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Episode 487: Money Never Sleeps (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-04 12:45:06
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Joe Weisenthal, co-host of the Odd Lots podcast, joins us to talk about the so-called politicization of the Fed, general weirdness in the American economy, AI’s stagflationary set up, and the continued rise of The Dragon.

Hit the tip line: (646) 801-1129 | tips@trueanon.com

Discover more episodes at podcast.trueanon.com

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Comments

melly

boy bye

Noah

Is Brace washed? Is Young Chomsky chopped? Is Liz Unc?

rizzler

yes to all dadly

Grant M

All my goats on one podcast🫶

Louis Cruz

I got so excited when I realized I was going to hear someone find out about Tiptoes for the first time.

Wyatt H

Wow. Crossing into the mainstream.

Jingle Jangler

Anyone who is very attracted to Sabrina Carpenter and is older than like 20 is sus as fuck

Thor

Tiptoes! That movie is horrifying and enthralling.

Evan

Always knew Joe was one of us deep down

tyler

woaaah what a crossover

Sam Zeng

Monitoring the situation

Kyle Smyth

Gary Oldman watched all the Dorf movies to prepare for that role

bubberducky

the music's been 🔥 lately ily YC

Ligma

Sabrina carpenter looks like a possessed doll. Like one day her eyes will glow and her head will start spinning around

Hannah Barnes

There is zero Truss nostalgia in the UK right now, she’s honestly completely forgotten

Broton Thompson

I think you guys got the perfect guest for this topic.

CJ

Kuato mentioned 🙌

Mungo Franczak

Do u think Gary Oldman is proud of his performance

FairIsleMonch

I agree although I had second thoughts seeing that recent video when she tries to hitch a lift but in my defence a) You can’t really see her face. b) it’s a low angle shot which disguises her small stature and c) that ass

jsobrie

Damn I’ve been on trazodone for years but I never remember my dreams, feel like I’m missing out

Doug Cartel

Idris Elba did a thing on gold which obviously makes him an enemy of The Black Keys who are Bitcoin stans (They're very ashamed of Gold on the Ceiling)

John Wick

They said only in tamagotchi, the working man’s currency.

Emina

Brace who is famously 5'4" making fun of Sabrina Carpenter's mini stature hmm idk!!!!

Mersham

What if instead of Gary Oldman it was Very Gayman

Inge Teloo

I work in a minimum wage non union manufacturing plant (shitting on company time to write this) and ya we are all on our phones every day, but that we are on phones, on social media, etc. is a particular cultural expression of the underlying political-economic reality. during the stolypin reforms in the ussr, despite rising technical efficiency labour productivity was falling. all the official revisionist soviet economists were left scratching their heads—but overall the call was made for greater discipline of the labour force, bcoz at the system level it was understood the root cause of the decline in productivity was (even unorganized, unconscious) passive resistance to the process of restoration and expansion of capitalist productive relations. imo similar things happening today, not in the context of a capitalist restoration but rather in the context of deepening capitalist crisis. and it's worthwhile 2 note that the real function of AI (disentangled from but mediated by the financial markets and marketing schemes which condition its development) is in management and policing.

Mountain Dew Or Crab Juice

I feel like we haven't heard from Coindexter in a while: did become gold-pilled or did he take his own life after getting rug-pulled on the latest shit coin?

Doug Cartel

Wage-price spiral is like ghosts, people are scared of them but theyve never been proven to exist Economics has fought for centuries to be considered a hard science when so much of it is just psychology and legal scamming

RyGuy

Amazing crossover episode for us TrueLots heads

Mugiwara

insane crossover, really excited to listen to this one

Cal

Pablo torre episode plz

Sac

Bro sound like NPR

DaFunkBackToDaPunk

Why does the guest sound like Joe List and Harland Williams at the same time?

Peanut Horse

Have not seen the materialists, but I’ve heard from people that some insist it is actually not a comedy, and some insist that it actually is

Sam from Boston

The leg line in materialists was absolutely supposed to be a laugh line!

Doug Cartel

Oh yeah the finance guys absolutely destroyed the nursing home industry where I am, they all need to be punished for crimes against the elderly

Nathan

In their discussion of England’s economy, they neglected to discuss its more important domestic manufacturing industry: warhammer miniatures. Please do better.

Jesusgod

He sounds like his jaw is wired

waterbird

Birth rates are low bc on some level everyone is thinking about climate collapse. its in the back of our minds making us depressed driving us crazy

Pink&TealCore

I do find it funny that 3/4 ppl in this studio blamed their phones for low productivity out of pure boomer reaction, and out of a lack of answers; even if it is a bit, it is a bit grating to hear. Nothing else at all has happened during the last 20 years or 40 years.

