing this stuff, and he gets very famous for
like he'll like make it much of money, and then
I'll lose it again, and then he'll make it again.
And this all culminates in Okay, so they're they're okay.
(14:51):
He starts taking ah, truly enormous bets, like against national currencies,
and there's one of these that's just funny, and there's
one of these that's really bad. So we're gonna do
the funny one first, which is so in nineteen ninety
two Soros And this is the other part that they
ever gonna talked about. It's like it's not just Soros
(15:11):
doing this stuff. He has like allies because like as
big as Soros as for MBA is right, he can't
him and his ally is gonna take a fifteen billion
dollars short position on the pound, and even he doesn't
have like nobody like this is like fifteen billion of
nineteen nineties money, right, Like you need a bunch of
firms working together in order to do this. But he
basically takes this massive bet the pound is gonna go down,
(15:35):
and because of the way that these these bets work,
like the actual value of the pounds like collapses, and
the British Central Bank like like doesn't have enough. And
the reason we're able to do is they figure out
that the British Central Bank doesn't have enough money to
stop them, like they don't have enough money to like
maintain like they don't have enough reserves to like maintain
the value of the pound. And so he gets like
(15:56):
completely blamed for this, even though again there's like other
people involved in this, right, Like the front page of
the Daily Mail is literally his face in the title
I made a billion crashing the pound baste, which is
I okay, so like an anti British level, this is
very funny. It's no, there's a bunch of arguments about
(16:20):
like what does this mean for like the world economy
and for national sovereignty. Soros thinks that like currency speculation
is necessary evil and he has this sort.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Of tay to think that when you're making that much money,
yeah right, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Now, okay, this this like specific thing which is like
a a a bank. A banker comes in and is
able to manipulate the value of a currency. This is like,
this is like absolutely like this is the fodder for
(16:55):
like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of the anti Semitic right.
Like it's this sort of like rootless cosmopolitan banker like
attacks the good and righteous like noble people of Britain thing.
And this is how it gets framed in the press,
who are like the press is I mean it's the
British press, right, Like the British are not known for,
you know, not being anti Semitic, so they just like
(17:17):
go wild with this. But you know, like this particular
thing he's doing against the British. Part of what's happening here, right,
is there's this sort of there's this kind of like
national populist equation thing going on here, where there's this
assumption that like the Bank of Britain, like the bank,
like the British Central Bank is like an entity that
(17:37):
is identifiable with like an ordinary person in Britain, and
like no, like the British Central Bank is run by
just unbelievably in bred aristocrats, right, and you.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Know I think they're pretty believably in bred.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Oh that's fair.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
We're just talking about like like zero point five six
of a Habsburg unit, you know, a hack. The Habsburg
is the international unit for measuring how inbred someone is.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
If you're if you're unaware, Yeah, yeah that that seems
like a reasonable amount of inbred for these specific people.
But you know, like but this is what I was
talking about, Like at the very beginning, I was talking
about sort of like Sorrow's not being from this sort
of like normal class of finance people. And the thing is,
like the normal class of finance people are fucking terrible
at their jobs, right, like these amber British aristocrats and
(18:29):
like the fucking American like cocaine frat boys like like
just like doing lines of cocaine off each other's as cracks.
Like these people all suck at their jobs. And George
Soros is like smart and is good at his job.
And so she just like absolutely goes through these people
like a fucking flaming chainsaw, and she just like, you know,
and the maneuvers that he's doing here, she just like
(18:51):
absolutely humiliates all of the people at the at the
British Central Bank. He's humiliating like and not just those
guys too, it's humiliating the Tories. He's humiliating like all
of the people who are seriously important in the real economy,
in the sort of real British economy. And he can
do this right because like his opponents are you know,
(19:12):
people who are like they're they're they're promoting, they're like
they're they're they're okay, they take in like their people
from college, right, and they're promoting the base off how
good they are at golf. And so when when he
just sort of like like walks in and just makes
it like makes like billions of dollars just like destroying
these people, he makes just a permanent enemy of a
(19:33):
very very powerful like faction of the British ruling class
and the British ruling class. Like I don't know, they
they it is hard to find people who will beat
the British ruling class in an anti Semitism off. And
this is this is one of the things that sort
of you know, if you're looking at like why Sorrow
specifically is the guy who all of these sort of
(19:54):
right wing conspiracies wind up being about, like part of
it is because he pisses off these specif people.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Yeah, these guys who's like dads were all friends with
the King of England, who was like a close personal
buddy with Hitler. Like there it's a bunch of like,
it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted
and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game.
And so like the fact that it's a Jewish dude
who does it means that they're going to be even
(20:21):
more racist than they already were. And the fact that
there's plenty of international anti semitism and that George Soros
after this starts funding liberal and you know, vaguely progressive
causes like yeah, it's not this is not a it's
not surprising that this is the way things went.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, and you know, and again, like I can't under
emphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically
the reaction to British media class. Who I mean, we
know now that those people are psychos, Like we have
seen them see a transperson at a boat race and
like like ten years ago and like like draw a
gi things circling them in a boat and making it
(21:01):
a front page news story. Those people in the nineties
were like sure, they are biological biologically better at navigation.
