You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism

Summary

Benn Jordan's video, "You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism," delves into the complexities and alleged crumbling of American capitalism. Through an engaging narrative, Jordan explores the shifts in economic systems, from feudalism to contemporary capitalism, and the socio-political forces reshaping these structures. He questions the sustainability of the current capitalist system, highlighting issues like debt, wealth inequality, and a move toward a "rent-based" economy. With historical references and modern examples, he paints a grim but thought-provoking picture of economic evolution and its ramifications on society.

Highlights

• Benn Jordan started exploring finance in 2020, intrigued by the Federal Reserve's responses to crises. 📊
• He raises questions about capitalism's future amidst socio-economic shifts and wealth stratification. 🤔
• Jordan discusses the transformation from feudalism to capitalism and the implications on labor laws and taxation. ⚖️
• The video illustrates the historical context and practices that have shaped modern economic frameworks. 🕰️
• He presents a critical view of private equity and its influence on the economic landscape. 🏦
• The potential transition to a rent-based economy and the loss of control over economic power are scrutinized. 🏠
• Jordan suggests that economic and political decisions are increasingly influenced by a select powerful few. 🏛️
• The video culminates in a philosophical reflection on society’s relationship with capitalism and economic power. 🧠

Key Takeaways

• The video explores the potential collapse of capitalism, comparing historical economic systems with today’s practices. 💥
• Jordan highlights the growing wealth inequality and the transition to a rent-based economy as major concerns. 📉
• He critiques current financial practices and their impact on both the economy and the average person. 💸
• The narrative includes historical references, showing how past economic decisions impact present-day systems. 📚
• Jordan encourages viewers to critically analyze economic structures and their personal roles within them. 🔍

Overview

Benn Jordan's exploration into the world of finance uncovers his skepticism about the structural integrity of American capitalism. Initiated by his curiosity about the Federal Reserve's crisis responses, his research leads to a profound questioning of the economic status quo. This journey prompts Jordan to scrutinize the widening gap between the wealthy and the everyday citizen, sparking debates about the pursuit of profit at society's expense.

The video's narrative interweaves historical economic transformations with contemporary realities, rallying against the perceived decline of capitalism. Jordan challenges the conventional wisdom surrounding the stock market and critiques the ongoing shift towards a privatized economic domain dominated by private equity. His assessment insists on a holistic understanding of how historical policies continue to shape our financial world today.

