Richard Wolff: Trump, Hitler, and the End of the American Empire

President Trump has appointed Vice President Vance to remove from the Smithsonian Institute the anti-american improper ideology. What is that? It's over. The empire is on its way down. In that moment, Donald Trump says, "I'm going to take back the Panama Canal. I'm going to take Greenland away from Denmark. I'm going to take Canada away from the Canadian. When your country is falling apart, one of the ways you hold it together is to go on a crusade and the working class is hit in too many ways. It's upset. It's angry. It doesn't see a way out.

That's a description of the German working class. That's why it went with Hitler. Today I would like to talk about the decline of the American Empire. This is a a very provocative question. Uh, but first I want to say whether you love Trump or hate Trump, that this more applies to people who hate Trump. I think it's just absolutely ridiculous to say that he's Hitler or he's as bad as Hitler when you look at what Hitler did versus what Trump has done. It's just crazy. Agreed. I still think it's a very interesting historical exercise to

ask what parallels you see between Trump and Hitler as people maybe in their rises to power, their regimes. That's not the kind of reasoning I do. It's just I don't believe in it. It makes no sense to me. What what's interesting is not these individuals, neither of them because Trump is irrelevant as we we spoke about before. Yeah. It's the situation he what he does is made by his circumstances, not by him. He is really the the the in a long chain of causation. He's the last step. He's not the first step. He's not even

in the middle. He's trying to cope with 27 pressures coming at him in different ways. And if I knew more about him, I might make an educated guess which way he's going to go. But I don't I'm not about to know him. I don't even care very much. I'm interested in the forces and and how they are pushing him. Which way he finally goes, I can't know. And the it's kind of idle speculation. The reason the German story is important is it gives you some sense of some of the pressures he's under. You've got a

working class here that is very shocked. Very no one prepared them. That's a flaw of this culture which of course no one is allowed to say. No one prepared them that there is an empire that the empire is going to decline. Why? Because every empire in the world has. And do you really want to bet that this one won't? And if it might, could it be now? Could we? We can't. We cannot have that conversation. We just had a presidential election in which neither candidate said a word like that. Not Trump, not Biden, not Harris,

not declining empire. Us? Who? Me? Not at all. They all talk as though we're deciding on doing the we're the United States and we're making decisions in union. Look at Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump in a world in which probably it is fair to say the overwhelming majority of people are coming out of a century or two of colonialism hating it, wanting it to disappear. Anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism is the ethos of the world at this point. Why would a leader now, given the ethos I just described, having attacked Russia for three years relentlessly for taking Ukraine, territory

in Ukraine, suddenly become the advocate of taking territory? What the hell? What? But now wait a minute. Now you do but you do have an answer. When your country is falling apart, one of the ways you hold it together is to go on a crusade. Hitler attacks everybody. It's crazy. How is Germany going to fight Russia, Poland, the West? What are you nuts? Yeah. Yeah. Afterwards, that's how we talk. But at the time, he's solving problems step by step. He's and his rationale is kind of un if you look at it. Honestly, I don't like

it. We're obviously, you know, most of my family was killed by the fellow. You not his part, but I understand what he was doing. I understand what Mr. Trump is doing. I think the usefulness of the exercise is to learn something from understanding it to be more strategically adept at avoiding the worst outcome. Hitler, you know, Trump is no Hitler. I got that. I I agree with you about that. But he's under pressures that in one case led in that direction. And there are sure as hell signs that in this case there are also some

of them leading in that direction. Will they be strong enough? Will they engender a counter reaction? Who knows? Germany at the time Hitler takes power had extremely wellorganized very powerful leftwing. Half the country were in the socialist or communist parties. These were parties that had armed detachments to fight in the streets and so and they were disciplined in many ways particularly the communist party of German. We our left is out to lunch. There are no organizations even remotely comp comparable. Is it is it therefore easier for fascism to come here in some ways? You bet.

You bet. If and when Mr. Trump if he hadn't done it yet, but if and when Mr. Trump were to mobilize his partisans, you know, the Proud Boys, folks like that, put you put them in a uniform the way that Hitler did, and have them terrorize anybody who has a meeting to get rid of the unamerican improper ideology. Now it's a Smithsonian. Tomorrow it'll be what? A rally in Time Square. We already are picking up people whose crime seems to have been that they participated in anti-Israel or pro Palestinian activities at various universities. The universities

are caving giving the names to the police abetting the whole process. Colombia beyond words. Okay, those are signs. And I think it is as it is as inappropriate to equate Hitler to Trump as it is not to see that Trump is under very similar pressures and is making some similar moves. That's as much as it's reasonable to say, but it's unreasonable to deny that. I I wish it weren't the case. Secretary of State Rubio made a speech yesterday in which he proud he he made it clear I'm boasting 300 foreign students that was a number

he gave have been expelled from the United States have had their visas canled or withdrawn. People in the middle of their PhD studying such revolutionary topics as you know oceanography and so forth. Well, but it turns out that they wrote an article about genocide in Gaza or something like that. Jesus, it's interesting. It's interesting that people who come here and participate in nonviolent perfectly legal political expression, which is not an excluded activity by anybody are now being a and that nothing is happening. Nothing is happening. very few people saying much about it. The the the

Democratic party is DOA. It's not I mean it's not even there. Mr. Biden seems to vanished into thin air. Kla Harris with him. You know, this is the great for me. By the way, you're you're heading into the greatest crisis that the Democratic Party has had in a long time. the progressive wing of that party it cannot continue much longer the way it has and that's you know they may not recover I can't tell you the number of people that have contacted me talking about new parties third party I mean you know it's off the

ch that doesn't prove or guarantee anything but it is an interesting phenomena coming out of this situation and even the republican party may not be able to. You can see senators already over this uh what are they calling it? Signal gate uh are are beginning to split inside the Republicans because those who see this as another Watergate and they want to get on the right side early and those who don't want to. But here's the punch line. Take us back. These are all signs of a declining empire. That's all of this. All of this Trump

as a phenomena, this is this is a society that somewhere in some way understands that the convenient oscillation of the last 70 years, a Democrat, a Republican. as president, you do your stint and you turn it over to the other one and the same at the Senate and the same at the House and in uh and it doesn't make all that much difference. It's enough of a difference of little that half the people don't bother voting. They don't see any point in it. They don't regret it when they don't vote because we know two years

later, four years later, they don't vote again. All right. These are This was a very The Germans have a wonderful word gimmutish. I don't know how that translates into English. Gamutish. Um, pleasant, comfortable, relaxed, tranquil. Words like that. Uh, Mr. Trump is the end of that. Mr. Trump had nothing. He didn't come up through the ranks. He didn't learn the political game. He wasn't like so many of you. You know, look at Kla Harris. She was a DA. She was a senator. She learns uh Biden. He was a senator from Delaware. You know, in Bush's

world that Mr. Trump comes out of what's what's his skill? He's good at being a playboy in New York City, going to clubs with his father's money. You're charming. It's fine. Who car? But you need And he's brash. And he says things you're not supposed to. And he acts he he doesn't fit. That's why he get treated badly and now he's angry and getting back and revenge against all. It's a play. Shakespeare could have written this. You know, it's a play. It's the odd president. But that tells you something. And that is that the system

can't it can't go on. That's why when he first starts, he rides down an escalator and tells us all how Mexicans are rapists. Well, that's no politician would do that. That's nuts. But it was the ticket to success because everything is different now. And being your reasonable Bush Clinton is you know the same same old same old doesn't fly doesn't fly. And by the way, I can assure you since I'm closer to the Democratic party than I am, of course, to the Republican is that among the Democrats that I talk to, they are they are

more troubled than I've ever seen them. They don't know what to do. And I I know people pretty high up in that structure. They really don't know what to do. They know that Bernie is kind of out of the pig. He's too old. But they're coming up, lots of them all over the place. And and they understand that if you look at the voting, if you look at the young people particularly, this has got to go. And especially now, if you look at the economic program that Mr. Trump is putting forward, it's nuts. that you

can't I mean I liken it to this and by now you have a sense of how my head reasons the best image for Mr. Trump's economic policy is from football. You know what a Hail Mary passes? That's his pol his policy is a Hail Mary. It's when the game is nearly lost and you've got only enough seconds for one more play. So, you tell your receivers, I want you all to go out and go over in the left hand corner of the field, you know, close to the end zone, but not yet. I'm going to

heave the ball there. There's going to be three of you and three defenders and you're all going to go for the ball. It's going to bounce around and hopefully it'll come down in your hands and then we win the game. You fall into the end zone, we're done. That's it. That's where we are. Why is this his economic policy? Because nothing else left for him. Let's start with tariffs, right? Tariffs is the number one weapon that he's deploying. Tariffs have been in existence for hundreds of years. The United States has used tariffs at various points

in its history since it was independent and could do so. So right after the revolutionary war, we had the power to do and we have on occasion done tariffs. Okay, number one. Number two, some tariffs were worked out in deals with the rest of the world uh and have not occasioned a problem because we gave stuff that we could also benefit from. I'll give you an example. In the 1960s, there was a a really serious struggle when the United States wanted to levy tariffs on foreign automobiles. Why? Because coming out of World War II, the

rebuilding of the German and Japanese economies from World War II destruction led both countries to the same strategy. The best way we can recover from the war is to outdo the number one dominant economy in the world, the United States, and its number one industry at that time, automobiles. If we can't do that, they're going to dominate forever. That's our task. That's our goal. That's our measure of success. Can we produce a better car at a lower price? Enter Volkswagen. By the way, Hitler's project. Volkswagen. Volkswagen in German means the people's car. Um, Toyota. Yeah,

you know them. You know the Japanese. We all know them now. They started to come in. There was the romance of the VW Beetle, the little round one, and the auto companies went crazy. Detroit, which was our auto center at that time, was the dominant success story of American capitalism. When foreign dignitaries came to Washington, the president would fly with them to Detroit to have them look at Dearbornne or look at the the Ford plant or the GM plant or the Chrysler plant. Look here, we have look at this technology. Look at the workers how

satisfied they are. Look, we got a significant number of black workers here. See, we're overcoming our racial. It was half but half genuine, you know, justified. And there was a horror. Our dominance would be undone because the VW was a better car at a cheaper price. And the the Japanese came shortly thereafter. And so a deal was struck. Here's we're going to put a tariff But we won't put it on every car and we'll put it low on regular cars. But you got to give us one thing. We're going to put a fat tariff and

in exchange you can put a tariff on some of our agricultural products. The Europeans were interested in preserving their agriculture, particularly their chicken production. And Americans are good at making chicken. The chicken is no good, but the cheap price is spectacular. Um, anyway, long story short, a tariff was attached to the pickup truck, a big one, 25%. Compared to all the a sedan, 2 and a2%. That tariff has been in effect for half a century. You know why Americans celebrate the pickup truck? Why every He-Man has a pickup truck? Because it's a symbol of masculinity.