That is that has actually been improved. Yeah, but then
they're like justice, they're they're they're just a sort of
feral and like terrifying lead bigoted then as they are now.
(21:22):
And this means that like like just if you're a
regular British person and you are like walking down the
street and there's a newspaper sand you are seeing like
like they truly unbelievably terrifying anti Semitic shit, like just
literally everywhere. And this this will have no consequences whatsoever.
(21:44):
Uh yeah, it's all good, nothing bad ever happens. And
speaking of no consequences, I do you know what we
can promise about about training services? Twenty three minutes in?
You know, look you're welcome, Damnan. Okay, we're back and
(22:11):
we have to talk about Okay. So the doing it
to the British economy was mostly just really funny because
the British economy is going to be fine. And it's
the funny part about she was doing it to the
British economy is that this actually unfortunately helps the British
economy because it forces the British to like abandon some
truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they were doing.
(22:36):
But then he does it to Thailand, and that is
a lot less justifiable. So it in this is five
years later, this is nineteen ninety seven. Sous brings in
some economists, Arminio Fraga, like Roddy Joe's David Kowitz. Uh
(23:00):
he he brings He's bringing in people who are sort
of experts in like developing market uh economics. And that's
never no one has ever brought in a developing market
economist for like a good reason. And what they what
they realize is that they start doing analysis of Southeast Asia,
(23:23):
like the Southeast Asian markets, and they realize very quickly
that Thailand is fucked. They they figure out that Thailand
has Thailand has his currency pegged to the dollar and this,
but you know, they don't have the reserves support this,
and the tie like actual tai currency isn't strong enough
to maintain like like stay being pegged to the dollars.
(23:45):
It's not a strong enough currency. And so they do
a two billion dollars short of of of like Thailand's currency.
And I mean, I'm gonna read from the Influence of
Sorrows again about like the process of this. It was
a debate we had. Jones told me we'd gone to
work in Asia, and here you are taking large scale
(24:05):
short positions in countries with institutional fragility. Going for the
juggular in the United Kingdom was one thing doing the same,
and Thailand was another. The Bank of England would surely recover.
Thailand was a developing economy and it was unclear what
impact outside investors could have. Soros has justified speculation with
the idea that it could serve as a kind of
warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the bot needs to devalue.
(24:31):
Change your policy now before a currency collapses, devastating for
your people. The trouble is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead,
it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves to buy
Tai bot. When it finally ran out in early summer
nineteen ninety seven, the value of the bot plunged thirty
two percent against the dollar and millions of people lost
Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made seven
(24:51):
hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes,
I made a lot of money selling heroin to those
middle schoolers. But really, when you think about it, it
was a warning to those schools that it was too
easy for me to bribe the janitor to sell heroin
to kids there. You know, I was actually performing a
public service. So true, Robert, It is just like that,
(25:18):
you know.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
To be fair, you know, I'm not going to every money.
I'm not going to finish that thought. That's probably for
the best.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Yeah, we need we need one person to remain uncanceled
here to keep the lights on.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Oh God, doesn't have to be me.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Oh no, yeah, no, legally it does.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
It's really bad. Yeah, no more joking, but yeah, we can't.
We can't suffer any other jokes.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yes, somebody's gotta upload this episode.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
All right here, here, here, here's the next joke. Soros
actually doesn't make money off of the speculation, if off
of a speculating in Southeast Asia, because he loses basically
the same amount of money taking like a long position
in Indonesia.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I took
a long position on doing cocaine in my bathroom with
the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids.
You know, we're a lot alike, him and me, we're
a lot of like.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Well, okay, to be fair, to be fair, and this
is okay, this is the thing. The reason I wanted
to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay, like
to this day, if you look under sort of if
you if you every once in a while, someone someone,
there'll be a tweet that's like, what did George Sorrows do?
And immediately there will be a bunch of people talking
(26:33):
about how he like deliberately destroyed all of the economies
in Southeast Asia. Yeah, and that's not really what happened.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
And that would be for one thing, too much to
put on one guy fucking around with a cup.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah. Yeah, And I wanted to actually kind of walk
through this a little bit in depth just because okay,
there's a really really easy way to think about the
economy that is bad. It leads you into anti Semitic traps,
which is like, hey, here is like one banker who
wanted to make money, and because he wanted to make money,
he like destroyed all these economies. And like, on the
(27:07):
one hand, yeah, like like Sorrow's betting against like the
tai currency is bad, right, like this is this is
not a thing you should have been doing. On the
other hand, you know, okay, so that's like the sort
of level one thing. But the thing about that, you know,
this is the sort of this is the sort of
like great Man, anti anti Semitism theory of collapse. And
this is the theory that a lot of the sort
of regional leaders take, you know, because and this and
(27:30):
this is sort of a crucial thing, right, this position
very conveniently allows them to just like not think about
capitalism in general or like their role in this in
this crisis, which is not insignificance. And so in order
to figure out what what actually happened here, we need
to look at so so Sorow sort of like tip
(27:50):
like tip some dominoes, right, but the dominoes were already
there and they were going like regardless even if Soros
had never existed, right, Like, they were going to fall.