Blank

Agree, also a sense of general fascism/nastiness of the world rn plays a similar role for me. Plus housing and childcare costs

drewb

My sicko side wants to hear what happens when brace really, really gongs the gong. I get the impression someone has asked brace to be very gentle and that we haven't witnessed the true power of gong yet

Manu Hurtado

Haven't listened yet but this is the collab of my parasocial dreams

Doug Cartel

I think it was like Carl zha or someone who pointed out that there's some kind of good boy clause in the Chinese death penalty where you have 2 years to prove that you're really sorry

Collieflower

I thought this guest was Neil Hamburger at first

KC

Do you think your phone makes you smarter

Madeleine Peterson

I really think the phone is just a prosthetic. Where people used to go outside, to use their bodies and interact with living things, has been replaced with scam businesses and perfectly flat, exterminated property developments. Everyone sticks to the phone because the world outside the phone gets worse and worse, hotter, more dead, every inch of space turned over to someone else's profit and convenience. An average person who left the phone to live in the real world wouldn't end up smarter or happier like, say, someone whose bills get paid by reading books and podcasting, they're misanthropes and basket cases.

Sydney

Liz girls, how we feeling today?

Pink&TealCore

I should have said 50 years to be more specific, I forget I am old. As to what I was referring, it was the (a) mismanagement of the 70s oil crisis, that started the process where finance became the hegemonic fraction of capital as opposed to the 'big industrialists'; and (b) the related start of globalisation and the offshoring of manufacturing. Both of these have wide ranging consequences, be those that state responses to Crisis, by the Fed or the Executive, have always since favoured finance propogating a rent seeking, short-termisr model that cares little about worker productivity, that dominance of finance led to the political supremacy of neoliberalism, that the deindustrialization of the west led to service-based economies that have inherently lower potential for productivity growth etc. writing this quickly on the phone so there might be spelling mistakes. Anyways, I doubt you are gonna read all this, but despite some small annoyance I love all of ya guys, Joe was an informative and fun guest.

Julie D

This guest is hard to listen to

Pink&TealCore

Do you think your drill/ TV makes you smarter? What relation is there between 'being smart' and your tools/entertainment? OPEN THE SCHOOLS

Peanut Horse

I feel like a lot of “productivity” has to do with the way companies track productive processes within their company. My job has a very outdated tracking system (we have switched systems for various products multiple times over the last 10 years, but we still use a system from the 70s for some products) for workers that process application for insurance and annuities, and for like 2 years now my manager has been saying that due to how processes are tracked, we are over staffed by 700% for our team, but then when any exec or higher up spends time reviewing my teams workday, we are very clearly not over staffed, and if not understaffed during certain busy months. My vibe is a lot of these production numbers are because jobs have become more and more digital, and we don’t have an super accurate way to track creating and processing these non-material products like financial securities, etc compared to the very real products like manufacturing parts, cars, and other physical products. I wonder if since more and more work is becoming digital, this “bad”way of production tracking, often time not efficient because systems/applications to track production are being updated more often recently, is also getting more and more representative in the overall economy than 20 years ago

Adam B

I think brace should flesh out that “wagwan with the economy” bit into a full character. Maybe a love interest for coindexter?

Pink&TealCore

Hmm that's interesting, i think the most basic way to track productivity is to divide the value of goods and services produced (price X amount sold) by the man hours required to make them, and on a state-scale divide GDP per hours worked. If you want to see productivity changes you compare present productivity with a baseline or past productivity and there are formulas to come up with % changes. There might be more involved, but I am in the legal field and not an economist. I definitely agree on the point about intangibles, like securities, and it definitely seems likely that in digital service economies the calculations would be put of whack. I am sure a macroeconomist could come up with a more complete explanation; a few finance papers I saw in brief recently specifically tied financialisation to lower productivity too...

🌻

Brace: plz ask your doctor about Quviviq instead of trazadone. Less/no crazy dreams, less/no sleepiness the next day, better REM/deep sleep and it's basically like on off switch for your brain at night. Trazadone fucking sucks for sleep.

🌻

It sounds like he has a bite of a sandwich in his mouth

Ashley Koch

its also because people just, in general, have much more control over when they have children. one HUGE factor in the collapse of fertility in the US has been the collapse of teen pregnancy (a GOOD THING, let me be clear). widespread adoption of improving contraceptive measures makes unplanned pregnancies very much the exception in a way they never were before. turns out, if people have the choice, they generally want to have less children. and i suspect thats just as true today as it ever was. again, this is a good thing. people deserve agency over if/when they have kids. but an inevitable corrollary of that is that there will be fewer kids.