Not at all. You had to train the American buffoon to want that truck. You know why? Cuz the profit margin on the truck is way better than the profit margin on a car. And why? Because of the tariff. No far. That's why you don't see very many foreign the pickup truck that has the name Toyota that was made here to escape the tariff you know it's just so there's nothing new about it and therefore there's a literature you know many more books than you have on your shelf here about tariffs it's been a it it's

a a segment of every course in international trade ever taught and I've taught them. The library is full of enormous studies of every tariff there's ever been. Studies did it work? Did it fail? Why did it work? Why did it fail? And here's the conclusion. I'll save you a lot of time. I have done the literature. I've taught the course. We don't know is the answer. The effect of a tariff depends on the context within which it's said. It's a little bit like the phrase, "Oh shit." The impact of saying oh loudly in a group

of people depends on that group, who they are, what they're used to. They'll either be horrified or they'll give it no notice, right? Depends. That's what a tariff is. So when the president says, "I'm going to tariff. It's going to have this result," you're talking to a somebody who's talking right out of the other end because he has no idea what he's talking about. What will be the effect of the tariff on Canada? I don't know. And I know he doesn't know, right? It could be. There's the Hail Mary. Could it get him the result

he's hoping for? Yeah. When the quarterback heaves the Hail Mary pass, could it be end up caught by his tight end? Possible. possible Mr. Trump's policy if he's luckier than I don't know who could work out. But as a policy with his, you know, bravado explaining that this it's so pathetically absurd that you don't people like us and I'm I'm you don't have to be a leftist to understand it. Any half-wit trained economist knows you this is this is first year economic class in college stuff, right? He either didn't have it or he's forgotten that

you can't do this. And so I'm here to tell you that the consequences of the tariff could be a serious boost to inflation here because remember a tariff means stuff coming into the country costs more, right? Uh uh a bag of coffee coming in from Latin America or from Mexico, for example, cost $100, let's say, he's going to put a $25 25% tariff. You're going to have to pay $100 to get the co the the bag of coffee plus $25 to Uncle Sam. That's the tariff. It's a tax. Mr. Trump often says that the tariff

is paid by the other country. This is wrong. It's not paid by the other country. It's paid by Americans. Nobody else is built. United States can't bill another country for a tax. It's not the way the system works. You know, Nigeria cannot bill us for taxes their legislature passes. It's not the way it works. Okay. So now the coffee will cost to the American buyer $125. Let's say the American buyer is a company called Starbucks. They now have to pay 25% more for their single most important input. You know what's going to happen to the

price of your latte? The inflation is going to get major worse. Multiply it by not just coffee but by all the other items. Our biggest trading partners are Mexico and Canada. The two countries hit with 25% tariff. Those are the biggest sources of inputs imports into the United States. So you could have here a sudden shock. The avocado toast that the nice people like to eat, that's going to cost a fortune. And the avocados all come from Mexico. In the morning, you have coffee, which I just told you will go up in price. And into

it, you put sugar, which is an imported product. Don't you go, "Welcome to America of $20 for your morning coffee." You think the working class is angry now? Oh, wait. Mr. Trump won the election in part by the antipathy towards the Democrats held accountable for the inflation that we had during the Biden presidency. Mr. Trump really want to do that now making himself to blame cuz everybody's going to say it's because of the tariffs and it'll be largely true. And then we ask the question, what will the objects the people hurt? And the Mexicans, you

know, and let me do Mexico cuz it's it's wonderful. It's so horrible. It's wonderful. We are deporting into Mexico more than any other country. Millions of undocumenteds that are being collected by ICE and sent over the border into Mexico. What's in Mexico for them? Nothing. There are no jobs in Mexico. Not for millions of people suddenly arriving. This is a catastrophe. But we're just beginning. Those millions who were working here in the United States, the millions of Mexicans all around us, they were taking a portion of their weekly salary and sending it back to Mexico

for their grandma and their grandpa and their children that they left behind. This was, and I know the numbers, 18% of the GDP, if I'm not mistaken, a huge cash inflow to the Mexican economy. Gone. You return the workers who for whom there's no work and you cut off the source of income. And now you're saying, "But you can't export anything to America anymore because we got a tariff against you." A lot of people aren't going to buy $125 bag of coffee because they'll turn to tea. They're not going to What is Mexico going to

do? Where is Mexico? And in Canada it it's different. Canada sells us lumber. We're going to put a 25% You know what? Nobody can afford to build houses in America now. Add 25% to the cost of lumber. Kiss it goodbye. and rents will go what? Half of this country uses electricity from Canada. The Midwest brings Canadian electricity because Canada has oil, gas, and can generate masses of it. What do what is Canada going to do with its lumber? With its Oh, I know. There is a place that will buy all the electricity and all the

lumber. It's called the People's Republic of China. Having a real competitor for the first time means everybody has options they never had before. So you the real effect of Mr. Trump's policies of tra of of and I haven't even gone through the impact on China or the impact on Europe and he's throwing tariffs on them too. You could have a a concatenation of events in which what the unthought through strategy of Mr. Trump doesn't yet take into account that there's another competitor who can buy if you don't, who can sell if you don't. You're not

what you were. In the latter half of the 20th century, it all made a kind of sense. United States says jump and everybody asks how high. But we're not there. It's over. The empire is on its way down. You can live with that. You can make that decline manageable. You can avoid a trauma or you cannot. For every example of an empire that went down traumatically, I can give you one that didn't and vice versa. That's a choice we have if we take it seriously, which our leaders do not. So, they're doing this m the

retaliation. I mean, Canadians are on mass changing their summer vacation plans to not come to the United States. It's an interesting moment why they're so shaken by all the rhetoric and everything, but that that hurts our tourist industry, which is a significant industry in this country. You know, six Canadians were were planning normally to come to that resort or to to be part of the sunbirds that come to Florida in the winter, but they're not coming anymore, you know. And those people in Florida with their you see did you see what Mr. Dantis did? This

is another he's the governor of Florida. He gave a speech four days ago in which he said, "Well, we got a problem here. We're deporting immigrants, but they're the ones who pick the fruits and vegetables upon which the Florida economy depends. But I have a solution. We're changing the law so children can go to work in the fields. That's the end of an empire. That's what happens. And no one says boo. 14y olds will now be eligible to work until I think 9 at night. I mean, all kinds of things that the law forbade for

children before. We're going to have child labor. And it's going to be good because you see, you can pay the children as little as you got away with paying those immigrants. Jesus Christ. How many symptoms do you want to see before you go to the doctor? How many things are you going to face before you realize you got a different problem than the one you thought you had? And all of this this this let me put it to you this way. I if everything is going your way, you can afford to make mistakes, misjudgments, you

know, because everything is kind of going your way. So, yeah, you forgot to take care of that, but that that's happening and that's good and that'll kind of compensate for the boo boo you made for the mistaken judge. And the problem is that that's true. That is true. And the United States had that for the second half of the 20th century. But now the wind is going the other way. Everything going down. There's no there's no slack anymore. There's no space. Each mistake now worsens the other one. I'll give the a very concrete example. when

the United States decided to fight against the Russians uh about Ukraine, right? It was quickly understood, even before the war started, that Russia has, if not the greatest nuclear weapons in the world, second to the United States. And not a distant second, if it's at all second, which means nuclear war is out. You couldn't possibly pick a worse choice than Russia to have a nuclear war with. I mean, pick any China, pick anybody. You know, Russia's got the most. So, there's not going to be a nuclear war. The two sides understand that would be crazy.

Neither of them cares enough about Ukraine to run such a risk. Okay. What does that mean? Well, it means that there if there's going to be a war, it's a conventional war. Army, Navy, Air Force, human war. Okay. But then you don't want to fight Russia because Russia has a fantastic record in these kinds of wars. I mean, uh, Napoleon tried and got defeated. And Kaiser Wilhelm tried and got defeated and Adolf Hitler tried and got the you do you really want to fight the Russians in an armed conventional war? The United States understood that.

They really did. So they came up with the great way of victory sanctions. Russia is a small economic unit. Russia's dependent on exporting oil and gas. We are the United States and we have allies, the Europeans, and we're going to say to the Russians, we're going to sanction you. They did. This is the quote. I'm quoting. I didn't make these things up. Mother of all sanctions. It's what they called it. We're hitting you with this. And then we're sanctioning oligarchs. We're sanctioning industries. We're sanctioning companies. We're sanctioning the whole country. We're sanctioning sanctioning sanctioning. And

it was the biggest program of sanctions. There are thousands of sanctions right now on the on Russia. But the big one was Europe would stop buying. and to drive the point the oil and gas and to drive the point home. Remember they blew up the undersea uh cable, the undersea gas pipeline, right? I mean, extraordinary action to stop the Russians from exporting their number one money maker. That was going to bring them to their knees. The president said so. What wasn't calculated was that the Russians have a way to avoid the impact of the sanctions.

Not the usual way because sanctions are quite easy to evade. There's a book I forget the author's name but there's a book a few years old which is a study of sanctions. And the whole point of the book is to show you done by some academic professor somewhere in the United States here. The whole point of the book is to show you that the sanctions never work. Country after country he goes to it's very good very good announcement. Anyway, it's not that the mistake made by uh Biden and his people was not to understand the

importance of China and its allies known as the bricks. You know, Belgium, uh Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and the dozen other countries that are now part of that. Uh what Russia did is say okay I don't have to sell it to you I'm going to sell it to India and China end of you lose I got my money is coming in I'm sell Here's the joke when you sell it to India it just goes on another ship and goes right back to Europe Russia is still selling its oil to Europe it's just

just a new middleman But the beauty they never understood because they didn't understand. They didn't understand that if you don't handle intellectually the re change in the world, you're going to make catastrophic strategic mistakes. They lost the war in Ukraine. Russia now occupies a quarter of that country. They lost because the sanctions didn't work. And it didn't work because you didn't understand what this new configuration of the world economy is. So your sanctions aren't going to work. They're not going to work for five minutes. They don't even have to sneak around. They got these two

monster countries. China and the bricks is 55, I believe, percent of the world's people. United States has 4 and a half% of the world's people. You can't overcome that. That's just light, you know, that's light and day or whatever. It's just you got to face this. You can't pretend you are not in the 1960s and 70s. You're just not. But we live in a country of uh, as my psychotherapist wife says, denial. And what we got is a country and a and a leadership that is committed deep down to denial. It's like watching the Europeans

now. They couldn't defeat the Russians with the Americans backing them up. The Americans have now pulled out and they're babbling to one another how they're going to do it. That's a joke. Not even a good one. That's a joke. That's so pathetic. It's painful. It's embarrassing to watch you talk. Kier Starmer, a relatively new prime minister in England, is wanting to send troops to Ukraine. You want to go down in history with as the shortest prime minister ever. You do that, you idiot. What? What? What is it? Yeah, these are not stupid people. I don't

mean idiot in that way. It's just this is an idiotic. It's like the Hail Mary pass. We can do better than that. We are not in the last two seconds. We are not Don't do that. Don't do There's no need for this. But nobody asked that question. Everybody's enthralled with going to hit him with a tariff and I'm going to raise a tariff. And he yesterday he did yet another unbelievably crazy thing. You know about Tik Tok? you know, Tik Tok is Chinese and Mr. Trump has said he won't tolerate them being Chinese, which is

a topic in and of itself, but let's leave that. And the the deadline for them to stop being Chinese is the 5th of April, which is coming up. And they but they haven't cut a deal yet. the Chinese. The hope was that American company would come in and get them for a cheap price because they're under the gun. They have to sell. Chinese are very, they're used to this. They much smarter than that. So, there's no deal yet and there may not be one. And Mr. Trump begins to realize he's at the wrong end of

this because if the Chinese are smart, they'll kill tick tock. And they'll say to the 20 million Americans who use it, you know who deprived you of your Tik Tok? The orange man. Someone told him yesterday or the day before, you're going to screw yourself here, Donald. You're going to they're going to go out. They'll reset it and call it lick lock two weeks later and the and and and it'll have all the names. They'll have all they have everything they need. They'll just move them and the whole game will start all over again. Or

they'll find an intermediary, you know, some obscure Norwegian company and make them the intermediate. All of this is being done, I'm sure. All taken care. You're gonna get screwed, Donald. So yeah, four days ago, Donald goes on the T on the air and says the only thing he could say, I am I'm not going to impose the April 5th deadline. If a deal can be worked out though in the the days and weeks following, I might take the tariffs off of China. Do you understand what he's teaching everybody, even though it'll take him a long

time to learn, is that this is all a game. Real fast and loose. Yeah. And I'm playing as fast and loose as I know how. I realize, oh this is going to come back and bite me. I got to do something. So, what what can I give the Chinese to back away from doing what they're going to about to do to me? Because more important for the Chinese than Tik Tok, no matter how many billions it's worth, is destroying the political base of Mr. Trump by depriving Americans of Tik Tok and blaming him for it,

which they will be able to do. Wow. Now, he didn't think that through just like he didn't think through the how sanctions could not work in the Ukraine situation. He didn't. The only other explanation besides the chaos of all this is if there's a method in the madness. If there's some strategic objective and I have heard one I don't I don't buy it but I might be wrong and maybe it's true. I'll tell you that if you want that he is in fact the prisoner of Mr. Putin and that somehow making a mess here is

the point. If it were the objective to do that he's he's doing it. You think that I don't I don't believe that that's correct. I don't agree with that, but I've heard it and I look, it's like everything else. It's a symptom to hear it whether it's true or not. And I don't think it is. I certainly don't know that it is. Uh but that people are thinking that it's thoughtful. It's it's it's the intellectual effort to say this is so bizarre and unusual that I need to think why would this be h Don't get

caught in the weeds. Why is the totality an awful lot of Americans pick up the newspaper waiting each day for what Mr. Trump is going to say that's sort of outrageous or extreme or provocative and what what is that could be his personal style? Yeah. Okay. Even then if you believe that why are we having that now? We haven't had that for a long time if ever. But what what what is this? So I'm sure people will come up with more and less far-fetched because the situation is far-fetched. I don't blame people for coming up

with these sorts of speculations because you it is provocative. You want to understand it. I want to I wish I had an expert. If you say to me why is this whole thing happen? Well, I tell you my story of a declining empire. I think that does a good bit of putting these things together into a coherent argument. So, I use it makes sense to me. I don't do the Putin story. That's American, you know, demonization of your enemies and all of that. I mean, it's not that I like Mr. Putin. Has nothing to do