And they're going to fall because ironically of the plaza coords.
So you know, when we talked about the plaza courds earlier.
The US forces Japan to increase the value of its
currency relative to the dollar. Okay, so this is great
(28:12):
for the American economy. This nukes the Japanese economy, I
mean the Japanese economy, you know. And we'll talk about
this in a bit too. It was already kind of
doing bad. When the US does this and its manufacturer
economy just like implodes it. It guts the Japanese economy.
It has The Japanese economy has never recovered from this.
It probably will never recover really into what it was.
(28:37):
And you know, the effect this has is that now
the government of Japan has to figure out how to
grow their economy without having any way to make money
that grows your economy. But now they have a stronger currency,
and so their solution is, Okay, what did they all
the central banking people look around each other and they go,
what is a strong currency good for housing speculation? And
(29:01):
so they they start like they start, they start slashing
interest race, and they start basically building an entire economy, uh,
based on the assumption that housing prices will always go up,
and so you should just take out loans so you
could buy houses because the value of the housing will
because you know, highing prices will always go up, so
you can you can have all of these assets based
and mortgages. H This is this may may or may
(29:24):
not be sounding familiar to everyone who literally thousand and
eight I and so you know, in in like in
like nineteen eighty two, the entire Japanese economy implodes sort
of again because they they literally built the two thousand
and eight machine. And so this this forces the US
to do something called the reverse Plaza Cords, where they
(29:47):
take the original Plaza records and they reverse it and
they increase the value of the American dollar. American manufactury
dies like it's never recovered, it's never coming back. And
this for a this kind of this stabilizes the Japanese
a to be a little bit, but it means that
the US now no longer has a functional economy. And
so we do. Our solution to this is we need
(30:07):
two thousand and eight. Right, we build an entire economy
also on the Japanese model of currency speculat of you know,
of like housing price speculation, ceculation of like or like
the rising prices of like stocks. Right, we build an
economy completely made a bullshit. But you know, okay, but
what does this have to do with the Asian market collaps? Okay?
The problem is that like all of the countries and
(30:28):
in East Asia and like Southeast Asia also do this.
They also do the thing where they're like, oh, we're
gonna we're gonna, we're gonna ba We're okay, so our
manufacturing economies are declining, right, so we're gonna we're gonna
base our entire economy on housing prices going up. And
you know that's and it's not George Soros. That's the
thing that actually destroys like the sort of that's something
(30:50):
that like that like actually destroys all of these economies.
And you know, and I wanted to sort of run
through this, and you know, this is like a lot
of like sort of econ shit, right, But the reason
I wanted to run through this is that I think
I think he gets at the sort of truly the
truly horrifying thing about how our economy works that is
(31:12):
really difficult to face, and is I think it's at
least a part of why people really really want there
to just be one guy who is running anything everything,
whether that's the CIA, whether that's Soros, whether that's like
the New World Order. Yeah, right, because if there's if
there's like a guy who's doing this, right, you can
(31:33):
stop him. But the great horror of this world is
that there is no deep state, right, there is no sataniscoball,
there's no one pulling the strings at all. The only
thing that is there is just sort of the cold,
lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital, and that logic
is moving all of us, right, all you know, the
people who are doing the conspiracies, insofar as they exist,
(31:53):
are being moved by this. All of the rulers are
being moved by capital. All of us, the subjects, are
being moved by capital. But that like sucks, right, Like
the fact that all of these economies are destroyed not
by like the individual actions of people, but by the
fact that, like returns are less good in Thailand than
they are in China. And this is just sort of
(32:14):
the inectable logic of the entire economic system we have.
This is, you know, this is absolutely terrifying, and faced
with this sort of reality, right, like, people who want
to protect capitalism because you know, they have a bunch
of assets in it, right, retreat into this sort of
like they you know, they they use Soros as a
smoke screen for like why everything is suddenly going wrong.
(32:39):
But sort of simultaneous to this, right, this is also
a real problem for George Soros because he's, like, you know,
when he's not sort of in his role as like
capital He's like not a piece of shit. He's like
a person who wants the world to be better. And this,
(33:00):
you know, this causes a sort of there was a
contradiction in his ideology, right, which is that he wants
the world to be a better place, and simultaneously he's
also a capitalist, and these two things are sort of
warring with each other. Even as early as even as
early sort of the nineties, he's giving speeches about how
like his open society that he wants. It's just sort
(33:20):
of like this liberal democratic society of like laws and
norms and human rights. The greatest danger Twitter ceased to
be communism, it's now capitalism. But he can't do anything
about it because he is also a capitalist. And next episode,
we're going to watch Soros like through his philanthropic endeavors,
attempt to solve the problems that his economic system has
(33:42):
caused and fail catastrophically and become the sort of boogeyman
and the the anti sementic spector of every conspiracy theory
in the world.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah, so check out that next time. And you know,
if you're hanging out around Clark Middle School and you
have forty dollars. I can hook you up with some
some of that sweet black tar, so you know, give
me a ring. My phone numbers posted in the show
notes of every episode It.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, Updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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