Jordan pushes for a critical reevaluation of capitalism’s role, especially as it seems intertwined with socio-political tactics that influence public consciousness and individual power. The video serves as a manifesto urging viewers to question the motives behind economic and political structures, and to consider how these systems affect their lives. Ultimately, it is a call to awareness and engagement in shaping future economic landscapes.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction: Personal Journey into Finance and Capitalism's Death The chapter "Introduction: Personal Journey into Finance and Capitalism's Death" begins with the author's growing interest in finance in early 2020. The author sought to understand the Federal Reserve's response to certain events, which prompted deeper analysis of stock markets, particularly focusing on familiar companies like Curiosity Stream and Spotify. This analysis led the author to establish a private fund that strategically shorted these companies.
• 01:30 - 03:30: The Evolution from Feudalism to Sharecropping The chapter on 'The Evolution from Feudalism to Sharecropping' presents an introspective narrative by a freelance consultant, originally a musician with no formal higher education. As they delve into the world of venture capital and finance, they struggle with self-doubt, questioning their understanding of the financial markets that seem clear to young traders. This sets up a fundamental conflict between personal inadequacy versus an implication of systemic imperfection in modern capitalism. The narrative suggests a possibility that capitalism's decline might be intentional and not just a circumstantial error or something the wealthy are trying to prevent, hinting at a deeper critique of economic structures.
• 03:30 - 07:00: Capitalism and the Velocity of Money: A Historical Economic Overview The chapter titled 'Capitalism and the Velocity of Money: A Historical Economic Overview' delves into the concept of rethinking the traditional goals of capitalism. It questions the possibility of circumventing labor laws and taxation by reducing the emphasis on financial profit, or perhaps even money itself. The discussion highlights a shift in the economic landscape, supported by the perspective of various economists who believe significant changes have occurred or are occurring within capitalism. The chapter aims to provide a clearer picture of the complex socioeconomic reality of the past decade, which often seems obscured by rapid developments.
• 07:00 - 09:00: The Impact of the Federal Reserve and Inflation on Wealth Distribution Capitalism's relationship to feudalism is crucial to understanding wealth distribution. Feudalism defined wealth through land control rather than money, contributing to hierarchical power structures. Although history marks the end of feudalism in the late 15th century, its influences linger, impacting modern economic systems and wealth distribution.
• 09:00 - 12:00: The Stock Market's Historical Growth and Challenges The chapter discusses the historical growth and challenges of the stock market. It starts with the end of the American Civil War, where former slaves were given opportunities to work on the same land they previously farmed as slaves. They were allowed to live and farm there in exchange for a portion of their crops. However, their trade was often limited as they could only sell their remaining produce through the plantation store, which restricted their ability to participate freely in the market and limited their economic opportunities. The chapter reflects on how these historical circumstances present growth challenges within the stock market over time.
• 12:00 - 15:00: World War II and the Birth of American Capitalist Growth In the late 1930s, many sharecroppers, two-thirds of whom were White, began migrating to cities to work in factories due to the impact of the Great Depression on farms. Despite not being illegal, sharecropping became obsolete with the growth of American capitalism. Capitalism, defined as a system where individuals and private parties control production means with profit as the main economic driver, flourished, transforming the economic landscape.
• 15:00 - 18:00: The 2008 Financial Crisis and Its Aftermath This chapter explores the concept of the velocity of money as a measure of capitalist success, using an example of a small economy consisting of a farmer and a mechanic. The economy starts with $50, and through a series of trades (tractor repair, corn, and a barn cat), the money is circulated within this small system, reflecting a velocity of money that measures how often a unit of currency circulates over a specific period. In this case, $100 changes hands, indicating a velocity of two. This principle is used as a basis to understand economic activities and the flow of money, particularly relevant to discussions about the 2008 financial crisis.
• 18:00 - 24:00: Amazon and the Shift Towards a Rent-Based Economy The chapter discusses how economies traditionally increase the velocity of money by reducing interest rates, while increasing borrowing costs to mitigate reckless spending. It also explores the role of governments around the world in controlling interest rates and speculates on the potential impact if the Federal Reserve were to be abolished.
• 24:00 - 31:00: Introduction to Post-Capitalism and Billionaire Influence In this chapter, the discussion revolves around the dynamics of market turbulence and wealth distribution, particularly under post-capitalism scenarios. The author suggests a shift in perspective, advocating for wealth measurement through consumer goods instead of money, using the example of Coke Zero cans. The comparison shows that an investment fund like Vanguard has slightly increased in value, reflecting on the broader economic influences of the wealthy.
• 31:00 - 38:00: Media Manipulation and Information Disequilibrium The chapter discusses the effects of inflation on different segments of society, highlighting a disparity where a person working full-time for minimum wage in Iowa earns significantly less in 2025 compared to 2019, due to the devaluation of money. This shift in economic dynamics results in wealth accumulation at the top, illustrating a broader theme of media manipulation and information disequilibrium that allows such financial disparities to persist.
• 38:00 - 46:00: Impact of Technology and AI on Labor and the Economy The chapter explores the historical evolution and impact of the stock market starting from its conception in 1792 to its role in economic and technological growth by the late 19th and early 20th century. Initially dominated by railroads and banks, the stock market stimulated economic activities, encouraging a vast number of businesses to list themselves. By the 1920s, stock trading had become a popular endeavor among the middle class, sometimes leading people to borrow money to invest in stocks, reflecting its deep integration into societal financial behaviors.
• 46:00 - 57:00: Conclusion: The Future of the Economy and Societal Implications The chapter discusses the historical context and evolution of economic practices, particularly focusing on borrowing and investment strategies. It highlights a 1:3 borrowing ratio, illustrating the high risk involved in borrowing $300 for every $100 invested, which may seem extreme. However, the concept was mitigated by the introduction of Futures in the mid-1800s by the Chicago Board of Trade. This innovation aimed to stabilize and make the grain trade more predictable. Futures allowed grain farms to sell their produce at a discount before the season ended, thereby reducing uncertainty and stabilizing the market for grain by guaranteeing a sales contract for future yield rather than trading stocks or shares directly. The chapter likely explores further implications of such financial instruments on the economy and society.