with that. But I'm looking for explanations. uh when people offer one, I listen. One of the amazing things though that comes out of these interviews is the tangents are often gems and I can't resist one other one before we get back to the other stuff and it's that and and I think it's actually could be relevant to the discussion at hand and we've never spoken about Hitler on the show and I think it would be interesting to hear uh given the current environment maybe in the background if there is a a simple story because obviously

it's a complicated thing, but how it was that Hitler came to power in Germany. Yeah, I'll be glad to give you a thumbnail overview of it, but let me start by telling you I think it is immediately applicable to the United States. Um, and the way I tell you the story, I think you'll see how that works. If not, I'll make it explicit. We can do both. Yes. The German, Think of it this way. In the 19th century, the dominant player in the global economy was Britain. It is the century of the British Empire of

of whom it was said the sun never sets on the British Empire because wherever the sun is going down there's Britain and wherever it's coming up there's another part of Britain. Right? India was the great gem. But British Empire included parts of Latin America, large parts of Africa, large parts of Asia and so forth. Um, not to speak of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and all the rest of it, but there were two upandcoming challengers to the British Empire across the 19th century. One was the United States, the ex colony of Britain and the other

was Germany. These two countries were capitalists understood that Britain was the the what to beat if you're going to make it. I don't think either of them aspired to replace the British Empire, but the thought crossed their mind and it was a delicious thought. Uh you have United States, the Monroe Doctrine. We're going to take over LA. We Latin America is ours. Wow. you know, colonial dreams, you know, like taking Greenland, say, or Panama or making Canada the 51st state, that sort of thing. And Germany had a notion of it really being a a challenger

to Britain. The German word reich that's reich in German is empire in English roughly Hitler was going to create the third reich that's what he called his project they had had two earlier rice you know the empire the br the Germans had for example large chunks of Africa that they had colonized in the south in the east in the west. They had had a piece of of China. They had colonies in in Asia and so forth. So they were trying to to develop in Germany. They were mostly successful as they were in the United States.

They not only grew dramatically, but Germany wasn't really a country until the second half of the 19th century. Before that, it was broken up into little principalities. So, the United States had a bit of an edge because it was one country from Atlantic to Pacific pretty much by the n middle of the 19th century. The big thing that hampered the United States was a civil war. The big thing that hampered the Germans was the unification which is lots of little wars with France, with Denmark and the different pulling together under a charismatic leader Bismar by

name in Germany. But with the end of the civil war, the 1860s and by around roughly that time, a little later in in Europe, you had these two powers had come together and were independent, had solved their divi divisions north south with the United States, the defeat of the south, and in the case of Germany, the defeat of those who opposed German unification, chief of which were the French. and they were defeated in 1870. They were defeated and I believe you and I have discussed it. The defeat by the Germans of the French opened a

moment for the left to have an opportunity. That's the Paris Commune of 1871. Okay. In Germany, the experience here was spectacular. Instead of feeling to be way below the British, the British were rich first. The British had the biggest empire. The British were the center of power. You know, the world used the pound sterling as its currency. All of that. Germany always had an inferiority complex. So they went to work to develop quickly. So from 1860 to the end of the century 1900 German economic development is spectacular outgrowing the British Empire uh despite the empire

being still intact but they were really ch as the United States had its boost of development after 1860 Billy the railroads and everything else in the west. A whole middle class develops in Germany around the success of their capitalism. A working class for sure, but a real bourgeoisi in the way of remember Germany is feudal much longer than Britain or France is. Feudalism stays strong in Eastern Europe relative to Western as it dies. Long story short, and here's the point. By 1914, Germany is a real successful powerhouse, an exploding economic success, people, middle class people

living extraordinarily uh prosperous lives. If you ever want to understand it, the novels of Tomas man, Mannn, Woodenbrooks and others capture that better than any sociology can. And the working class, which was the first working class to develop a real socialist movement on a mass scale, not so surprising, Marx was German, so they picked up on him. uh very successful, powerful enough that Bismar made deals with the social had to. So you had a an organized confident working class who attributed their success not so much to the success of capitalism but to the success of

the socialist party in getting a piece of that activity for the working class. very confident, very proud and quite rich, saving money, very for the Germans, very frugal, very frugal. So they they remembered the hard times before you, you know, it was clearer for them. And so they think the world is their oyster. They are the they have an empire. It it's productive for them. It brings them wealth and and then they have an absolutely crushing experience. All of this is under an emperor. In German, the word is Kaiser like Zar or something. Kaiser Vilhelm

was the one in power at the time. And he leads them into World War I. They're going to win that battle like they've been winning everything else. They lose. World War I horrific, the most devastating, destroying factories, railroads, everything, killing immense numbers of people in trench warfare to terribly destructive. But most important and cataclysmic for them, they lose. And now very quickly, a one, two, three punch. After the war, the Versail treaty, which ends World War I, imposes reparations on Germany. The winners are going to make the loser pay for the war. And so Germany

is required to devote huge portion of its resources not to build up Germany after the terrible war but to pay back the French and the British. And the French and the British insist on being paid. Why? Because to fight World War I, they had borrowed from the United States. That's why the United States becomes the world power right there. It funded the world war that crushed its enemies or its potential competitors. And consequently, the United States becomes the power because no war was fought here. No World War I. No destruction. No destruction. Relatively smaller number

of people involved. World War II wasn't fought here either, except for Pearl Harbor. So you have it you have it again. But before we get to that here now comes the thing. So the Germans are after World War I utterly impoverished. If you want to get an idea of a society destroyed by this experience, then the thing you want to do is is look at the lit the painting, look at the literature, look at the the well Two names I'll give. George Gross. If you're at all familiar with the paintings of George Gross, that's painting

Germany in the 20s after the loss of World War I. The country is flooded with wounded soldiers. Is this degenerate art? Yeah. And the greatest theater producer probably in the whole century, Berto Bre, writing in Berlin in the aftermath of this horrible, horrible war. Okay, they can't recover because they're funding the British and the French who are using the money to repay the Americans. It's destroying what's left of Germany. The shock of the war, then the shock of losing the war, now the shock of being unable to recover. Where does it lead? It culminates in

n the war is over in 1918. In 1923, five years later, Germany experiences the worst inflation in modern human history. In a matter of eight months, the currency goes from four or five Deutsch mark, that's the name of their currency, to a dollar to five billion turn Deutsch mark. That's crazy. My parents lived through that. My mother told me stories in which her parents, she lived in Berlin, her father would run home from his job at noon, grab a sandwich prepared by my grandmother, my mother's mother, because he would give her a little bag full

of banknotes of money, and then run back to his job. She would run to the market to spend the money because if she waited till the evening, the money wouldn't be worth anything anymore. Yeah. And we think we've got it bad now. And it's bad now. Well, now here comes the punchline. The Germans were frugal. For the previous 50 years of their spectacular growth and prosperity, they had saved up money. With the money saved by two generations over 50 years, they could now purchase a quarter pound of butter. They were wiped out. They couldn't handle

it. 5 years later, in 1929, the stock market crashed and we entered the Great Depression. That means you hammered the German working class with a war, a loss of the war, the worst inflation ever, and the worst depression in capitalism's history. All in a 12 or 13-year period. It was too much. And they went crazy. And the proof of it is they turned to a non-German, nonblue, blonde, non tall person from Austria and said, "You will save us, Adolf Hitler." When does he take power? January of 1933. Right after the he collects the catastrophe in

the last two elections of 1932 before he takes office the country split right down the middle. Half went to the old German middleof the road political parties and the other half split between the socialist party and the communist party and the business community held a meeting of which there are records which I used in my writing. What are we going to do? Both sides denounced capitalism on the grounds it had brought war. It had been responsible for the reparations. Yeah. That's why Hitler had to call his fascist party socialist. It's the national socialist party. He

had to tap into anti- capitalism otherwise he wouldn't have got to first base. Nazi n a zi that's the first four letters of the German word nazional which simply means national it's the national socialist party so it's Nazi party against the socialists and communists and that those were fights in the streets they were fights at the ballot box the business community realized the country is dissolving into two wings we have to make a choice and they went with Hitler and they turned to Hindenburg the president of Germany at the time and told him you have

to invite Hitler to form a government. That's what they did. That's how it happened. Why is it similar? You have a Now here's the parallel. For the last 30 to 40 years in this country, there's been an income and wealth redistribution. Anybody who studies that leftwinger, right-winger, except for a few in the right, understand this. You can take a look at the genie coefficient. You can take a look at the, you know, all this status from the IRS and all the rest. We have moved wealth from the bottom and the middle in this country to

the top. That's why even our candidates talk about uh the middle class is dying. The middle class is gone. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. The middle has fallen out. Number one. Number two, you subjected them after uh uh uh this kind of a thing to a pandemic which really shook them up, an inflation which shook them up, still shakes them up, and a serious diminution in your position in the world. You have over the last 30 to 40 years, you lost the war in Vietnam, you lost the war in Afghanistan, you lost the war in Iraq,

and you are losing the war in Ukraine. Uh, too many things are happening and the working class is hit in too many ways. It's upset. It's angry. It doesn't see a way out. That's a description of the German working class. That's why it went with Hitler. Enough, not all of it by a long shot, but enough of it to give him the chance to get rid of all of his enemies and reshape Germany. That ought to strike a chord. This morning's headline, this morning, 28th March, 2025. The headline when I opened my news was that

President Trump has appointed Vice President Vance to remove from the Smithsonian Institute the anti-american improper ideology. What the hell is that? What is that? You know what the first thing comes to my mind? In the 1950s here in America, we had something called the unamerican activities committee in the House of Representatives that hounded people out of their jobs and their positions because they held views that a collection of congressmen, many from the south, held to be unamerican. Now, we've come to regret that. That's McCarthyism and but that's what they did. By the way, among the

people who left the United States because they wereounded by this committee for their ideas were Bertold Bre, Charlie Chaplan. I could go on. That's one of the reasons we came, I thought, to understand what an aberarent horrible period this was. We understood nothing. We're just doing it again. Will the outcome be the same? I don't know. Maybe they'll win this time. Maybe we won't have what happened in the 50s. We'll have what happened in Germany in the 30s. But the story in Germany of a working class that was shocked, the American working class was told

that America was the king of the hill, which coming out of World War II, we were. And that this was just it was the way it was. American exceptionalism, the uniqueness, God loves us, whatever the form in which you celebrated it. But nobody here was prepared that it would come to an end that for the first time in a century, we actually have an economic competitor called China. We never had that. Russia, I think I told you this before, Russia was never Soviet Union was not an economic compar uh competitor. It was way too poor,

way too small. The America, even today, the American GDP is 28 29 trillion. Russian GDP3 trillion. I mean, this is David and Goliath. But David minus the slingshot. You know what? They have military. They have nuclear weapon. I shouldn't say minus the slingshot. Here's a slingshot. But it's still David with a slingshot. Uh, China's China's 18 or 19 trillion. That's a serious competitor. The two together, now you're talking and they understand it. And so do the folks here, but not the American people. They must be kept innocent of all of this, except when they leak

their materials to the Atlantic magazine. One particular possible symptom I'd be curious to hear about is Elon Musk and Doge and how you see that fitting into the state of the American empire. There's nothing new original extraordinary about all of that with one exception. The choice of a person who is not given a top government job to do this to have this sort of friend I don't know how to describe what you would call him. I know it's called the department of government efficiency but I don't believe there is such a they made that up.

