We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Today I'm
happy to be joined by Carol Roth. She's the author of the new book
that is out on July eighteenth. It's called You Will Own Nothing, Your
War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back. Carol is
a recovering investment banker and actually knows so much of the self the stuff from
her own up close and personal experiences with that world. So Carol, thank
you so much for joining us. Thank you, Emily. Yeah, that
the recovery sort of a twelve step process. I'm not sure if I'm ever
out of step eleven, but I try my hardest. Well, you've done
the most important thing, which is admitting that you haven't thank you, thank
you, which is what this entire book is. But I just want to
start by saying this book is an achievement. It is sweeping. It goes
through so many different aspects. I mean, everything down to like nitty gritty
of social media, but then to investment banking as you alluded to earlier.
I mean, it's just just it must have been a real labor of love.
Otherwise there's no way there's otherwise, there's no way you could have written
something like this. I think it was a labor of hate because I hated
the fact that I had to write this. Yeah, I hated every moment
of this. And then I just wanted to be a game show host.
I didn't want to depress people, but it really is. You know,
I was trying to find it through live through all of these issues that people
had been talking to me about. I've been an advocate of wealth creation and
as we get, as he said, social credit, Wall Street competing with
you for for your home, the dollar debasement and inflation that we've been facing,
Big Tech trying to rent your life back to you as a service or
a subscription ESG. You know, I kept trying to put this through line
together and then it just sort of hit me, you all owe nothing.
You know, this meme that we had been seeing everywhere, and that really
ended up being a very nice way to tie it together. But when people
hear you will own nothing. It sounds so conspiratorial. So one of the
things I tried to do in the book, which made it a labor of
hate instead of love, was to source everything, you know, from every
place I could, especially when I could take it right from the source and
the people who were saying these things. And so I do think it's a
really important work and the fact that, you know, we get to the
end with a plan to fight back, because I do think a lot of
people focused on talking points and very macro sort of issues and then everyone's like,
Okay, I bought into this, what do I do now? And
they're sort of left at the altar. And I didn't want to do that
to people. You know, I feel like there aren't enough folks who are
very clear eyed about the problems that are also so knowledgeable about the subject,
because I think people who tend to be knowledgeable about our system of finance are
generally pretty defensive of it. And they're part of that world, you know,
they're people who are going to the World Economic Forum and are in constant
communication with the folks on the hill or at the World Health Organization, and
aren't you know, even if they're well intentioned, they aren't cleared eyed enough
or they don't have enough distance to kind of see what's really happening. So
could you talk to us about maybe even the meme is a good place to
start. You will own nothing. You write a lot about Klaus Schwab,
the Great Reset, the World Economic Forum, which maybe does sound conspiratorial to
some people, but is really the opposite. It's sort of plane in sight
and is happening openly. They're bragging about it. What does that have to
do with this broader conversation about the war? As I'm taking this from your
subtitle with a new financial world order? Like why is property and ownership?
How do we know it's so central to this? Yeah, I'm going to
answer that one second. But as you let into that, I think the
difference between me and perhaps some of my colleagues, as I come from a
blue collar background, neither of my parents went to college. My dad was
an electrician. I was granted this incredible opportunity to seize the American dream,
and so I am particularly defensive about that. I have a very sort of
rising tides lift all both the pie can expand mindsets, and unfortunately, I
think a lot of people in the Wall Street world want to protect this little
fiefdom that they have, or maybe they came from privilege and so they think
that it's you know, came to them for reasons other than how it really
did come about. So I do think when you are on the beneficiary end
of this, and there are a lot of people and I am one of
those people who've been on the beneficiary end of it, it's kind of hard
to step back and say, well, let's get rid of this whole thing.
But I take that Henry Ford mindset. You know, I'm going to
build cars, but I want to pay my workers enough so that they can
buy the car, because I actually think that's the way that everybody does well,
and that the wealthier people get wealthy, you know, by marriage and
sort of free enterprise. But I think that that's shifted as we've moved away
from free enterprise towards more central planning. So the actual question to add to
me, so that's really interesting. Actually, yeah, so thank you.