Ben

He sounds like a cartoon dog

Saint Wickley

I can’t be bothered to google whether we haven’t improved in productivity since the iPhone, but a good deal of this feels like to do with the financialisation of the economy. That so much of our economies is about moving money around. There are so many bullshit jobs and so much of the world’s economy is artificial. Plus, there’s so much consumer abundance that is unproductive and just fattens us all up with labubu’s and Big Macs. Big Luddite here, burn it down, return to monkey.

wet_poptart

Peter Dinklage actually grew his legs back out after Game of Thrones ended and he didn’t need them for the role he’s big sized now

Saint Wickley

I think people are building families later cause they simply cannot afford it here in the UK. So much of the world’s wealth sits with the older generations. Plus, my wee wee doesn’t work cause I keep my phone in my boxers.

Mark Owen

Orality and Literacy, going back to my Greener days.

Robbie McCoury

“So you had a circle jerk with a bunch of little people? I would love to see that” - 100% serious Kate Beckinsale

idiot.wisdom

The only industry in the UK that's worth anything is Games Workshop. Always bet on companies that cater to the interests of autistic adults.

Jerimiah

Yeah, Abundance doesn't mention China, because it is a bait and switch. They talk about affordable housing and renewables and vague environmental "streamlining." The streamlining is outsourced to Pacific Legal Foundation, the Manhattan Institute (Rufo), and AEI. All the worst property rights shitheels. https://www.abundancedc.org/speakers

Crank

This episode makes me think about how much i hate the phone i really do

Praxcheat

Riseboro is an entrenched part of the Dem political machine (Vito Lopez linked) in Bushwick and Ridgewood and they are one of the largest employers of home health care workers fyi

Nathan

I think one reason we don’t see profitability gains from AI is that a good chunk of jobs are bullshit. It doesn’t matter if someone can write a report in half the time because the report is bullshit that doesn’t contribute to the economy.

Chas Padunski

Joe, put the AI away, Joe. It’s bad for you.

Zzz

That’s mean :(

Lars

You can't get pregnant that way fyi

I am become reply guy

Love was the first currency, ie grain for brain. It’s in Gilgamesh I think.

Chachi uday

I second tip toes. My friends and i watched it years ago and we were crying. Its so crazy.

merfdiezel

I used to work for them in 2010-2012 when they were still RBSCC and undergoing Cuomo’s sell-off of Medicaid long-term care contracts to private insurers. Great staff, bad leadership (minus one great boss), Vito sucks and everyone knew it quite well then. Dem machine BS. Rest is sleaze, Vito

MKatieUltra

Phones may be partly to blame for the more recent global cognitive changes, but we’ve had them for a while. Covid has probably done brain damage on a population-wide level. There is tons of evidence in medical literature for this. It fuses neurons together. It increases inflammation and damages cortical areas that control empathy, executive function, memory, and probably speeds the progression of dementia. The effect varies a lot from person to person and probably depends on a lot of variables, obviously socioeconomic status, age, genetic predispositions, etc.

AL

I'd say the same thing too if you were talking.

grymm

This

AL

What the fuck are you guys even talking about? Are economics fake?

TrueAnonPod

I think it’s a wonderful marvel of human ingenuity

Crank

but it’s a it’s a yetzer hara trap i really believe that

Chapo Bath House

Holy shit, I thought I hallucinated Tip Toes

August West

Love this episode and the guest is really insightful but why does he talk like his jaw is broken? He sounds like Michael Corleone after he gets punched by McCloskey

Bob K Ross

Aww i thought we were doing an Every Damn Time with the intro

Olivia

TIPTOES MENTION

bob

Broke/fake: wage-price spiral Woke/real: tendency of the profit rate to fall

Pelican Grief

Love to attempt to observe and understand the 10,000 year old collective pathology of which i am a single cell.

Siena Fulton

William Gibson discusses this a little bit

bob

It feels like the North American economy is really trapped in exactly the same place as the oil shock 50 years ago. There has been little change to manufacturing and primary commodity production beyond aggressive productivity gains from automation, and offshoring. So falling employment in those areas. But the content of the economy has been basically the same — resource extraction, oil oil oil, big cars, and sprawling suburban housing tracts being the big ones. Services and financialization are like, tacked on top, but the foundation is continually being undermined. Tech and software I see as largely communications and entertainment changes that are parasitic on the rest of economic activity. Anyways, that’s all to say that I agree. Feel like industry is stuck in the 70s and has been rotting since then, with no investment in anything but tech, finance, and luxury real estate.

diptherio

Listening to this guy unironically talk about how he asked ChatGPT to tell him about Palantir was a kind of cringe I never expected to hear on this pod. And he's vibe coding? This guy is not a tech journalist to take seriously. He needs to read some David Gerard or Ed Zitron to get a reality check. Hell, even Sam Altman is trying to walk back the hype the he's been promoting for years.

Agent Grange

Look in Epstein's defense 9/11 was probably a very busy day for him. He was cooking with the boys on that one for like years.