there is no there was no existing and I don't even think they've gone through some bureaucratic you know there is a way to add a person to the cabinet you could have you know we haven't always had um uh an EPA we haven't always had a whole bunch of agencies over time if something is needed you could do that you could have developed a department of government efficiency long ago if you wanted that but my understanding it doesn't exist. It's just a madeup thing. So that is unusual that a person is who's a friend is

given such an important position and then it's also unusual that that friend is the largest contributor of money to a political operation I believe in American history. If I have understood correctly, it's somewhere around $300 million one way or another through one channel or another that he contributed to Mr. Trump's effort this last time. Oh wow. Huge amounts of money. And it's also a person who is contributing. I know right now that on Tuesday is an election in Wisconsin for they elect their Supreme Court judges. So there's an election for a Supreme Court judge. And

if I understand the political, it's a it's a 50/50 split on the Supreme Court so that this election will kind of tilt the balance which way that court goes. and the left and right. You know, Wisconsin is a state of of importance because it's it's not either in one camp or the other. It's half half. He is giving money, I believe, $100 to every voter who signs a petition that he has and he has has circulating Now, obviously, the idea is if I can get this person to sign the petition for $100, I'm going to

let them know I want their vote. You can't literally give people money for a vote. Believe that's a crime and most states can't do that. Of course, that's a crime because we used to do that in this country and then there was an outrage and it stopped. So he's skirting that law to to do this. A person who gives money to buy voters whether it was in the presidential election or in Wisconsin or in who knows how many other I haven't done the work and I'm not aware of anybody who's asked the question uh to

whom else has he given money. We do know that he went to Germany and spoke there before their last election about how the German people should vote for the um the right extreme right-wing party. I don't know if you're familiar with that. The party is called the alternativ. Um it got about 20 something% of the vote. Did very well in the last election. He visited Germany and said this is the only party that can save Germany. An extraordinary act, in case your audience is not aware, there are four or five other parties in Germany. It's

a multi-party society. All the other parties, all five of them have vowed never to work with, never to have a coalition with that alternative because they are thought of as the inheritors of the Nazi history. M the leading advisor to the president of the United States officially goes and supports the extreme. You want to know why the Germans are upset with the United States before you get to the uh tax tariff on BMWs and Mercedes which is coming and and that's terrible for the Germans. Their their exports of cars United States very important for the

German economy. So they you can bet they are scrambling now really. But even before that, this kind of interference in their internal politics, holy macro. And I don't know if he gave money. I don't know if it's known and I don't know how much it might be, but given what he's done everywhere else, I wouldn't be surprised. And since his his wealth is listed, last I saw at around $400 billion, giving 10, 20, or 100 or 200 or $300 million is immaterial to him. It's it's like you're giving me a quarter for my next political

race. Thank you very much. But you know it's a quarter. That's unique that you that a big a huge money donor becomes a kind of an adjunct to the president without being part of the administration the way others are. So for example, he doesn't have to go before the Senate to be approved. They get to have him there. It might have been brought out by Senate research, which they're supposed to do, what he has done in his life, and that might have made it much more difficult for Mr. Trump to give him the power he

has. You know, he comes from South Africa. Ooh, that might be an issue. What did he do there given the horrors of that society and its history? Anyway, all of that was avoided by this maneuver. Okay, that's interesting. That's unusual. Other than that, everything is the same. And let me go through a couple with you. Every employer that I've ever studied or every employer that I've ever worked for has on occasion fired people. Sometimes a few, sometimes a lot. And one of the standard behaviors of employers when they fire you is not to tell you

the truth. And there are many reasons for that. It's not about honesty in the normal sense of it. It's because give you an example. If I were to tell my employ if I were an employer and I needed to fire people and say the reason is my business is not doing so well. I can't sell as many widgets and so I can't afford to hire people if I can't sell what they help me produce. I fire them. But if I tell them look and they ask me at the moment I'm saying don't come back Monday.

They say to me why is my work no good? I could say that but that's hurtful and that's not true. Nothing to do with their work. It's cuz I can't sell the output. Nothing to do with you. I can't tell them that because that's going to make everyone I didn't fire frightened. They're and when they're frightened, you know what they're going to do? Look for another job. And if a good one comes along, they're not wait for me to fire them if they find a good job. Better to go where I know I can get

a job than to wait for the axe to fall. Right? So, I I don't want that. I don't want anxiety among my workers. I don't want to lose them before it's when I have to. I want to be able to fire you. I don't want you to make that decision cuz that's a burden on me. So all employers either themselves if they're have a brain or they hire a consultant to give them the line of to tell a worker who's fired and you choose carefully what to say so that other people aren't provoked into leaving.

Number one. Number two, if you're a public-f facing enterprise, in other words, you deal with the larger public, then you got to worry about how they hear the news, right? I don't want to buy from a loser. So, you got to be care. You got to be probably pay you to do a little extra advertising to make yourself look good so that Mi music drowns out the fin. Long story short, one of the things you say is that you are only working to remove the inefficiency that dogs your business and that as soon as these

people are fired, the efficiency problem will be solved. Which means if you didn't lose your job, don't worry. Whatever it is made us do it is done. You're the good. You're the lucky one. You're saved. The other ones are. Now, for this to work, there had there has to be no counterveailing evidence. But in Mr. Musk's case, partly because I don't think they're very good at what they do, they didn't take care of that. Here again is that element of flying by the seat of your pants, the element of chaos, the element of fast and

loose. Let me give you some examples. The efficiency story is only of course about federal employees because who's being fired are federal employees. Now, let's take a look at that together, right? I'm an economist. I'm supposed to know these things. So, I did a little research and here's what I found. There are about 2 and a half million civilian employees of the federal government. Another two and a half million are the military, but I'm going to put them aside. Civilian employees, you know, the people who staff all the agencies, the IRS, the EPA, the aid,

all those that we've been reading about, two and a half million. I then went back to 1960s and I said, "What was the the number of federal employees in 1960s?" Answer about two and a half million. Whoa. Wait a minute then. In the 1960s, we had 2 and a2 million civilian employees, give or take. And in 2025, we had 2 and a2 million. The population in the United States has grown 150 million people between the 60s and now. I am surprised to hear this. Yeah. Which means under the normal way efficiency is used in economics,

the same number of federal employees that serviced 150 million fewer people in the 1960s is now servicing them. That's an incredible increase in efficiency. You What do you do? You can't justify this on grounds of efficiency. It's ridiculous. But it gets better. I then took the next step. How many people work for state governments? All 50 of them. 5 million civilian employees. And now the third level of government in the United States, local cities, towns, 15 million. So if you want to bring efficiency to government work, would you focus on the federal 2 and a.5

million or the state and local 20 million? You focus on the federal because he can he can't do it to the state people. They're employed by the governor and the state and ditto for the local. So he's only going after them because he can. Not because it's efficient. It isn't efficient. First of all, they are efficient. And second of all, efficiency would require you to do something about state and local government about which they are doing exactly nothing, not even trying. Partly because they would get a push back first of all from every democratically governed

city and state which would mean the vast majority of cities are governed by Democrats not by Republican. He can't. And he would run political. That's all this is. It's a show. I look and look at the imagery. This is the best part for me because it's a level of incompetence that I I gasp at unless I'm missing something. You know, I made mistakes, too. On the stage covered by a million cameras is a prancing Elon Musk gripping a chainsaw. I don't know if you caught that picture all over the country. He was on I don't

know what the occasion was, but he's up on a platform, a speaker platform in his signature t-shirt and baseball cap holding a chainsaw. And the point was, I'm taking a chainsaw to the waist in the federal workforce. So, Americans saw the richest man on earth taking a chainsaw to rip the jobs away from tens of thousands of working people. I I would if a student portrayed such a story in a class on public relations, I'd say, "I'm not just going to give you an F. I'm throwing you out of the class." Cuz that level of

misunderstanding of what this is about is beyond repair. I mean that that could occur to you and that you would do it without nobody or yourself introducing the question maybe that's not the image you want. That image will haunt the Republicans. If I were a Democratic advisor, which I have been in my life, I would say just take this. The billionaire is firing the workers. But what also to fire 10,000 at a time which he's doing in the IRS he did that in aid he did that not efficiency if you're going to make efficiency means

you have to study the situation look really carefully at what everybody is doing and then figure out better ways of do wholesale no efficiency expert would tell you to do that that that's dumb that that that that's that's cha The mere chaos recovery will undo the efficiency you get. Now let's suppose you get 10% more efficiency. You're going to get 10% loss from the upset of all the workers who are not and then even crazier they undo it. They didn't take the they didn't take the legal steps to enable them to do it. So it

turns out they violated half a dozen laws. So the people who get fired go into court, get a lawyer, uh, and that's now running through 57 different courts and some of these judges are siding with the workers, which is likely going to happen, going to that's going to hold it all up, which means you've alienated that worker. You've made that worker look for another job. Meanwhile, you may have to give that worker his job back and his salary back and possibly pay a pedal. Who does things like that? What? This is for show. It's like

having ICE pick up, you know, a Turkish professor who teaches oceanography at Dipsy Doodle University and ship her out of here. What do you What What for? Well, it scares people. It is dem it is demonstrable. It is dramatic. It gets you on the news. Otherwise, we're back to where we were before. What is going on here? Well, you know, when there's a catastrophe at your house and everybody's fleeing, you don't behave the normal way you do. You say things, you throw things, you grab hold of things in a way you wouldn't normally do. And

we understand why because you're a bit of a panic here and you're desperate to get out. That for me is another symptom of a declining empire as important in its way as losing the war in Afghanistan or turning on your earthw enemies. You know, there's a if you learn how to swim or if you're instructed in how to be a swimming lifeguard, you're told that one of the things you have to be careful about is that a a a person drowning or or losing control in the water, if you go to help them, they will

grab on to you and actually pull you down with them. not intending you harm, but they are desperate because their lungs are filling up with water. So, you've got to approach them very carefully or else it'll be two people drowning, not just the other person. That's that's the sense I want to convey here that this we are seeing people behave. Canada is an ally has always been Mexico basically also subordinate allies. Why would you turn on them? Why would you why would and why would you insult call the president of their the prime minister of

their country governor as if he were the head of a state? Say such a thing. Why are you telling the Greenland, the people of Denmark, I'm gonna take I'm gonna take it. I want it. I'm gonna take it. What would you do? What? What is that? That's the behavior of a brownie, a drowning person who grabs hold of your tree uh swimming trunks because it's well because just trying to save him. They don't mean you don't mean to pull off your pants. It's just the way it works. That's a little bit of what I'm think.

And I can tell you that more and more of the world is looking at the United States now. And I've not seen this before in my lifetime. You, you know, born in Ohio, lived in worked here all my life. Uh, the United States is a rogue country. The United States is the country to which the rest of the world looks, what the hell is going on there? You know how the United States tried to pay uh to portray the head of North Korea? You know, a country nobody knows anything about, right? He's crazy. He's a

little fat man and he's bizarre. That's how the world is looking at Mr. Trump and the United States. In that moment, Donald Trump says, "I'm going to take back the Panama Canal. I'm going to take Greenland away from Denmark. I'm going to take Canada away from the Canadian. What do you What? Here's a wonderful Hegelian irony coming out of World War II. Uh a thinker of that time who was very important named George Kennan. uh I believe he's credited with the phrase that American foreign policy has now to be focused on and now came the

key word containment and the containment had to do with the Soviet Union. You had to contain this communism becau because after World War II now there was that cordon of countries of Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact, Poland in the north to Bulgaria in the south, a buffer zone of sorts before you got to Russia proper. So it had spread from because those were all communist things and so we had to contain that's why there's the ring of bases. If you ever look at American foreign military bases they're literally a ring around Russia. Russia is the

largest country by geog geography in the world. And so, you know, it's quite a ring you have to put. Um, we were going to contain Russia and the policy was to line everybody else into this containment. NATO was conceived as a mechanism of containment. It was the way the United States would link and mobilize Europe or at least Western Europe to contain Russia. The irony is the project to contain has become its opposite. It's we who are becoming isolated. We who are becoming contained not by a ring of bases although that may come at this

point but by a ring of alliances and coalitions for which the United States is the enemy. recent votes in the United Nations. If you take a look, it's more and more isolated. It's United States, Israel, and the Tobago Islands. You know that it's more or less how it goes, right? Uh we're alone. We're alone. Coalition of the willing. It's a joke. There was no coalition on paper. Yes. So it was 200,000 American troops in Southeast Asia and 11 French paratroopers, you know, and 12 British. It's silly, but the silliness now is becoming almost perverse. The

Europeans feel they've been turned on, and they are. The United States is alone. It's even turned on its neighbors, the heads of Mexico, Shine Bomb and the head of uh uh Canada, the the banker Carney or whatever his name is. They're making incredible statements. The world has changed. Our friendship is over. Our relations to Okay, yes, it's just words at this point, but we've not seen those words. Not in 75 years. Everything, you know, words are not zero. It's not that they don't mean anything. They're very powerful institutions. If you ever study Freud and psychology,

you know, the words you use are very powerful shapers of you as well as everybody around you. So, I would argue United States is becoming more and more isolated. And I think that the Elon Musk phenomena makes it worry. He this is an easy person to dislike, an easy person to feel alien from. And you know, look at what's happening to his automobiles. And he too admits it. You know, he's paying now a spectacular price for what he's doing. There's a demonstration tomorrow in in in the headquarters of Tesla here in New York City. And