So the actually question is, you know, so when you see this meme
going around social media, you will own nothing. You'll be happy. My
first instinct is somebody who tends to be a little skeptical of everything. Is
okay? Did they take this out of context? Is this wrong? Because
the World Economic Forum is a non governmental organization that is littered with the business
and political elite. You know, everybody gets together, they go to Davos,
Switzerland, They find their private jets, they wear their fancy clothes,
they stake and caviar and share big ideas like why would these elite be you
or anybody who's associated with them, be predicting the end of private property by
twenty thirty. And it struck me in particular as somebody who has advocated for
wealth creation opportunities for more than a quarter of a century. You know,
I know that you need to have ownership to have wealth. Ownership comes from
having assets that have the opportunity to retain value or to appreciate and value.
That's the differential between just making some money and then putting it to work with
you to really drive that wealth creation. So the idea that the World Economic
Forum would be having this prediction seem kind of crazy. And it took me
very little research in this particular case to find the video, which is by
the way, still on their Twitter feed. You can find it. The
eight predictions for the world in twenty thirty. Number one, you'll own nothing
and you'll be happy. And a few things strike me with that. It's
not I'll own nothing and be happy. It's not we'll own nothing and be
happy. It's you'll own nothing and be happy. So there's there's a clear
distinction there that whoever's sharing this doesn't seem to think that they're a part of
it. It's that their their prediction for you and the idea that you're going
to be happy. Because throughout history, people who haven't had property, have
not been free, haven't been particularly happy, and in many cases have ended
up dead. So that didn't seem like a really good outcome and sort of
a weird projection. So you know, I'm sort of pondering this, and
one of the things, you know additionally that I know is as a student
of financial history, is that we are in a very weird time in sort
of the global financial order. Also something that sounds like a conspiracy theory,
but just type into Google or duc duct go Joe Biden New World Order and
we can see all the times that he's said it, and it's on the
White House's website and all of those things because it does happen on a regular
basis, Like we've been the center of the global financial universe for about eighty
years. Before us, it was the British. Before the British, it
was the Dutch. And you know, this is something that happens with,
you know, pretty clear regularity. And so if you look at that and
you put on some of the other things that are happening, the debtload of
the United States, the fact that the Biden administration weaponize the dollar and froze
access to Russia after they invaded Ukraine to their reserves, the fact the Fed
hasn't kept the dollar stable domestically or on the international stage. Like, there
are lots of things that say, we kind of seem like there's a there's
a push for change here. So if you are the wealthy and well connected
and you see these things happening, and you know history and you know that
there's a change over time, do you just kind of sit back and go,
well, I hope this works out okay for me, or I believe
do you think that you know they go well, you know things are going
to change. I better make sure that I'm taken care of my cronies are
taken care of that, you know, we retain as much power and wealth
going forward. And I would guess most people would say yes. Of course
they're going to say the latter. And I think that's kind of where this
this all comes from, is that they're trying to get as much for themselves
that they kind of don't care. It's not that they're they're coming from a
place of like, we're trying to make you own nothing. It's just that
we're trying to get what we can. We don't care if you have anything.
And by the way, if you buy into it that it's much easier
for us to affect this change. If you decide you don't want to own
things, and you somehow believe that this is better for you, then it's
going to be much easier than if you resist. You have some really interesting
history in the book. You talk about Bretton Woods and here's the phrase you
use exactly the post World War two quote rise of the US financial Empire.
But then right afterwards you do the downfall of Bretton Woods and the emergence of
the petro dollar. And this is really really interesting issue, really relevant history,
and I wanted to ask just if you could talk to people who haven't
had the opportunity to read the book yet, maybe what people's appetites for your
argument as what happened in that shift from Bretton Woods to the downfall of Bretton
Woods and the rise of the US financial empire. Though, it all really
hinged on this time in the early nineteen seventies when President Nixon decided to take
us off the gold standard, and that really created a shift because we had
a representative currency, a currency that was basically your dollar was stood for gold.