Nothingburger Burgerreich

That does seem like the pinnacle of our ancestors’ idea of the good life though. Maybe the masses don’t want communism because we have it

Ian Mc

Grea episode for the market freaks like me...dragon rises 🐉

3WGMR

The "everybody on their phones all the time" explanation for stagnant or dwindling productivity: were you guys serious? Were you putting that as the main cause or did I read you wrong? Because for example immediately before that you *were* talking about the rise in care work, which counts as low productivity.

HonestEd

Thats just coindexters cousin from Toronto

HonestEd

I tried to listen to this at work and found myself slowing down unconsciously lol

DarylBarenziah

Brace’s version of thanos is some propaganda poster Jewish man from Brooklyn combining platinumburg Goldstein copperfeller and Silverstein into a last name.

Ben P

the perfect guest!

Zzz

Can’t help but share what Zizek shared re: AI — “We often hear that digitalization will enable the full automation of most productive processes, eventually allowing the majority of humans to enjoy far more leisure time. Maybe, in the long term. But what we see today is a sharp increase in the demand for physical labor in developed countries. Behind these social threats, however, lurks something far more radical. Human intellectuality entails a gap between inner life and external reality, and it is unclear what will happen—or, rather, what is already happening—to this gap in the age of advanced AI. In all probability, it will disappear, since machines are wholly part of reality. This gap is being directly closed in the so‑called Neuralink project, which promises to establish a direct connection between the digital universe and human thought.” 💭

Aaron Friedland

I appreciated the different perspective, don’t be so callous my guy, not everyone is autistic like us

Aaron Friedland

Well is that the correct metric? We have these things in the West but it is off the back of a lot of exploitation.

Matt Jolo

I'm monitoring the situation. Something has gotta give in this big scam.

B b

I watched Tip-toes a few years back and it was funny that they even injected propaganda into this weird clunker. The main villains are a Palestinian man that “got evicted from his apartment in the Gaza strip” who beats up a Gary Oldman’s ex-girlfriend and an annoying marxist that yells at people and kills the vibe at a party.

boop

"i'm going to ask chatgpt what palantir does" amoronsayswhat?

Vinay

I don't understand half the words in this episode

Trevor Hannan

i think one of the earliest written records we have in Cuneiform is like a list of wages being paid to workers in beer so... Beer may be one of the oldest forms of money?

CJ

He lost me at "Truss apologist"

Sean Carton

As a tech professional fed fired in the musk scam in march I got to say how much fucking hullshit this feels like. THERE ARE NO IOBS.

rolfesam

Wait I’m so interested in the topic at the end — pls keep up the post-truth art/media theory it’s fascinating

Zzz

Based

Saint Wickley

You’ve just said a lot of things.

J_Theory

Smart phones are just the latest and easiest way to slack on the job. Don't be the only sucker putting in 100 percent at your underpaying job.

Erika Stecz

Best episode ever. Great topic. Great guest. Liz proves to be the smartest woman in the world.

k

JOE WEISENTHAL ON TRUEANON????

lynchianphallus

so fucking funny my neolib econ-prof mom listens to oddlots. now this guy on trueanon. woah

Morgan

Wait im confused, is this or isnt this just virgil texas doing a wizard voice?

tyler

i work for them and while that’s true i think after Vito’s death and a pretty major financial scandal that almost destroyed the company, they are now much less enmeshed in the Dem machine

Eugene Debs

Officially demanding Liz interviews Pablo Torres

This is how Janis Joplin feels

In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes the author makes a compelling case that language preceded thought. I think he is correct

k

Odd Lots episode on the economics of being tall with the perfect guest: Brace Belden.

Tim m

🫡🇨🇳🫡🇨🇳

Mike

Episodes like this always make me realize that despite other people thinking I'm intelligent, if I ever had a conversation with Liz about economics I would only be able to say " ... damn, yeah..."

ERIC

His appearance on Chapo was good too.

Yoni Maltsman

I'd love to see a podcast or miniseries that talks about macroeconomics and monetary policy from a leftist/crackpot point of view

Jonica Stewart

Don't know how often ya'll read this, but I've been looking into the assassination of folke bernadotte by Israel and 2 other Swedish officials. I would love for yall to talk about it someday

Jonica Stewart

Oh and Olof Palme swedish prime minister

Zoe G.

Yeah I tried to give him grace at first because it sounded like he was using ChatGPT to prove a point about bias and then he proceeds to talk about being a fucking vibe coder jfc

Toshio42

No appreciable boom in productivity 'cause bosses want more work done by fewer people, so they pay fewer people to do more work.