I expect there'll be hundreds if not thousands of people there against at the Tesla against Mr. Musk as a representation of what's going on. And certainly people are not buying his cars. His his dealerships announced that the Chinese announced I don't know if you're aware two days ago the Chinese announced that the bestselling electric cars in China are no longer Teslas. their own company BYD which stands if I'm if I'm correctly informed BYD is the name of the corporation stands for build your dream English they are the the world's biggest producer now of u electric

cars and trucks and they're the biggest seller in China they surpassed Tesla by a lot first year that they did that Tesla is not selling in Europe. It's a catastrophe for him in Europe. He's associated with Mr. Trump. And that's the worst advertising imaginable in the world right now. And you know that too is a symptom. The joke about the end of the Roman Empire is there a the emperor Nero on a balcony playing a violin which he was good at. He's not troubled by Rome, it was said, is Bernie. He's fiddly. Not a bad

image. Mr. Trump is fiddly. Rome is burning. You can't, you know, after a while get too hot, the strings will pop and your violin won't sound so good. It's a serious, you know, I'm trying to have a little humor in it, but it is in fact a very serious situation. And there is not there is not the admission, there's not the recognition. I will tell you that more and more people are asking me to talk because they don't agree with me, but they kind of feel as though they ought to hear it. You're a symptom

of the decline of the American Empire. Absolutely. I'd have to lick myself, list myself among them. It's not so much me, although maybe that's true, too. What I was about to say is interest in what I have to say is a symptom. It's not that I've been saying things that are all that different from what I said 10 years ago or 20 years ago, but now the number of people I mean, Wow, I can't quite get over it. Doing a lot of work in India right now because of the interest, you know, podcasters and radio

and TV. India's in a big country, bigger than China, by the way. It just changed a little bit. They just went ahead of them population by a little. But India is a, you know, absolutely important country. Then I'm I'm overwhelmed. by how well what I say is known there, how many different outlets are approaching me, it's flattering. I don't deny it for a minute. [Music] Um but I think there's a sense of something very big shifting in the world all over the at all levels of society different stories to account for it different ways of

interpreting it understood but it's still important that it's happening in different ways but it's all happening at the same time and that somehow the relationship between the United States and its leaders and everything else in the world is a key part of almost every story. I'm taken by this image of the drowning child pulling down somebody's uh trunks and or shirt. I didn't mean to pick up the trunk. Trunks makes it funnier though. But one of your thesis ideas is that capitalism is dying and it's being replaced by something else witness China. And I wonder

then if you see Elon Musk and by extension the increased role of corporations or private wealth in government as symptomatic or emblematic or representative of this dying capitalism's last gasp at trying to double down. Do you see that at all? I I would put it a little bit differently and let me use you you notice I I use history a lot. I studied history. It's it's what comes to my mind for because of who I am. If you study the history of feudalism, the system dominant in the western world before capitalism arrives right thousand years

500 AD roughly collapse alone uh renaissance 1500600 arrival of capitalism roughly. Then in those thousand years of feudalism you see a remarkable evolution. Feudalism starts as a highly decentralized. It's the opposite of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was a concentrated empire with a headquarters in Rome. Blah blah blah blah blah. Feudalism is dispersed, not hierarchical. Lots of little lords and surfs who are their own little entities. You know, modern countries like France, Germany, Italy come much later. They had to be created. They weren't there before. Rome Empire falls apart. It breaks into many, many

little pieces. Yet, by the end of feudalism, by the 15th 16th century, what you have are something called absolute monarchies. the opposite of early feudalism. Highly concentrated state dominated feudal societies. They even had to take one of the feudal lords who used to be many and make them get like competition. They be they fought each other. They absorbed each other and eventually one becomes the number one feudal lord who takes the name king. That's what kings are. the biggest, bestest, feudal lord. You know, the absolute monarchies, they're the ones that created the Versailles gardens. If

you ever visited Paris, you go to the tourist thing outside of the city in Versailles, spectacular palaces, gardens. These were very rich, highly organized, highly con the they produced the great painters, the great chataus that you visit to this day. Why am I telling you this? I'll quote Markx. Markx wrote, "No system disappears before all the possible forms of it have been tried and utilized." as far as they could be. Then we get the next system. Feudalism went through a a decentralized through several steps to a highly centralized. It went from a purely agricultural to

a lots of cities in medieval Europe. It handled urbanization. It went from no trade, everything self-sufficient to lots of trade. Right? Capitalism likewise. It goes from the small capitalist with a dozen workers to the big modern corporation. From a national cor from a local corporation to a national corporation to a multinational corporation to a global corporate. Why am I telling you this? Here's another way capitalism evolved. It started as a thoroughly private enterprise undertaking. Coming out of feudalism, there were a few of these people who set up little businesses, but they had no relationship to

the government. That was all feudalism. That was the king. That he didn't care about them. They were the opposite. If anything, he went and taxed them. They didn't like it. And so they fought back and they got little privileges of not being taxed, of not being regulated, little walled towns where they could be free. Why am I telling you this? Because over time, as they grew, they stopped being angry about the state and realized, maybe we'd be better off trying to control this state. Don't get rid of it. Control it. So it works for us,

not for the feudals, which is where the state comes from, and not for the working class. We don't want that. But for us, we want the government for the employer. And so they needed to develop the government to give it the capacity to do that. On the one hand, for example, the capacity that if the workers revolt, remember workers are many, employers are few. US census right now classifies 3% of the American people as employers. The other 97% are not. Okay, that's a problem for employers because they're a small minority. They need to control the

government to make sure the majority doesn't crush them. So now they need a strong government with troops and police and army and and a judicial system. So the worker who wants to rebel gets punished and stuck in a jail or fined or then they need also help because other capitalists in other countries I them with jealousy. So we need a navy and we need slowly the government has to be built up. You don't trust it. You don't like it but you have to do it. In that scenario, what China is is not what you said.

China is a recognition, as we talked a little bit before, that capitalism needs to go through all the phases it can to survive. It adjusted the private quality of its beginnings by allowing the state to take a bigger and bigger role. It didn't do it in a straight line. The great crash of 1929 brought the government in massively to save capitalism. But in the aftermath of World War II, they pushed the government back out. That's what we you and I have lived our lives in a period when they pushed the government out. In a way,

Mr. Trump is the end of that period. When we push the he bring the government back in. But here's the crucial thing for China. We've had the government minimal early capitalism. We've had the government brought in Canes, the depression, and then this thing called Scandinavian socialism, which which seemed to mean a regulatory government, a taxing government, lots of social services produced by the government, but basically private capitalism for the bulk of the goods and services in the society. So that's another form. Then we have the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union called itself socialist like

the Scandinavians do, but they meant something very different. They meant the government takes over and runs the enterprise. And they said that was socialism. But I would argue, as you've heard me, I think before that it isn't. It wasn't socialism. I don't dispute. You can call it whatever you want. But they never changed the employer employee structure of enterprises. Small group of people, the owner, the director, the board of directors, whatever you want to call it, overseeing and ordering about a mass of workers who are employees. They have very little power. They have all the

power. These people fire those, not the other way around. These people direct those, not the other way around. These people produce a surplus that they get, not the other way around. In other words, there's a highly structured arrangement for me. That's capitalism. And that was there when there were capitalists were small and had a few workers and it's there with a major corporation today. It's there whether the private people do it or whether the government does it. So for me, we still working out all the ways you can have capitalism if you understand it as

the employer employee relationship in production. Then China is simply the latest experiment in yet another form. It's not private capitalism where you might take the example Britain and the United States. It's not the Soviet Union, no private capital, more government does everything. The in between Scandinavian with a little government and mostly private. And now the Chinese 50/50 with a super powerful state and communist party on top. That's a wrinkle. But that wrinkle has been more productive in a shorter amount of time than any of the others. Just like the absolute monarchies were the most effective

spectacular achievements of feudalism. So I'm not surprised. I think we the the reason China is ahead is it figured out that form of capitalism which could get it out of poverty which was its number one goal. 100 years of humiliation of China. Was it because it was poor backward technologically underdeveloped like like the whole global south like all of Africa like most of Asia like most of Latin America. The name of the game for them was above all else not the struggle of capitalism and socialism. The leaders worried about that for the mass of people

how to get out of my poverty. all that that meant and begin to live life. The Chinese Communist Party understood that in part because of their differences with the Soviet Union stuff that we talked about and they understood that's that's the way we're going to try to do it with all the risks, all the possibilities of failure. We're going to do a hybrid of 50. We're gonna let the private go under our control. Meanwhile, keep our control by having half the economy right under our thumb. That's how we're going to do it. And at this

moment, the year 2025, there is no contest anymore. They're just they look at it this way. Europe had 500 years to get ready to compete with the United States. They failed. All hot technology in the world today comes from the United States or China. Europe, nothing. Nothing. Look, there's no there's no comparable Apple or Microsoft or BYD. You know, BYD, the electric Chinese, they're on the roads of Europe because they don't have a 100% tariff. We do. So 100% 100%. Mr. Trump put it up to 27 a.5% and Mr. Biden raised it to 100%. So

if you want to buy a BYD electric car, best in the world, cheapest in the world, $30,000, get a car, but what will that's what it'll cost. They'll ship you a car from China. They ship all over the world. I mean, all of that's taken care of. They're a very very big and powerful company. By the way, there's an American who has a big piece of it. Owns a big piece of BYD. His name is Warren Buffett. Smart cany guy. Yeah. Not held back by stupid leftover Cold War nonsense. Never was. Anyway, BYD can't bring

a car here because the $30,000 car, which I would buy tomorrow if if I could, I have to give a 100% tax to Uncle Sam. Another 30. So, for me, the car costs 60 grand, not 30. And that's why I don't buy any because I can buy a 40 or $50,000 electric car from GM or Ford or Tesla or somebody else. It's not as good, but I don't have there's no tariff. Anyway, the these situations mean that Mr. Musk and the United States are more and more looked at as a problem to contain. a little

bit like Soviet communism looked to Americans. And the Chinese, in my judgment, are on the cusp, as we are in the United States, although for completely different reasons given our very different situations. We're on the cusp of discovering what European feudalism discovered. that the highest achievement capitalism in China as this hybrid is also the last achievement. Now the trans the the Louise in France who built Versailles were the same family of Louisis who ended up on the guillotine with their heads chopped off. I'm of course not suggesting anything remotely like that could or would ever

happen here. pause for effect. But the point is now comes the question, what do we need to do to do better than what the Chinese have done? What's the next stage? How will people define the problems that the Chinese have and will have? Even the Chinese in the very wise about that. They understand their system has problems different from what they used to have. Thank God they're much better off than they used to be, but they have all kinds of economic and other problems. Here's my prediction. These problems will sooner or later, and I hope

it's sooner, be addressed by daring to relearn Marx's lesson. Take a look at how you organize production. The notion that you have to have a few people at the top who run the show and a mass of people underneath who do the work is your problem. You've got to get rid of that. It's a little bit like understanding that for the centuries that there was slavery, there were all kinds of people who understood those slave systems had a problem. And there were all kinds of people who understood, let's solve the problem this way. Give the

slave a better diet. Give the slave some more clothing. Put the slave in a decent house. Stop beating the slave. Don't sell the wife against the husband. Blah blah blah. And then there were people who said, "No, no, no. That's it. ain't gonna solve your problem that way. You know your problem is the master slave relationship that's got to go. That's me. I'm just doing that now. It's that relationship that has to go. It's done. That was Marx's point. Poor poor fellow back in the 19th century. I want to see 150 years ago. He tried

to get that across. Markx made mistakes. Markx is known saint and none of that. But he was very smart and he set himself the problem. How do you do better than capitalism? And he spent a lifetime trying to figure it out. And he ended up with this conclusion in my judgment. And I'm open to interpretations. Very Hegelia. The problem of capitalism is itself. It's not this or that. Don't It's not get the workers a bigger wage. Don't stop. It's like getting the slave a better diet. Stop. Of course, we are in favor of a better

diet for the slave. We We're decent people. But that's not the that's not the problem. The problem is slavery. And the problem is capitalism. The problem, you have a tiny group of people who make all the decisions. Guess guess what? They're going to take the money and be the wealthy people, the top 10%, aren't they? Everywhere all the time. And every few years, we'll have a war on the poverty, which we seem unable to overcome. Now, why might that be? H look at the taboo in our culture right up to this minute. You can look

at almost anything, but not that economic system. We will criticize our education system. We will criticize our transportation system. We will criticize we even criticize institutions like marriage uh like heterosexuality. Well, but criticize the employer employee doesn't occur to anyone. Well, you know, 20 years ago, it didn't occur to anyone to question sexism or in many parts of the country racism. There comes a time when in history it becomes possible to say, "Hey, this is outrageous. We won't tolerate this." That's going to come for capitalism. And my guess is it's a crapshoot whether it comes

in the dying capitalism of the West or the rising capitalism of the East. And I guess it's going to happen in both of them. And wherever it happens first, it'll be infectious on the other. Because the idea will be the problems we face now are finally those which will allow us to ask the question, might the solution to these problems be changing the organization of the workplace from a hierarchical top down to dare I say a democratic arrangement. in which all the people at the workplace get together, talk it out, and then have a vote.