It was as good as gold, as they like to say in terms
of international trade. And the reason behind that was to have stability in the
money if you're going to have it as a unit of account or a unit
of measure like that measuring stick kind of needs to be pretty clear and stable
otherwise one day, I mean, imagine if your ruler one day a foot
was six inches in stay it was twelve inches. Kind of hard to do
measurements somehow. When money is that unit of measure, you know that shifts,
and nobody seems to care and take that as an issue. And so
once we came up the gold standard and everyone was going, Okay, you
know, we said that we were going to use the dollars. You know
what's going on here. Basically, we made a deal with Saudi Arabia,
who you know was kind of the head still really is at the head of
the Arab oil producing countries. They're producing a ton of oil, and we
kind of came to terms with them and said, okay, here's the deal.
You're going to agree that oil is going to be priced in dollars.
It's going to be the you know, we'll do what we can to keep
it stable for you, and you're going to take those dollars and you're going
to plow them back into treasury securities so that we can finance our government cheaply.
And what do you get for that. We're going to protect you militarily.
And you know, Saudi Arabia looked at the range of options for the
range of other countries and went, yeah, okay, that seemed to make
sense. And so as Luke Gromman, who is a really great economist particular
around the area of oil, says that we went from you know, the
dollar being as good as gold, as being as good as gold for oil,
and that ended up being sort of, you know, almost the de
facto reserve for the dollar, and the FED would make decisions that you know,
if if oil got too higher, too low, they would shift the
interest rate so that oil would go back to trading in a narrow range,
and it would make sense, you know, on sort of this many dollars
buys oil. And that's important if you are think about a country today like
China, which is a net importer of you not only food, but oil,
and these are all priced in dollars, and all of a sudden,
you don't hold the dollars stable as the reserve currency, and it takes from
that more US dollars in order to buy food and to buy oil. Well,
that becomes a matter of economic security for them and potentially national security.
So US moving away from you know, kind of really holding the dollars stable
on the international stage was a big catalyst in terms of shifting what's happening in
the financial world order. And when you're hearing things like the Bricks countries,
which is Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa looking to
move away from the dollars in distansion to the weaponization of the reserves, it's
that this instability of the dollar that they have been experiencing. And it's funny
because coming out of Breton Woods, there is an economist, Robert Triffin noted
economists who had this thing called Triffin's dilemma. On part of it was that
when you hold the world reserve currency or always trying to have a trade off
between holding the dollars stable or the reserve currency stable for the domestic economy,
in this case the US and the world. What's amazing to me is that
the Fed has done neither. Right, We've experienced a huge debasement of the
dollar here in the United States. It's not stable. Maybe it's good against
other countries, but not when you go to the grocery store, right,
it's not buying the same amount of groceries that you've got a couple of years
ago. And it's also not stable on the international stage. So they've managed
to do neither. And again, these are all little kind of like signposts
and catalysts that are sending the signals up to the people going, yeah,
I'm not sure how much longer this particular scenario can last. And you know,
as we see in history, you know, these are the kinds of
things and the kinds of ships that we see that have happened at the end
of these other financial empires. Yeah, it's like I think what you're describing
as maybe this sense of existential dread that people in the know are picking up
on or that they feel and then lash out by sort of trying to protect
their own mini empires and their fiefdoms. People might use your critics might say,
you know, that sounds conspiratorial. You know, as you alluded to
earlier, how much of this is intentional or how much of this is transparent
and public? You know, we can we can see this happening as is
the case. I mean, this is on the World Economic Forum website some
of it, as you mentioned. Um, So to people who say,
you know, that sounds like that sounds it's like these long time French conspiracy
theories about the shadowy puppet master rightings. Um what's what's the kind of reality?