Graham Mattox

the point about language without thought is a banger point

Tranche Devereaux

5:50 = the very 1st time in my 48 years that I have ever enjoyed hearing another person’s dream: Brace in Krishna-esque terror group meets wizened shriveled 2 ft tall Sabrina Carpenter Shout out trazadone

Tranche Devereaux

For a while now, elite readers had been asking for a Liz-based, Econ-focused drill down. Dreams do come true 🥹

Tranche Devereaux

My grandma was an Austrian immigrant and worked at the Pabst brewery in Milwaukee (1950s-70s). Part of the compensation package was one 8oz glass of beer with lunch. It was a cultural thing - all the workers were FOB German or Austrian.

bob

It seems to me that post-1975 or so, maybe on into the 80s and early 90s, all the step-changes in productivity gains in productive labor have been exhausted. Like what is the next robotic assembly line, John Deere gps tractor, cut-to-length logging rig…? The improvements to these things are much smaller, and usually the investment cost is very high. Like Boeing - a new airplane is tens of billions of dollars in capital investment for not very much performance improvement. And finance capital is clearly very uninterested in large scale, long-run investments in fixed capital. So with productivity kind of plateaued and extensive capital investment basically out of the question, there are only a few options to continue reaping mega profits: financialization/rent-seeking and squeezing the labor force for lower wages. And now, with crypto/NFTs, literal scams and fictitious capital. Like yeah people are dumber today because our jobs and trades have been offshored and deskilled for decades. Kids in school are better off learning how to do tiktoks and write ChatGPT prompts than math or literature or carpentry. At least that will land them a job.

Tranche Devereaux

I had to google “vibe coding” AND “jfc” Result: concur with Zoe in full

Jack F

I appreciate you guys talking about the phone usage. I always thought it’s interesting how no one seems to question the fact that the average person has an addiction to social media as or more powerful than a crack addiction . Probably more mentally damaging as well

Tranche Devereaux

I think your comment was directed to the prior episode, where L&B read excerpts of the Ghiz jail interview transcript? Jeff was too busy to be with his Boo on 9/11 😬

Tranche Devereaux

Feelin ready to ride for our queen! 🌟 I’m 15 minutes in, and Liz is top of her game

bob

This one harkens back to the old days of the NFT bubble in 21/22. Halcyon days

bob

Liz goes off for 15 minutes about treasuries and bonds and stagflation - we get more knowledge about economics than in 100 college econ classes

Nate Hutchins

I’m a home hospice social worker in a rural area, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the approach to managing the volume of aging Americans. Looking forward to more discussion on this topic! I’m very close to the issue but I really think millennials taking care of boomers is the next big economic/cultural era in our society.

HK

Elder leftists please tune in to Odd Lots you would love it.

Zach

The world expressed in this episode is complete garbage. The whole discuss is a loss.

yak??

Brace is onto something, I've been getting ads for that Idris Elba gold documentary for the past two years, I can't get away from it

Markus Puskar

I work in home and community based services for Medicaid. There’s a lot to say about this industry, and how vital it is to the economy. I’ve seen it getting reported on more like from the Nyt, but they’re just sort of scratching the surface of how giant some of these programs are. It’s really not a scam, and provides a ton of people with incomes they wouldn’t have otherwise. Obviously some people abuse it but it’s kinda just basic Keynesian policy. People getting paid to care for other people, sometimes 40+ hours, sometimes family, but always pumping money to the bottom of the economic ladder. It’s good. I promise. I have so much more to say about it. Just so many “unskilled” jobs to people who need them. Would be disastrous if they got cut

Swimaroo

Is the opening tiptoes story a nick mullen blind item? 🤔

K

YES

K

Around the very end of this episode y’all get into some really interesting things re: epistemology/pedagogy/craft and I’m dying for an episode that gets into it!! I know I can’t be the only teacher that listens to trueanon who’s in a weird despair limbo about my students being unable to read and think their own original thoughts and I feel like there’s some good speculation to be had about what tf is going on and what we should do abt it!!!

K

Also like if we wanna do the “it’s because u on that damn phone” thing I feel like teachers are on the front mf lines and have some good empirical data on it

chronye

i have friends who caregive for elderly relatives, they are paid by the county

Return of The Mac 2nite

The smart phone derangement syndrome argument falls apart when you consider these things are everywhere but simultaneously this supposed syndrome has clear particular localities. It’s a cultural phenomenon.

emoly

i cannot BELIEVE tiptoes was mentioned. i watched it recently and can’t stop thinking about how bad it is or how it got released

Kabi

Totally. I swear Liz plugs in her second standby brain when speaking econ.

Mike Malloy

Materialists was ASS and I was the only one in the theater who laughed at the leg surgery reveal. Also believe the leg surgery discussion happens right after Dakota Johnson’s friend was sexually assaulted and instead of addressing that we get a serious discussion of height supremacy, absurd sequence

DarylBarenziah

Dr William ripple did a good podcast episode on the deep evolutionary impact of smart phones on the human psyche and I couldn’t even fucking listen to it. It’s so horrific. We fucked up yo

Isaac

Me, who didn’t understand 75% of the words: “WELL WELL WELL LOOK AT THIS SMARTY PANTS!!! Professor 50Percent over here!”