You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 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
• 00:30 - 01:00 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
• 01:00 - 01:30 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 seems foggy to us
• 01:30 - 02:00 [Music] 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
• 02:00 - 02:30 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
• 02:30 - 03:00 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
• 03:00 - 03:30 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
• 03:30 - 04:00 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
• 04:00 - 04:30 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
• 04:30 - 05:00 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
• 05:00 - 05:30 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
• 05:30 - 06:00 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
• 06:00 - 06:30 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
• 06:30 - 07:00 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
• 07:00 - 07:30 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
• 07:30 - 08:00 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
• 08:00 - 08:30 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
• 08:30 - 09:00 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
• 09:00 - 09:30 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 us richer and happier and
• 09:30 - 10:00 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
• 10:00 - 10:30 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
• 10:30 - 11:00 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] now look at this if that little risky
• 11:00 - 11:30 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
• 11:30 - 12:00 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 circumstances the market is not functioning properly instead of doing something utterly Reckless list like revamping and updating laws to protect
• 12:00 - 12:30 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
• 12:30 - 13:00 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 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
• 13:00 - 13:30 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
• 13:30 - 14:00 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
• 14:00 - 14:30 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
• 14:30 - 15:00 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
• 15:00 - 15:30 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
• 15:30 - 16:00 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
• 16:00 - 16:30 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
• 16:30 - 17:00 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
• 17:00 - 17:30 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% we're back baby well Co is a Hot Topic for debate these days between scientists and cult
• 17:30 - 18:00 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
• 18:00 - 18:30 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
• 18:30 - 19:00 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
• 19:00 - 19:30 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
• 19:30 - 20:00 some economists refer to [Music] 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
• 20:00 - 20:30 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
• 20:30 - 21:00 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
• 21:00 - 21:30 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 [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
• 21:30 - 22:00 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
• 22:00 - 22:30 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
• 22:30 - 23:00 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
• 23:00 - 23:30 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
• 23:30 - 24:00 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
• 24:00 - 24:30 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
• 24:30 - 25:00 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
• 25:00 - 25:30 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
• 25:30 - 26:00 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
• 26:00 - 26:30 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 the key driver of economic activity
• 26:30 - 27:00 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
• 27:00 - 27:30 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
• 27:30 - 28:00 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
• 28:00 - 28:30 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
• 28:30 - 29:00 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
• 29:00 - 29:30 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
• 29:30 - 30:00 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
• 30:00 - 30:30 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
• 30:30 - 31:00 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
• 31:00 - 31:30 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
• 31:30 - 32:00 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
• 32:00 - 32:30 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
• 32:30 - 33:00 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
• 33:00 - 33:30 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
• 33:30 - 34:00 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
• 34:00 - 34:30 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
• 34:30 - 35:00 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
• 35:00 - 35:30 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
• 35:30 - 36:00 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
• 36:00 - 36:30 Cambridge analytica Scandal or Twitter quite literally and intentionally becoming an interactive right-wing propaganda tool there's a lot more to be worried about than 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
• 36:30 - 37:00 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
• 37:00 - 37:30 123% 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
• 37:30 - 38:00 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
• 38:00 - 38:30 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
• 38:30 - 39:00 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
• 39:00 - 39:30 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
• 39:30 - 40:00 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
• 40:00 - 40:30 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
• 40:30 - 41:00 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
• 41:00 - 41:30 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
• 41:30 - 42:00 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
• 42:00 - 42:30 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 watching keep creating bye