Um, as you've you've researched it, what does it really look like?
Yeah? Well, certainly you know in terms of financial world orders shifting.
If you tell me as a conspiracy, I'm going to say, well,
how did Brett Woods come about? You know, how did the British
take the post position from the Dutch like explain that to me, like I,
you know, I didn't make that up. That's very well documented and
you know people I quote, you know, age hedge fund manager Ray Dalio
in the book. He's done a lot of great research on the different financial
orders and history and cycles. Um. So we know that part's not a
conspiracy. In terms of the US being a little long in the tooth,
you look at our debt to GDP. We have a publicist public debt,
not including the intragovernmental part, but public debt to GDP is at one hundred
and twenty five percent. You can go back to the imf UM, you
know, they they kind of say that things get a little out of control
somewhere between seventy and eighty percent. The Treasury has said we're on an unsustainable
fiscal path. The CBO has said we're on an unsustainable fiscal path. So
that's I'm not sure where the conspiracy isn't there. In terms of dedollarization,
we have seen central bank lighten up on their reserves, particularly at an accelerated
pace. The pace between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two was ten times
more the sort of standard or average pace that of you know, kind of
degradation and the reserve holdings from years past, and we have you know,
the bricks countries coming out. They have a conference in August where they said
they're going to be exploring other currencies because they don't want to depend on the
US dollars. So like, again, I didn't say that. And you
know, it's not like a bunch of tinfoil hat people saying it. Like
they're the ones who are saying it. When it comes to the new World
Order. You go to the White House's website. March twenty one, twenty
twenty two, speech before the Business Roundtable, which is the CEOs of all
the major companies in the US, do you know most of the publicly traded
companies and maybe some others, And Joe Biden literally said this. I mean,
I'm sure someone else wrote it for him, but he said it aloud
that you know, this is something that happens every three or four generations.
There's going to be a new World order out there, and we've got to
lead it. So like, I'm not sure which element of this seems theoretical.
If you want to say it's a conspiracy, the conspiracy the coordination is
with these different organizations that are working together and happen to be saying the same
things and signing on to principles together. But it's certainly not theoretical, like
I'm showing you that they're saying it. One thing I found so interesting about
this book is a lot of people, something that frustrates me actually on the
very brave, courageous and smart people who are fighting the political establishment and who
are very clear eyed about the problem ahead of us. Also then, UM,
in so many cases are looking to government for answers. And I see
this especially in the right a lot a lot of politicians. Like one thing
that it blows my mind is the child cash payment policy, which is like
you're you're asking for the government to have more strings to control families, to
say you are not getting your cash payment that you now rely on because you
will not vaccinate your child with you know, experimental mRNA technology whatever it is.
UM, I guess I want to ask you about that dynamic. Um.
You know, how should people who on the one hand do see the
sort of cultural economic wreckage of so much of this consolidation, and on the
other hand want to fix it. Um, what is the solution, you
know, what is the solution outside of consolidating more government power or giving the
government new opportunities to wield power over people. Yeah. I always liken it
to the arsonist who's burnt down your house and then he comes with like a
water bottle and he's like, hey, I wanna help you put the fire
out in your house. So sorry it's burnt down. It's like, okay,
ay, you burned it down, but you've got a water bottle.