Isaac

Me, who didn’t understand 75% of the words: “WELL WELL WELL LOOK AT THIS SMARTY PANTS!!! Professor 50Percent over here!”

Isaac

Damn. Zizek is gassing up neuralink now huh. When he fell off, he fell off hard.

Isaac

Light that paper tiger on FIYAAAA BABAY!!!!

Vinay

Unable to find it. Can you drop a link, please?

Zac

Have you seen the sketch in Mr. Show where David Cross hosts a pre-taped call-in talk show?

Lochlyn

Does Liz have a degree in Econ or is she a nerd because I have no idea what the hell she’s talking about whenever economics comes up lol

Mauve_Avenger

Does someone have a clear sense of how Liz is using the term "productive"? Because she talks about healthcare work not being "productive" and I'm not following. Is she talking more colloquially re: returns on investment or in some sort of Marxist sense? And if the latter, is the idea here that service work doesn't generate surplus value?

Conor

Dr. Franczak econ seminar class love you girl

Kevin Stickel

I think she’s very smart and once she had enough wealth to play the great game of finance she just got into an endless deal flow. I’ve honestly thought way too much about the person she would be without principled leftism underneath her talents and personality

Conor

@1:33:30 what "tower game" paper are they talking about??

Glo-Lo

Difficult to listen to guests voice dnf sry

sandro

Productive labor is just something that creates surplus value that can be sold on the market. The reason they’re saying that healthcare and social care work is non-productive is because it’s a service that’s extremely labor intensive and doesn’t have very well defined outputs. It’s not a value judgement

Return of The Mac 2nite

“Principled leftism” in the fashion of renowned economist John Left.

Katie

I love Joe Weisenthal’s voice, very comforting

frag queen

brace got leg shortening surgery which is why he can’t dunk

Mauve_Avenger

So since it sounds like it was meant in the Marxist sense I feel confused even further: 1. Why is service work being described as unproductive when it is sold on the market as a service commodity in a process that *does* allow for the appropriation of surplus value by capitalist employers? 2. How does work being more or less "labor intensive" bear on whether or not its production process generates surplus value? I get that all else equal more labor-saving machinery = more surplus value = *more* productive, but I don't get why productive / non-productive status could hinge on labor + machinery ratios

Baby J

Why is elder care and nursing considered non-productive?

Leonora Calzogna

I think about this every day, it's an obsession. Spared the effects of what we imagine a plague to be, we live with the effects of its blunting of our minds. I hope it isn't terminal. I don't know.

Megatark

Folding Ideas did a good youtube video on that gold documentary.

bobore

If you consider in terms of material production, I guess the argument is that the elderly don't really labor or produce in a meaningful way, so maintenance of them as a resource is non-productive

bobore

You are intentionally misunderstanding. It is about material outputs. Nothing more.

bobore

How do you all reconcile your feelings on stuff like AI and China? TrueAnon definitely feels bullish on China but bearish on AI. Guys, China IS AI. They're going all in. I do not hear my leftist parasocial friend podcasts address this.

bobore

Imagine a world where energy is money.

bobore

I'm vibe coding and building an app. Just because people are stupid doesn't mean it doesn't work when you, get this, UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND HOW IT WORKS. You don't know anything about it, I absolutely guarantee it. Which CLI did you try? Which model? Are you running local? I've been having some good results with qwen3, just he 30b parameter version which runs fine on my GPU. I really hate seeing people on "my side" do the "I don't actually need to understand how this works because it's demonic" thing

bobore

It's just revealing existent truths, indeed

Mauve_Avenger

You should intentionally suck my dick. What a stupid thing for you to say

bobore

The phone is an organ.

bobore

Chinese industrial policy: energy policy. Energy and chips.

Z

this guest keeps interrupting Liz smdh

Joan Guenther

My god this is a great podcast - episode after episode I mean come on. Brace all sex appeal and back story Liz an intelligence too wide-ranging and commodious to be constrained by the form yet attuned to the job at hand the contributions of both enhanced by the elegantly restrained very sophisticated and snappy production values of Yung Chomsky oh Jason Jason Jason your parents must be proud …

Lulu

This is a listen twice episode for those of us with smooth brains 🧠

mexicanhalloween .

"things working out in the way that they do"=mass social murder

Michael Alexander

the Liz-dissects-market-dynamics arc of this show is by far the strongest

sandro

Honestly good questions. I can try to take a stab at them: 1. I was maybe oversimplifying a bit just to define the term. The big difference between productive and unproductive labor is just whether the labor itself produces surplus value above the cost of the labor. So yeah, service work can technically be productive in some cases, but that’s a very narrow definition. In practice, people call it unproductive because it’s extremely difficult to scale and extract increasing surplus value from. The pathway from labor to profit is indirect and doesn’t lend itself easily to capitalist expansion. 2. Fair point. Labor intensiveness doesn't make labor unproductive by itself, especially since surplus value can only come from labor in a Marxist framework. The issue is that capitalist production hinges on increasing productivity (usually through automation or process improvements). But the kind of care work they’re talking about in the episode is resistant to that. It demands constant human input and doesn’t scale well. You can’t automate it like a factory line, so it’s hard for capital to squeeze out more surplus value without cutting wages or pushing longer hours. The work they talked about in the ep is actually so unproductive that they're doing it in peoples' homes to try to cut costs as much as possible. It's also worth keeping in mind that labor productivity isn't just a Marxist thing. Economists rely pretty heavily on labor productivity metrics for their work, and even Adam Smith talked about labor productivity.