One person, one vote. After we've looked at all the technical and other aspects after we've asked the opinions of those who have the technical information, we need to make an informed decision. I remind people all the key decisions in major corporations are made by a board of directors most of whom have no technical expertise whatsoever. They bring in the specialists who explain to them as is needed to make the decision what the technical ramifications when I explain how a democratic workplace is to be there. Uh the sweeper can make a decision like the the the

heart surgeon in a hospital. Sure, he can. Those decisions that are technically complicated, the heart surgeons have to explain what is what they know and the sweeper tells them about keeping the hallways clean. You tell what and then when everybody's had a chance to explain, then you make a decision. That's all any board of directors ever did. That's what the workers democratically will do. And don't tell me it's not workable because the same argument was used. How can uninformed voters make a decision? We need a king. We cut the king's head off. And the decisions

are not arguably any worse and in many ways better. So let's do that. Let's finally bring democracy to the workplace. It's long overdue. That's the next stage. That's what the revolution is about. Whether we'll see it this year, next year, who knows? But nobody should say of folks like us that we only have a criticism. No, we we do have a criticism. Nowadays, it's less and less necessary to justify having a criticism since everybody is feeling the need that there be some criticism because of what's going on. But we are often charged with not having

an alternative. Yes, we do. And a good one and one that comes right out of the problems today. I don't think we solve the poverty problem without the kind of change I've talked about. And my proof, look at it. We're surrounded by poverty. We have been working. We've had wars on poverty repeatedly. Repeatedly every 20 years. This problem doesn't go away. In volume one of capital, Markx writes that the capitalist system has to be understood as being as successful in reproducing poverty as it is in reproducing wealth. That's right. And boy is that a Hegelian

moment. Given that you and I in a couple of days are about to be participating in this forum about China and the United States, I think it's worth asking right now just about how you see Mao ranking among the Marxists and what his contributions were and legacy is. Oh, that's a hard one. Um well he's certainly among the important people more I don't mean to be unfair to him but more because of his role he brings sophisticated Marxism to China. I mean, you don't have to say anything else. That makes you a world historical figure

of the greatest. I mean, it's stupifyingly important what what he did. [Music] Um, number one. Number two, his political decision has shaped the world in a way not like GR Grochi's this corpus of work on analyzing culture. You know, Mao didn't do anything like that. U not that I'm aware of. But Mao said to the mar said to the marxian tradition of which he had become a part that your focus on the factory on industry as the crucial place to organize is a mistake. It took unbelievable courage. I said I'm now you know as if

I were Mau. It is a mistake not to understand that the rural agricultural peasant of the world can be an equivalently revolutionary force. In Western Europe where Marxism is born, the most reactionary part of the society were the rural, uneducated, often illiterate, religiously uh dragged down. And so the chances to organize revolution there were hopeless. and revolutionaries who were themselves typically urban, relatively educated, relatively they went to work on the workers that were close to them that they understood from which they themselves came the urban industrial and you had this split. Mao is absolutely staggeringly

important because he brings the notion of Marxism and Marxist revolutionary anti- capitalist mentality to rural areas who hadn't have didn't have any capital for them. They were just beginning to deal with capitalism and they already had this enormous push against it. That which makes the evolution of the of places like India and China radically different from the west where the split of agriculture and industry I mean Mr. Trump's base is rural is suburban is not you know the big cities of this country are where Mr. Trump has got a lot of problems, right? That that's

our culture. That's not the way it is in the east. And Mao is as as much responsible for that as anybody, probably more so. So that innovation opened up Marxism to become revolutionary for what is the majority of the working class of this world which is rural was rural still is rural and agricultural and so now you know you India has four communist parties. China is ruled by a communist. Vietnam is ruled that that was that Mao breaks all that open and makes that uh a force in the world. And if I had time, I

would make you the argument that what that was what that achieved is the foundation for the Chinese economic development post World War II. And that means that Mao is responsible in a major way for the ability of China to be a superpower challenging the United States right now. If you deal with Mao in this country, they have no idea who you're I mean the the lack of an understanding of just a simple story I just told you in this country is stupify. It's like I don't know how to make an equivalent. It's like if that

fellow over there who's working with us wanted to light a cigarette but didn't have didn't know how to do it and I said here here's a lighter he would be stunned a look at that a thing with the fire. Whoa. And you feel for him. Oh well my god you you're out of touch. We've had these lighters over 50 years there. No, Mao is a bad person in China. End of conversation. And I I'm talking about educated people like those at Harvard and Yale. My Chinese teacher who's in China told me that they all really

look up to him. Yeah. For God's sake. Yes. doesn't mean you can't disagree with this or that or this policy or his capacity of swimming up the Yangy River and all the other funny stuff about him. He had that. He had that. They all do. Uh but if the man is too Jesus Christ, what what do you accomplish? I would say this to you that the the pamphlets he wrote, you know, the history, the long march when they're driven out of the south, driven out of Shanghai, um the early days of the Chinese Communist Party

were in the cities as was Marxism focused and Mao was a young you know, middle level income family kid and he's organizing in Shanghai in the south of China and the urban with a focus on the industrial and the the government of China at the time, a nationalist government under the heading of a man who became famous later, Chang Kaishek or the leader um hates the communists. He is the expression of the emerging Chinese capitalist class, the entrepreneurs. Remember, China in the early 20th century is what we're talking about. This is 19 20 in around

here 25 um is just coming out from being a semicolon. It was never a colony in the sense that Britain owned China the way Britain owned India. That that never happened. But along the coast of China, the cities that were interesting ports were snatched by European countries. So you you can think of it as China had portions of itself taken over. Hong Kong by the British. Uh there were Portuguese, there were Spanish, French, they were horrible. And the the Europeans got together and and defeated the old Chinese government in something called the Boxer Rebellion right

at the beginning of the 20th century. So China was, as they now say, going through its hundred years of humiliation. That's how it's called in China. Um and here were some communists who were upset about it. They probably I don't remember the detail but certainly from a good number of them they had become they had left China to become students in Western Europe. They didn't come to United States in those days. If you were a young aspiring middlecl classy kid in China in the 20s, you went to Germany, France, probably that's maybe England, I don't

know. I only know I know the ones about Germany because one of them became a student in Berlin and took my mother out on dates. Oh, those who I know and and and asked her to marry him which he did not do but she thought about it. She married my father who was not that guy for which we are all thankful. Yes. I hope so. Um years later, my mother went to China to visit and let it be known to somebody. She she didn't even remember who cuz well she had to get a visa and

crap like that that she knew Juan Pinan but was his name. He had by that time become a very high official in Ma's government. when her plane when the plane arrives a black limousine a mile long comes out onto the runway and as she come down the stairs they move her to the side the rest of the passengers go in she goes into the limousine and there he is welcoming her ch big that's why I know all this um Chanka murders a whole bunch of them sends the troops groups. They're having a meeting of their

little very small communist party at that time in Shang. I'm pretty sure it's Shanghai and murders a lot of them. But a bunch of them escape and they then go on a long trek pursued by Chunk Kaishek's military to escape and they go deep into the interior and that is called the long march. If you read any history of China, there will be a chapter in the book on the long march because it was in that period took a long time. I mean, I don't know, maybe years. I mean they they eunan into the deep

interior of China, you know, it's like I don't know if Americans had gone at some early point in the 19th century to the wilderness of northern Minnesota or something like that, you know, just far away. And they settled among peasants in this province and they organized the peasants against their own landlords, built a base and that saved them from the army of Chunk Kaishek and there they built an alternative system society putting many of their feel their principles into effect but also not being stupid built an army. It's very famous in China. It's called the

E. I don't know the reason why, but it had the funny name eighth root ar as in the number eighth root army. The people, the red army, the eighth army. Then the Japanese invade China 1931. Then there's a war between China and Japan. And Chan Kaishek now has to stop pursuing the communists because he can't. I mean, they're they're too strong now in this distant province. Fights the war with the Japanese in alliance with Mao, who's now the leader in this Eunan. And as soon as the war is over, the Japanese are defeated. They turn

on each other and they have the Chinese civil war, which goes from 45 to 49. Mao wins. Chang Kaishek loses, leaves China for the island of Taiwan with his people, which is why Taiwan is really weird. Yeah, that's out. That's the root of that. That's all that's about. And if you want to know why the Chinese would be angry, h they won a civil war. They worked together to defeat the Japanese, which they did. Chunk Kaishek, the discredited, defeated loser of the Civil War, goes to this little island. It's like Jefferson Davis had gone to,

I don't know, Staten Island and set up shop. The Chinese think that's their territory, which it is and that it's their issue to work out that the United States would decide that this is, you know, that is sheer cuckoo. And you couldn't possibly tell that story to the American people because it would have the effect it's having on you, which is, oh, I didn't realize this. The things you learn when you're an ignorant guy like me talking to Rick, it's not your fault. etmology, world history. It's not It's not your fault. Thank you. I love

to hear that. No, it isn't. It isn't. It isn't. The educa look, I went to Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. The education I got was very mediocre. Really me. Not terrible, but not very good. It just I had to learn to on my own. I had to. Where where else would I? Harvard, Yale, Stanford, I guess. No, what was it at Harvard and were other young people to work with me on it? But I think I would have found them anywhere, you know, at Caltech or at I don't know Illinois. What difference? There's always there's always

a few teachers. There's always a bunch of students. You find your way to them, you know, by accident. Oh, you're interesting. Having a beer with somebody, turns out they are interesting people and all that. That's all that happened to me. But I mean, I had the pressure of my politics. I [Music] knew it's got to be better than this. This, you know, as you grow up and you become an adult, this this this is it. You know, you can do better than this. And that impulse made me learn this stuff. I I used to get

angry. I do remember sitting in a in a lecture hall at Harvard. I remember it particularly being so angry at the that was coming out of that teacher's mouth that I would literally, you know, I was a good student. I'm a good boy. I sat through it all, took my notes. Um, and then I ran to the library afterwards to refute it because I didn't know enough to do it, but I knew where I would have to go. And I and I would sit in the library sometimes for hours scouring an article or book to

find out some way to express my anger and upset at what this person had told me including courses on Chinese and Indian history which I took because I wanted to learn about other societies. you know, my parents were immigrants, so you know, but they were Europeans, so that kind of, you know, the world had fallen apart on them. So that's why they had to be refugees. You know, it's a traumatic experience to be a a migrant. Again, we are busy deporting them. So they have to be evil empty vessels that nobody understand. But to be

a migrant is is a trauma. My mother was traumatized. My father was traumatized. They left their country, left their language, left their community, left their family, you know, entered the United States, they didn't speak English. I mean, what a mess. All the normal turmoils and troubles of life are multiplied by the additional strains and pressure. They're very hard. And they worked very My father worked himself literally to death. died relatively early of a heart attack because he worked he worked too hard. Had a wife, two children, my sister and me. Hard to earn a living.