How's that helping? And so I feel like it's the same thing with these
entities. You know, the different categories that I have in the book are
sort of government and government related, which is you know, Congress and the
Fed and you know, those kinds of things. These what I call bad
actors. So the WEF the un big businesses, you know, kind of
all these big connected, you know, elite people, and then big tech
stands in a category by itself because you know, many cases they have become
de facto governments themselves, and their size and scale and scope are really frightening
when it comes to this. So you have to kind of look to each
of these individual issues to figure out where the problem is. There probably is
some role for government in some of these things, and as somebody who's a
small government person, it kind of pains me to say that. But the
reality is, when you're looking at something like big tech and sort of the
need for a bill of digital rights, I think that when you think about
the telephone, and you're probably not old enough, Emily, but back when
I was a kid, I had a rotary phone. At one point,
I had a phone with little buttons and you'd call and like your friend's mom
would answer the phone. You'd be like, oh, no, it's the
mom, high Missinessode. So I'm so glad it's not the dead. Oh
that's talk to Jane, you know. Like so things were very, very
different. But one thing that was a law was that, you know,
this was infrastructure, and you know, the government sort of protected the right
to infrastructure and said, your telephone company, you know, you'll have this
privilege because there's only you know, so many of you that are you know,
can lay cables and you know have the opportunity to do this, but
you can't refuse service to anyone. So it's not like you and I had
a conversation. They didn't like what we said, or maybe they didn't like,
you know, where one of us worked, or we ate too many
burgers or whatever it was, and they just said, sorry, you can't
talk on the phone anymore. Like that's I think, like you put in
that context that sounds insane, but it's exactly the kinds of thing that's happening
in the digital sphere. And if you think about like your phone, your
access to the digital world, there's two companies whose operating systems cover ninety nine
plus percent of the planet, not just the United States, but the planet.
So there's no free market, there's no capitalism, there's no competition.
It's it's infrastructure with a with a duopoly. So I think, you know,
we do need again in the same spirit of a regular bill of rights,
that we have these natural rights that need to be protected, and they
need to be protected now in this sphere, and we're probably going to get
it wrong, but we need to start to go down that path to at
least, you know, kind of try to ran this in a little bit.
But there's other places where clearly the problem is not going to be solved
by more government. I mean, one of the things that's in the news
that I would imagine is probably near and dear to your heart and some of
your listeners. Is this whole student loan debacle right that you know, oh,
we're going to forgive student debts to become such a hot button issue and
everybody's sitting and they're talking about the symptom, but not the ailments. And
the ailments is the fact that the government nationalized student lending in large part,
and in doing so, not only became the largest predatory lender probably in the
entire world, but they also enabled a wholesale wealth transfer from young people like
in some cases minors like seventeen years old up to eight, people who are
very young and don't have sort of the experience to maybe evaluate an ROI,
and they're enabling that transfer wealth to colleges and their administrators and basically handicapping the
ability for smart young people who think that they're going to college to better their
situation to now be you know, indentured servants of the state for the rest
of their lives. And so the idea that you're going to get them to
somehow help by like, you know, oh, we're gonna we're gonna forgive
some of this debt. When you need to get the government out of lending.
You need to have underwriting. You need to bring bankruptcy back, which
the government got rid of. You need to, you know, have the
colleges have some skin in the game. You need to reset the entire system
here. But you have people who are sitting and arguing about like what level
of debt forgive this should happen instead of just addressing like okay, I think
we've missed the entire point and the fact that you don't have politicians that are
standing up like if I were running right now, I would that would be
like one of my first things is like, you know, we are we
are enabling a wealth transfer from young people to colleges. That's wrong, That's
fundamentally wrong. We you know, we are saddling young people with debts.
Instead of giving them opportunities, we're taking away their wealth creation opportunities. We're
creating bearers. Like why wouldn't that be one of the top things that people
are concerned about right now? Yeah, based on a why. And it's
another great parallel with the child cash payments. It's like, if you wanted
to stort the market that way, you're also creating a stick that the government
can use to as they've done with universities for years, comply with your ideological
demands. So it just that's another perfect example of the following book and without
getting into too much into the culture war aspect of this, but for poor
people, there has been no focus on like, let's teach you about ownership,
let's find ways to remove barriers so that you understand the difference between spending
and investing and that you can stand on your own two feet. Everything they've
done has been the opposite, and getting them to depend on the government so
that they can buy the votes and cement the power. And I think in
sort of these socioeconomic areas that are more poor and have these like long term
structural issues, like they're the number one people who need the like you will
own nothing message, right like that because they've lived it, but they don't
understand where that's coming from. There they've identified the problem, but they don't
know where that has come from or what the solution is. And so much
would shift if we got more people thinking about this ownership mentality and oh,
by the way, told them that that's that's the American promise here, right,
that's what you're doing here, and you should be able to see that
just like everybody else, I want to ask, we're crypto factors into this
equation because Sam bankman Fried was sort of notoriously fitted by Bill Clinton and kind
of elites around the world for a while. But obviously there are a lot
of sincere crypto boosters who see it as an important tool against exactly what you're
describing. So from your perspective, where does the crypto order kind of fit
in here? So this is a really good question, and I'm going to
speak to it in a neutral way because just for full disclosure, I'm not
a crypto person personally, like I'm not somebody who's invested in bitcoin or theorium.