Mauve_Avenger

Thanks, I think I get it completely now; I appreciate what you're talking about re: productivity increase potential of 'classic' commodity production vs service work and now I see that I was interpreting Liz's "unproductive" as "non-productive" rather than the "less productive / productivity potential vs other commodity production".

Andrew

Anyone have a good book recommendation to help me understand what the fuck they’re talking about in these econ eps?

Doc Adna

Brace thank you for letting it all hang out, you made me laugh so hard with your dream retelling

Houthi & the Blowfish

I used to work at a state agency helping victims of elder abuse. And my God, you have no idea how that Home Care thing is a powder keg

MLVF

You’d be surprised at what they’re teaching in Clown College these days

Wilian Moreira

SHOUTOUT TIPTOES, THE MOST UNACCEPTABLE MOVIE EVER MADE

CJ

I think I'm fine with forgetting this one, no offence to the pod, I just don't think I'll ever get it 🥲

DarylBarenziah

Sorry I should link stuff like that it was just hard to find

DarylBarenziah

It’s William Rees too lmao mixed him up with some other guy

Lochlyn

Joe is very smart but it’s a shame his jaw seems to be wired shut preventing him from speaking normally

Cardboard

I like Joe but I stopped listening after the third time he interrupted the hosts to keep talking. Show some respect when youre the guest on someone elses program

Marit

All in on open source yeah

Marit

Check out the ghost stories for the end of the world (friend of the show) podcast series on Olaf Palme

Ramona

Why did he keep interrupting Liz :(

CactiFlowFlow

Alan Greenspan, husband of MSDNC Andrea Mitchell

Gwyn

Sorry off topic but what was that book that Brace mentioned a few months ago in the vein of Christian mysticism?

CuckBucket

Yeah but they also have manufacturing which we don’t.

Le Michel diplomatique

Two headlines under business on China Daily today: “Aging populations sparks need for medical escorts, hospital aides” “AI injects new dynamism to nation’s consumption, trade”

Simon Steensig

Is Joe in fact Les Claypool or his long lost twin? Sure sound much a like haha

CJ

A huge factor is housing, people literally can't settle down with a family when they have no place of their own and pay out sometimes 60% of income on rent. Then we get the million/billionaire and landlord class worrying about population decline 🙃

CJ

Another big part of the unproductive state of the economy I would say is the rentier housing model which has 0% productivity yet the average drain is like 40% of renter's income on just the roof over their heads (UK stats). I would suggest that's a large reason for people not having kids. Landlords are a parasitic class.

J Fitz

Haven’t raised prices? Now I pay $7 and get a newsletter that I only read 1/4 of the time (when Liz writes it)

Brian Ward

The game is called the tower of Hanoi puzzle, the paper is the illusion of thinking from apple's machine learning division

Sam

Liz u are wrong Materialists IS a comedy!!! Also a drama!!

Alexander

In my mind, this guest probably looks like that "expert" guy on pawn stars with the funny hat. Hang on, I got a FOMC guy let me get him on the pod..

CummyPuss

your other option is to get a mortgage and be funding banks which are equally as draining and parasitic

CummyPuss

the creature from jekyll island about the fed. how do the people of this podcast feel about that book?

Eran Greenberg

Could taste the Vyvanse in his mouth

TRM

Regarding the back-and-forth about lowered productivity, I'm surprised Weisenthal and the TrueAnon crew didn't talk about deregulation, the decline of unions, and the rolling back of labor protections and benefits, rather than pointing to smartphones as the culprit. If the a substantial part of the workforce has no health benefits, no sick leave, and is working multiple jobs to make ends meet, no wonder no one is productive anymore and no wonder nothing works well anymore. Since Weisenthal cites some examples relating to air travel, I would recommend reading Ganesh Sitaraman's Why Flying is Miserable and What to Do About It.

CummyPuss

the gong is fucking comedy gold💀

N P

You guys should try and get Quinn Slobodian if possible, BU history professor. His book Crack Up Capitalism is a great look into how libertarian exit and soft secession are downstream of Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society.