He was a a lawyer and a judge in Germany. My father when I was born he was pushing a wheelbarrow in Youngsttown, Ohio in a steel factory. So he had he People have to understand that that family that comes from Honduras, they were I don't know raising bananas on a farm. Now they're working in Pittsburgh in in a meat factory. You try to understand what the these folks are going No. So you anyway you grow up with you also grew up with a concept. You're making me think with a concept of difference. It's very hard

for Americans. I spoke German at home mostly and some French. Only when I was 5 years old, they dropped me in the kindergarten. I learn English. You know, I was born in Ohio, but I hadn't speak English cuz, you know, I'm a baby. I'm at home. Speak my mother and father language. My mother was German. She was the most important adult for me to deal with. So I spoke, you know, I still speak German absolutely fluently because it I did it the first five year. My French with my father is I can do it. I

can understand everything and I can make myself understood but it's not fluent. It's labored. Um but here's what you get. Everything can be different. The English language is one thing and the French and German are each of them separate from the other and separate from English. Um, you understand everything could be different. It's hard to explain because you literally if you're 11 years old running around the playground with your friends talking English except when you have to pee or you're thirsty, you run into your house and chitchat with your mother in German. And then you

go back out. That trains you into the multiplicity of meanings, of inonations, of speech, and you appreciate difference. You're not frightened by it. You're not amazed by it. You assume it. And therefore, whenever anything happens, you naturally do what Hegel teaches you. The opposite. It's right in there. It's right there. It's It's not distant. It's not foreign. It's not a right thing. It's right there. It's right there. Anyway, I think since China is seems to be the clear rival to the American hegemony, we'll be discussing it is worth revisiting this idea you mentioned but didn't

follow up on, which is that Mao is in many ways responsible for the economic powerhouse that China has become. And what I was going to say is that as a verified non-expert in Chinese economics, my understanding is that China today represents this strange blend of capitalist but also people and stateowned, state intervening e economics. So I'm wondering how that comes out of Mao if I'm roughly correct in my assessment. Well, it's a very long discussion. So I'm going to give you a very short answer. Please. All right. Mao's only friend in the long that long

march when he's making that long march at that point the revolution has already happened in Russia 1917 Lennon has died in 1923 so what's going on in Russia in the second half of the 20s is a struggle between the two most important leaders of the communist movement in Russia after Lenin because they're they're inheriting the situation. One is named Stalin and the other one is named Trosky. And depending on how you come down on these things, one is a hero, the other one is evil or vice versa. That's how that goes. The global communist movement

splits on this subject. One side becomes the Troskyist movement, the other Stalinist movement. Stalin wins, Trosky loses. First he's kicked out of the government, Trosky. Then he's kicked out of the Communist Party, then he's kicked out of Russia. He actually comes here to New York, spends a little time in the Lower East Side, moves to Mexico and in Stalin and in while he's in Mexico, he becomes very important to the Mexican communist movement which was very strong then especially among artists and they hosted him. Those artists included Freda Ko, you know who she is. See

again Americans know all about Freda Ko but that she was the hostess of Trosky and probably slept with him more than a few times is a carefully cleansed to avoid any notion that you know it's just the there are three great muralists one of the greatest Mexico produced muralist painters people you know paint the wall a muralist Diego Rivera the husband of Freda Ko Um, David Sikeros and uh, Ortega. Um, yeah, if you go to the New School University, just a few blocks from here, there are murals up in the top of the building painted

by Ortega. Uh, all over the northeast here are painted by Diego Rivera, the Mexican. Rockefeller was one of his patrons. These are all communists. Shikira, Sautega, Diego, Kala, all communists. All Trosky friends of that Stalin sent someone who killed him with an ice pick in his ice pick. I do remember that. Very famous. Um, so he's gone. Stalin takes over Russia, but Stalin and Russia help Mao. He's a communist. He's in China. It's a long shot. You know, it's a few of them hunted by the government army, but they got support. So, they were very

loyal to the Soviet communists who kept helping them and helped them all through the civil war. And one of the reasons Ma won the civil war is he had some support from Russia, from communist Russia at that time. I mean, I don't want to take away. I mean, it was Ma's victory. He organized that army. the Chinese there was a big army of Chinese people they fought and they won. So in the early years from 1949 to the end of the 50s first 10 years China is a very loyal ally of the Soviet Union and

these are the years of the of the cold war. So the United States allies already earlier with Chongqaek tries to smash them. So the Mao and his people are very clear the United States our friend. They tried to kill us, you know, for Chunk Kaishek. Now Chong Kaishek is sitting in Taiwan, you know, twiddling his thumbs and now and now the Soviet Union is our ally. But we that makes us the enemy of the United States and all of that. If you ever go back and you look at American history at that time, there was

a tremendous halaloo about who lost China and McCarthy, remember the McCarthy of the Senate, McCarthy, they went after a high ranking state department official named Harry Dexter White, one of the highest official would have become Secretary of State at one point. He was in line like that. Uh but they hounded him out because they they found him to have been as a young man. He went to a Communist Party event or something. They had him and so he's he sold out the United States and that's why we lost China. The idea that the Chinese had

something to do with this Americans can't have it that it's all it's all it's all about us. Anyway, uh so Harry Dexter White was blown out of the water and the Chinese became officially bad. However, by that time, the revolution being grounded in agriculture had undertaken a number of experiments unlike anything the Soviets had done. Mao felt it was necessary. One of them toward the end of the 1950s was the commune movement in China and under Mao's inspiration they formed comm I mean the word communism suggests something that you would set up communes in which

people's relationship with one another is communal not hierarchical the goal. Uh that's a long story of how they worked for several years. My master's thesis at Stanford is an analysis of the commune movement in China. That's what I did. Um because I wanted to learn about it. This what gave my gave me the opportunity to learn. Um, you know, I I wrote a master's, not a master's, senior thesis at Harvard. If you got very good grades, you could sign up for either Magna Cumla or Sumakum Laad. And if you signed up for either or both

of them, uh, you were relieved of taking courses in the last semester of your senior year and instead you would write a paper, a major and I did that and there I studied the rise of Hitler. That was my, you know, my that's my family. the I wanted to understand how did the how did it come down on my mother and father to shake up their lives. By the time I was at Stanford, which was just a year later, I was on to studying China. And long story short, what Ma's experiments did was to freak

the Russians out. And there began a tremendous the the German word which comes from Freud splitting took place for some years. China and Russia denounced each other. They even had military skirmishes on the Chinese Russian border shooting at each other. It then died down, but it was a split that meant that the global communist movement also split. There were those who went with the Soviet Union and there were those who split off and became known as Mauists. That didn't exist before. in the great revolutionary upsurges of 1968 in France when Charles de Gaulle was driven

out of I don't know if you know the students arro rose in in France reached out and said to the working class join us in a revolution in those days the French communist party picked up 20% of the vote in every election very very powerful and the students went to the communist workers and the Trosky workers who were also and are still in in France important and there was an alliance and between the workers and the students the chief of police of Paris went on the television and said to the government if you come down

on the students and workers I can't be on your side and neither will the police got in an airplane left France, went to an American air base in Germany to wait. I mean, that's how close it came. Though the leaders of that were not the conventional communist party which was afraid of doing that, but the Mauists went, the Mauists took and because they did, Mao came into the consciousness of the French people. brought by this revolutionary thing. Well, who was impressed? Luis Aluser, my teacher, Jean Paul Sartra, never the same after that. Fuko, never the

same after that. I could go on. Jacqu Lakon, all of them, many of them were Mauist Young students caught up in it. And they then read Mao and they thought it Charles Betelheim. I don't know if these names mean anything to you. Leading intellectuals all around the country. They then began to study Mao and to study what he had done and they began to go to China to offer advice to give them the benefit of what the West had taught Marxists to this was invaluable. This was a way for a third world country to tap

western technology and thought in a way it could never happen any other way. But nobody understood that. They don't get it now either. But it it transformed not just the consciousness of the west learning about Mao but the Mauists learning what the West had to teach them about strategy. Long story short, they made a strategic decision which I don't think could have been done without Mao even though this was done. Mao is dead or dying. So it it comes with his end. And the strategic decision is we're going to build a socialism different from the

one in the Soviet Union. That comes out of their split with Russia. and we're going to make it different from what socialism has meant in the west. What did it mean in the west? Well, to this day, right, there are socialist parties in all the European countries. Many of them have been in the government, the Portuguese government. Right now, the so the Spanish government is the socialist party. Um, up until 3 months ago, the government of Germany was the uh was uh Schultz Socialist Party. Uh, Scandinavia used to be called Scandinavian socialism. When Bernie Sanders

explains what he means by socialism, he refers to Denmark. You know that kind of that's the socialism in which the government is very active, very regulatory, taxes a lot and provides a shitload of public services but leaves the private capitalist sector pretty much in private hands. Right? That's a kind of social it's called socialism. You know, even here in America, people kind of the post office is socialist. You know, they understand the government does something could be socialist. Stupid, but okay. Americans don't understand this stuff very well. The other sample is the Soviet Union, which

the government comes in and says, "We're not going to simply tax. We're not going to simply regulate. We're going to take over. We're going to own and operate the enterprise as a state entity. Okay. Soviet Union did that with its entire industrial apparatus and with a good chunk of its agriculture too. Not all of it but a good chunk. State farms which are different from collective farms. Those are private. By the way, what Americans don't understand that Russia never abolished private property ever. it's always been an important part of their economy always and that the

state was limited but relative to anything in the west the state is a very big player China didn't do either one of those China is unique because it's a hybrid China is 50% state-owned and operated enterprises and 50 not exactly 50 but roughly 5050 private all under the control of a powerful government which is in turn under the control of the communist party. That's a unique structure. Russia didn't have that. Russia never allowed half of its industry to be private. And the Scandinavian socialist never allowed their socialism to include an immense governmental sector. In American

mentality, it's large because relative to ours, it's bigger. But it it was never very significant. That's why there have always been Swedish millionaires, billionaire and all of that. They've allowed all of that. China now allows it also to be the private sector includes Jack Mah and other big billionaire. But it's a unique model, not the Soviet. They broke from that. Mao broke from Russia in the in the late 50s early 60s on these fundamental quests opening that space. You know, other countries didn't do that. North Korea didn't do that. Cuba even didn't do it. Vietnam

didn't do it. The Chinese did it. Now, I mean, now Vietnam does it following the Chinese model because the China is so important and Russia has disappeared. Anyway, that answers your question. We've spoken a lot today about China and the United States. Where does the collapse of Europe fit into perhaps the demise of the American Empire, but also this transition away from capitalism? Yeah. I think for me, partly as someone whose ancestors are largely European, um here's the way it appears to me. I grew up in an environment in which history was presented in the

following lopsided way. It kind of starts with Greece and Rome and then evolves into the modern period. And I've been regailed with the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, Athenian democracy, Roman slavery, the Middle Ages, the arrival of the big European states, the clashes that produced colonialism in which Europe becomes the dominant power on the whole globe and carves up the whole globe among the European nations. that famous conference in Berlin in 1884 when they literally sat in front of a map of Africa and carved up Germany would get this and France would get that and

Britain that and then the explosions that we call world wars one and two which were mostly not all but mostly European events. Europe is the center. Europe is the dominant. Europe is where I look to learn about literature and science and and now Europe is becoming more and more an unimportant corner of the world. It is becoming what it used to look at the global south as an unimportant little corner of the world. Good for growing bananas or rubber plants or something else. Now Europe is itself becoming a small corner. The modern development of high

technology, it's a non-European event. It happens in the United States. It happens in China. It doesn't happen anymore in Europe. The major industries that are growth industries are elsewhere. The industries of Europe are dying, are disappearing, are shrinking. There's a joke that England is on its way back to being what it once was, a cold, wet, offshore island of the continent of Europe. You know, haha. But there's wisdom and truth in all of that. The center of activity, the locus of growth, it's all elsewhere. Europe is less and less important. The war in Ukraine, which

is a war in Europe, is being decided by the United States, which isn't in Europe, and Russia sitting down and talking. Russia that has declared itself and its future to be Asian. Literally, people are walking away from Europe. And pretty soon you're going to see scientific people, artistic people leaving Europe. Europe is going to become a tourist destination and not a whole hell of a lot more unless they're very careful. This is staggering. This is this is the relative decline of western civilization and the rise of I don't know what we're going to call it

eastern civilization or global south civilization enormous changes that include the decline of this system which was a product of Europe's dominance capitalism cap begins in England that's part of Europe it grows in Europe first it grows those in Europe the most. It enables Europe to take over the whole world and bring capitalism to the rest of the world through its colonialism. But now the rest of the world has begun to take that capitalism, develop it in new ways and now we are all at the cusp of moving on. Capitalism will have done all it could.