It doesn't fit my personal investment thesis. But I also haven't dismissed it
either, so I have I feel like a fairly neutral approach to it.
I think the first thing is the thesis. The reason why people are interested
in something like bitcoin is exactly the kinds of things that we're talking about.
And you will own nothing, particularly the pieces around the debasement of the dollar
and the fact that we have a federal government as well as a federal Reserve
working together that have done everything they can to just erode the value of the
dollar, that don't seem to know that it's supposed to be a proxy for
productivity, that think that it's just something that you can print at nauseum and
you know that won't have any impacts on your life, and they just have
been derelict in their duty. There's lots of moral hazard around the entire structure.
And so you know, the idea that you don't believe in fiat currency,
you don't trust the government, and you want to have something that is
separate and you not able to be manipulated. And I'm not going to weigh
in on whether that's true or not, but just that thesis puts with everything
that we're talking about here, and particularly as we move closer to a potential
central bank digital currency which is looking to exploit and conflate the interest in crypto
UM with you know, their own very highly centralized digital based currency, which
means it's nothing ohing like, but enough people will be confused by it,
and particularly with the with the Sam Bateman Freeds of the world, you know,
the issues particularly with like something like a bitcoin, these kind of high
higher end cryptos. If if you will, UM is that it's really the
issues have been at the exchange level. It hasn't been at the currency level.
So that has been where there's been, um, you know, these
kind of frauds and issues and whatnot. Is you know, how how these
exchange mechanisms, which they themselves are not crypto there are services provider um.
You know, that's been the challenge and so I think it's a challenge for
the industry overall. But imagine the pitch if you're the government saying, well,
you can't trust the crypto industry because it's not the government, but you
should trust the government. We're not going to mention that we're the ones that
debased your money, but again, oursons too, burned your house down's got
his water bottle, and so you should trust us. And we saw this
emily with the stimulus payments, right, we saw how people just fundamentally don't
understand what money is, where it comes from, you know, what his
purpose is. And people were like, I need my stimulus check, I
need my thousand bucks or my twelve hundred bucks, you know, whether they
were the Donning dollars or the Biden bucks, that I just want my money.
And there were people like me and others who are standing up going no,
it's a trick. Don't do it. You're going to end up paying
seven or ten thousand dollars a year for the rest of your life or more
for taking that money because you just can't do that. It just you can't
create money from nowhere. It's it's a trick. They're going to debase the
currency, and they just didn't understand that. And so I could imagine a
scenario where they use these carrots to get people into a highly centralized currency,
which would further cement their power and control, would you know, completely take
away any privacy that you have and potentially any agency that you had over your
money. And they'll say things like, Emily, I'm going to give you
a hundred digital dollars. If you just give me one dollar, you're going
to be rich, and you're like, yes, I'm going to be a
millionaire. This is great. Or they do things like you know, they
say, hey, if you want universal basic income, we're going to only
pay that out in digital currency. Or you don't like inflation, well we
can control inflation if we have a digital currency. Not letting people know that
when they say, oh, I'm going to slow down, you know,
purchasing, and I'm gonna destruct demand. I'm not doing that anymore with interest
rates. I'm going to do that by literally shutting off the access for you
to that. So I think there are a lot of carrots out there which
are financially A literate population will jump on to make these things become reality and
in turn ensure that we have less freedom and opportunity, and that unfortunately,
you end up ooning nothing. We talk a lot about social credit, you
write about it in the book, and people are really afraid of the kind
of Chinese style social credit system, although we kind of have had right I
was gonna say, and you're right about this, we have sort of a
soft social credit system. We think of what's happening in China and it is
much more extreme and intense, But we have a we have a version of
credit. Obviously we have for years. What should people be looking for?