HP

One thing that too often goes unremarked in these attempts to gauge the seriousness of AI enthusiasts’ prophecies is that we’ve given the keys to the foreseeable future to a bunch of dudes (mostly) who grew up losers and now spend all the money trying to invent evil robots they read about in fiction they didn’t understand. It’s a pretty obvious indicator the US reached peak sloth at some point and is now just tumbling drunkenly down a long dark stairway

Timothy

Is it bad that I much prefer Ghislaine-themed episodes?

dumb bitch

i wish for a transcript

mrakobesiye

Emergency Birthday Book episode when

Kate Derringer

Please tell me you guys aren’t on vacation right now

ThatFlyingScotsman

Honestly I thought quite well of the guest, until he admitted that he asked ChatGPT what Palantir did, instead of looking it up for himself. How am I supposed to take someone seriously when they go to the LLM to get their answers for important questions that they should know? This guy's entire job seems to be financial news and political journalism, and he doesn't know what PALANTIR does? And when he's presented with realising he doesn't know what it does, he asks the fucking Cleverbot 9000?

o

He already knew what Palantir does. He asked ChatGPT bc it demonstrates how the info LLMs are trained on about groups like this are just the surface level stuff

ThatFlyingScotsman

No he doesn't. The conversation at 1:10:00 is Brace bringing up how a lot of Blockchain propaganda brought up how the technology could have been transformative for hospitals - which obviously was bunk but that's tech propaganda - and Weisenthal says "...the other day, I was in the airport and I was like, you know what, I'm going to finally do this. I'm going to ask ChatGPT what Palantir does...because I want to get to the bottom of this, and I had some time to kill." No where is he couching his statement in the idea that he's doing this to demonstrate anything, he quite clearly says he used ChatGPT to "get to the bottom of this", in regards to what Palantir does.

Tim Scott

A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Gwyn

Thank you! Do you remember what episode this was mentioned? I think there were a few more titles mentioned so I want to relisten.

Sebastian

Suddenly a bunch of episdoes appear locked, been a member for 3yrs whats the deal? you received payment on the 1st ???

David Haigh

On 1 hour 39 point of tv characters you can talk to. Take Parasocial podcast relationships, add notebook LM, plus Chat/ AI agents, and you've got a total closed loop

mary

why am i locked out

mary

i am locked out but paid twoce

mary

sorry don't know how to do this i'm lucky to find my way HERE

Jo Schmo

The Cloud of Unkowing

Justin Ford

most recent ep shows locked for me

Gwyn

This is what I was looking for! Thanks.

Robert Scherer

North Korea has a low fertility (I believe around 1.6) but it's more than double South Korea's dismal 0.7

Zane

Re looking at the damn phone: Do not listen to what that guy three or four episodes ago said about The Society of the Spectacle (being meandering or whatever). That book is a ray of light

Emily

You can tell by the follow up amongst all and his ancillary word choice that he clearly already knows what Palantir is and just wanted to see what Chat GPT would say, as the person above described

Mauve_Avenger

For a gentle introduction to Marxist economic analysis, Thier's "A People's Guide to Capitalism" is good. For a more dense contextualization of the build-up to the 21st century US / Western scene, Harvey's "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" is solid.

CE

China is embracing AI in every industry, but unlike the US they have the capacity to regulate the shit out of it as soon as it becomes a nuisance. They won’t let their Altmans and Theils steer the ship. The second Jack Ma starting talking like Elon Musk, they sat his ass down.

Barry

I'm locked out... Is this because I loved ZORT too much??

Barry

Click that wee round picture trueanon logo then you can hit message

Budget Hireling

Me when you google a biased map of Central Asia instead of flying there and using cartography to chart the landmass yourself

OutofBeerRage

Haven't a clue what's being talked about here. Get back to De niro suckin he own shit

ThatFlyingScotsman

If your job was a geographer, I would be kind of annoyed if you relied upon an etch-a-sketch rather than doing your job. It is the same thing with a political and economics journalist relying on an LLM for their researching. I don't give a shit about Joe Bloggs using it, but I do when your entire job is supposedly based upon your own expertise in the field.

absoluteboi

have you guys abandoned us?

jessie

they usually put out eps on tuesdays can anyone confirm?

casey

Are yall on vacation? Cause …

OutofBeerRage

Probably some last minute power grab for Charlie Kirks job

Michaela Ivalu

So I guess we know who you're going to talk about in the next episode 👀

Erika

Emergency pod PLEASE

Madison Perry

This is pretty rude. I bet you’re way less intelligent than this guest.

Blank

Every time TA is on break some wild stuff happens

Jonboi 0115

Every time they talk about Jackson Hole all I can think about is the On Cinema bit with Tim joining a biker gang and wrecking his motorcycle.

Drew

This was so awesome

bobore

So much for the tolerant left 🙄

babygurl

This guy has a crazy ass voice and i love it

Killer Dan

every time i think im out - they pull me right back in

Jessica

This was absolutely fantastic. Thank you.