Again, Marx's comment, capitalism won't disappear until it has tried every possible way, every form of continuing its life. And we are seeing a range of forms. Anglo-American private capitalism, Scandinavian socialism, Soviet socialism, China, socialism with a Chinese uh uh quality or Chinese face. I think we're at at the end of that. And I think that the demise of Europe is itself a symptom, a sign, an accompaniment if you like to the decline of capitalism. Each of them feeds on the other. Europe is committed to older capitalism. It was, you know, it had the benefit of

being there a long time. It had the benefit of its long history, but it also had the burden of its long history. It couldn't adjust fast enough. Very old story. The very capitalism it brings into being then blossoms even more elsewhere than where it was born. That happens. And it was better for the Europe for European development of capitalism. That capitalism did better elsewhere than it did in Europe. It grew faster in the United States. It's then grown even faster in China, leaving the Europeans behind. Marx's theory of uneven development. There it is. And I

think it's people should dwell on it because there is nothing so dramatic as the decline of Europe that you see now. It is the only thing more impressive to many of us than the decline of Europe is the denial of the decline of Europe. It is amazing. One watches really minor politicians in the world picture like Kier Starmer or Emanuel Mron talking as if they were the head of their of the country France and England once were but aren't anymore. You look at Britain and and you see the pump and circumstance of the coronation of

King Charles. There it is. All the drama, all the pump, all the circumstance of an empire that isn't there anymore. They just have the co the the the coach and the horses and the to-do the simolo of what it once was not the real and and Mr. Mak emerging from the A palace today. One begins to laugh because you're watching what is either a clown or someone mimicking a clown or a clown so far gone he doesn't know he's a clown. And that's very funny except for the French who don't who are now toying. Half

of France wants to believe with him and supports him because he's the symbol and the other half like the rest of the world says go away. You are an anacronistic leftover way out of place. And just like that, the west's hegemony is replaced by the east. Yeah. But now, well, no, no, no, no. That's very important and the topic of itself. What comes next? There are two options. There's a choice. The Chinese could become the next empire. And Lord knows there might be a logic to it. They once had empires in China. They have some

practice. They have some history. United States, it's denuvo here. It's all from scratch from the beginning. But there's an alternative. And the Chinese say for them the future is this alternative. And it's a genuine multinationalism. Why not think that the world, excuse me, might be better off without an empire? any empire that we shouldn't replace the British with the American with the fill in the blank that maybe we should learn that precisely because empires go up and then go down and the going down is painful and difficult and expensive and risky. Maybe we avoid that.

Maybe we take this moment of the down of the American Empire and join with the Chinese. Let's try to set up a genuinely multinational operation. Let's try. We made the first effort with the League of Nations. We made this second effort with the United Nations. They were good. They were not sufficient. Maybe something can be done now when we are self-conscious enough to admit where we are. The UN wasn't created out of a sense of the decline of the British. That was not in the air. That was not spoken. The British didn't believe it. They

made the UN before they lost India, etc., etc. Is it pronounced hedgeimony or hedge hegemony? It varies. It depends on who you talk to. The one that I end up using is hegemony. Hegemany, but God knows I'm no expert. That could be crazy usage. Well, we can keep this in the episode. Hegammon, which is some of my European colleagues. You know where the term comes from? Why it's used? No. the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Groshi, really one of the great intellects that the Communist movement in Europe ever produced. Um, and if you're

ever interested, somebody you ought to know about. He [Music] um was a literary critic when he started. Long story short, got involved in the greatest wave of strikes ever to hit Italy against the Turin the Fiat automobile company whose basic production factories were in Turin in the north of Italy and around 19 I don't remember the year 1912 1920 somewhere in there they had unbelievable strikes that built that union transformed Italy and the leader of it was this young sort of artistic man who was remarkable because he came from was born in Sardinia, the island

off of the coast where Corsica is. And he was born with a deformity which u in French is called bosu in English hunchback. Hunchback. you know, the bone doesn't go right and so you're kind of twisted little man little twisted man and but he became a hero in this strike and shortly there and he was a member it's very complicated Italian history he was a member of the socialist party in Italy already then as were an enorm half the young people over 10 over 18 years old joined the socialist. Mussolini was in the same party.

Mussolini then quit and went to the right. Antonio Groshi quit and went to the left when all socialist parties split after World War I. That's when all the the communist parties were created in the split and he he split for the left and became a member and joined and became the leader of the Italian Communist Party. After World War II, well before World War II, the the party grew very fast in Italy, really fast. and Mussolini who went to the right saw him as the great alternative as the middle of Italian politics dissolved. That's why

it's relevant to us now. It's the same story for the same or very similar reasons. The middle collapsed and the right went to Mussolini. The left went to Gamshi and the Italian Communist Party. Early in the 20s, Mussolini to handle the situation arrested Grochi and put him in jail and kept him there for the rest of his life. While he was in jail, he they kept notebooks on and he remained the leader of the Communist Party in jail. The notebooks were assembled and they are called the prison notebooks of Antonio Grochi. It has been an

inspiration for people everybody on the left in the world. There's there's an international Grochi society for example very active headquarters in Rome. Um Columbia University Press published the complete works, the complete uh um prison notebooks of Groshi and he coined in order to analyze Italy, he coined the phrase hegemony and because of its centrality to his analysis of the Italian and broader European situation, it became a term that got picked up and so that's where it comes. comes from. I think I first encountered the word in high school. I read a book by Noom Chsky

with hegemany in the title. Yes. And I didn't understand very much of that book, but I learned the word at least. Okay. Well, if you ever want to get to go to the proverbial horse's mouth, Groshi is where it comes from. And by the way, he is one of the great of the Marxian tradition. I mean if you made a list Marx angles I don't know Lenin Rosa Luxembourg Luc and a few he's right up there. What makes Groshi one of the greatest Marxists? The best way to understand it is Markx himself he dies in

1883. He devotes him he's a philosopher you know he he was he got his Ph the equivalent in Germany of a PhD in philosophy. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Greek philosophy of, you know, 5,000 years ago. Um, and it's as a philosopher, he gets his first job teaching in a university and he gets caught up, you know, the way that students today might get caught up in a pro Palestine kind of rally or something on the campus. um he got caught up in struggles of workers in the cities and towns where he was a

professor. Long story short, he shifted to economics and then he writes the rest of his life basically about economics and politics with a deep philosophic background. You know, he is he is one of the great students of Hegel. He comes out of the Hegelian tradition. He referred to Hegel all his life as my mentor and master. Um he had he had criticisms of his teacher as rightly he should but he was very angry when people denounced Hegel. He would immediately run. Are you kidding? You don't understand Hegel. You don't get anything I'm doing either. A

message to the left. Lenin later who didn't understand it late in Lenin's life he said that's he makes a famous famous quote anyone who doesn't know read and study Hegel cannot understand marks Lenin said that because it's it's how he came to it very famous Lenin has a whole book very few people know it called the conspectus on Hegel in which he writes an immense volume of endless notes on Hegel and how important Hegel was to Lenin's conception of revolution of society of social change and all of that. Now Hegel is a dead dog in

this country. The only places that teach Hegel in any systematic way are Catholic universities because they kept up the conventional when I was I wanted to be a philosopher. I mean when I went to Harvard I majored in phil I wanted to major in philosophy but between the horrible way it was taught and my father who said I'll never get a job as a philosopher I didn't I went to economics following Markx not that I didn't do it for that reason but like that anyway Markx writes it's all dus capal how does how does capitalism

work it's an economicsy focused so much of the Marxist tradition that rises up very fast toward the end of Marx's life and really takes off after he dies, the last decades of the 19th century and then the 20th century, which is the spread of Marxism to become global, which it hadn't been before. [Music] Um what also happened was that as it became bigger and bigger it attracted people whose primary interest wasn't economics who you know think of it this way they said thank you Marks you've helped me understand capital now I see how capitalism has

up the movies or opera or literature or how it has shaped our culture. Gamchi is crucial because he's the first one to systematically do that. And what I mean systematically, he's sitting in jail. If my memory is right, he's arrested in 1922 and he dies in 1939. The last few months they let him out of jail. They have made him so sick in jail that he dies of but mostly he killed him in in so many so many words but he's sitting there for many years right so he can do you know written analytical work

by force of prison and so it's an enorm and he studies he reaches the conclusion let me put it to you this way if you're interested in this in the marxian tradition uh I teach a I used to teach a course at UMass called the history of the marxian tradition. There was such a demand you couldn't hold the students back from all the fields and all I would do is say after marks let me show you what happened. So Grshchi's genius was to say I'm je and you almost use these words I'm jealous of Lenin.

He admired Lenon. I'm jealous of Lennon. He made a re He could make a revolution out of the chaos of Russia. We have very similar chaos here in Italy and we couldn't do it. Why not? What the objective situation very similar to Russia? devastation of war, weak capitalism, wild suffering, you know, and a a core of revolution. We have that in Italy when Italy did. Um why couldn't it work? Why why did the revolution not happen in Italy the way it did in Russia? You know, there were revolutionary upsurges all over Europe after World War

I. You know, in Bavaria, they formed something called the Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republic. They even took the name. And for a good long while, Munich, the big city in the south of Germany, was the head of the revolutionary government. In Budapest in Hungary, you know, two hours away, the same thing. Gayorg Lukatch, the great thinker, was the minister of education in the revolutionary Soviet Socialist Republic of Hungary. You had it in uh in Europe. You had it in Seattle. There was a revolutionary movement in in Washington. You know, all over the world this happened. Anyway,

in Italy, he asked himself the question and he reached the following conclusion. It's the culture of Italy. It's the culture and the way he put it using Marxian type language. The objective conditions for the revolution were present. The subjective conditions were not. what was in people's heads, how they understood the situation was different here than in Russia. And what I'm going to show you, he said, is how that worked. And in order for him to do that, he had to understand the music, the religion, the family customs, and he then devotes himself to studying that.

and he's a real scholar stuck in jail. He had been a a theater critic publishing, you know, theater reviews before he got politically involved. And so it becomes the first of the great Marxists to shift over and begin to take that theoretical framework but apply it not to economics, not even to political things. He talked about politics a lot, but that was not the notebooks are about culture. And there, for example, you have one of the greatest analysis of the Roman Catholic Church ever because it's it's the church he grew up in. It's the church

of Italy. It's the it's the Vatican. I mean, everything's there. So, he and it's very powerful among the people of Italy. It's been there for a thousand years or more. and he wants to understand how that ended up being something that blocked a revolution otherwise about to happen from happening. And he does the same for Italian music. He does it for Italian painting. He does it for Italian family life. And so every Marxist since and many others have taken their clues from this extraordinary cultural analysis, how to think about these things. It's not so much

the particular point he makes, but how he analyzes novels, how he analyzes newspapers in Italy. It's just extraordinary. And here in the United States, it took off in the following way because it's America. The peculiar way this country works. I'll tell you to this way. 20 times in my life, I have been present at some, you know, I've been a professor all my life. or at some seminar, you know, like at Stanford or a place like that. Uh, you know, I went to school, I think I told you I spent a year at Stanford as

a student. Uh, and there'd be somebody giving a paper on Grochi or comparing Grochi to somebody else and they would go on and go go on and I, you know, given I'm politically active. I noticed this was Grochi. They footnoted Grochi. They talked about Grochi, but they left something out. He's a communist. He's the head of the Italian Communist Part They had to clean him out. They had to take off his feathers. They They could It's America. They could not handle that. That's what he was. That he was an important figure in the literature department

at their seminar on postmodernism. And there's Mr. Grochy as he often was, but he was cleaned up. He was just Mr. Groshi, an important Italian intellect. Not, you know, it's absolutely incredible. I told you one of the people that I had time with is a is is the Groshi of France, which is Altus. Right. Right. Altus is a member of the Communist Party, an activist in the Communist Party. all of his adult life. [Music] Um, and he became the recctor of something in Paris called the Echol normal. That's the highest level of university you can

get to. It's like, I don't know, Harvard or Yale or some like, you know, Oxford or Cambridge. So, not only is he a professor there, but he's the recctor. The recctor is the highest deficit. It's like we don't have that here but I don't know provost or chancellor or some hoidytoidy president of the university is an active communist public active comm you know and this is in the 1970s and 80s can you imagine here in United States you know I would so I would talk about alt tus you know people who know a little bit

they know who that is he's widely published and he is the recctor at no means you're France's number one philosopher. That officially that's what you are. But here in America, they knew who he was. But that he was a communist. No. No. When I would tell them that, they would look at me. They would look at me as if somebody they really admired turned out to have a flatulence problem. You know, they they didn't know what to do with the very strange. It's very strange about our culture. In Europe, everybody knows, you know, to be

a communist or a socialist in Europe is no big deal. Every country has communist party, socialist party. Everybody's family has Uncle Harry or Aunt Louise who's in the party. And so when they have a family picnic, they have arguments and everybody everybody nobody's frightened by this. But not here. here because it's you've repressed it. You can then tell stories about it and they can become monsters because who's to refute it? Nobody. So you Anyway, that's where hegemony comes from and and Groshi is the key man. Each time we sit down for a conversation now, I'm

thinking we're finally going to run out of stuff to talk about. But then we don't even get to my notes at all. So that leaves room for at least another one. So Rick, tell me how often you come here. Seriously, I've been coming every couple months, two or three months. So, and you do it, you fly in and do a bunch of interviews. And I flew in on a red eyee last night. So I got in at 5:00 a.m. this morning. Oh. Had an interview at 8 for 3 hours. This one's for 3 hours. Did

you sleep on an airplane? No. And then I've got one for three hours after this with Chris. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, it was great, Rick. Until next time. [Music]