Um, when it comes to the evolution of that is it already dangerous?
Word is? And how much worse could it get? In the United States?
So I start to see it as through steps, I see you cancel
culture, which we clearly already have becoming sort of this informal social credit becoming
a completely structured state system. And I would offer that we're probably in the
middle. If you think about what happened during the pandemic, and you had
the state issuing these mandates and you had a bunch of useful idiots running around
going, yeah, I know you have to do this. You know,
they came after your social standing, which is your opportunity to get new ways
and new paths to create wealth. So you know, you don't want to
be a toxic person or else nobody's going to hire you for that next gig
or present you an opportunity. So if you weren't wearing a mask, they
took a video of you and put it on social media, or they said,
you know, you don't have a vaccine card, so you can't come
into a restaurant, you can't participate in society. The next level of that
is actually coming after your job. And we saw that, you know,
we've seen that both in terms of you know, the cancel culture. Somebody
says something bad and everybody goes to their employer and tries to get them fired.
But from the States standpoint, we saw that, you know, with
the with the executive orders, that basically said no, you can't have your
job if you don't get a vaccine. And people who were very qualified in
areas where we really need people were all of a sudden separated for their job
because of a health mandate because you would not listen to the government to do
something that you put something in your body that you didn't want to taking away
that agency, you know, over your body. So that was pretty staggering.
And then you know the third level of that is actually taking away your
ownership. And you know they did that for small businesses. You know,
they stepped down a third of the economy at one point in time, and
you know they took for some period of time businesses. We saw our neighbors
to the north, if you were part of the Freedom convoy, the truckers,
they froze access to the bank accounts. So and then you know,
outside of the realm of COVID, we see this all the time where somebody
says something bad on social media and they get two platforms and now all of
a sudden, not only can they not use the town square, maybe they
lose their PayPal account or their bank account or you know YouTube. I know,
with my book right now, I'm not allowed to advertise using Google and
YouTube on and off because you know, quote unquote election advertising. But anyone
seeing my trailer has nothing to do with an election, so you know,
I'm going to have to kind of put a question mark around that. So
when you think about this in sort of a social credit system, there's really
two ways to kind of get it formalized at the state level. Is one,
as you need the technology to be able to gather information and store it
and analyze it at scale, which certainly we have that capability today. And
the second is you need the buy it, and what COVID taught us is
unfortunately we have the buy it. There are enough people who derive some sort
of what I call rowe return on ego for being part of the you know,
the right crowd. The fact that you know, you can put an
emoji in your bio, or show everyone your picture with your mask, or
put a sign in your front yard where t shirt, or just maybe get
a visit to the White House or you know, whatever it is. But
you get some sort of you know, other benefit for being part of this
group that you know somebody has decided is in the moral rights, and you
know that creates the mechanism for social credit. And on top of like on
the personal side, you know, we're also seeing it on the business side
in terms of ESG. And you know, this is interesting as it relates
to the China system because in China, their formalized social credit actually started for
businesses, like it was more formalized for businesses than it is for individuals.
And the reason is because you know, those where you get the really big
important people, the billionaires and the people who are doing well, and if
you don't put those people in their place, then it becomes hard to control
everybody else. So it's um. You know, as you kind of go
through these things and peel back the onion, it's so crazy to see how
they all tie together and how they all kind of come back to this this
umbrella theme of you know, your ownership and all the things that that property
rights stand for. I mean, it was so important to our founders.
It's the way you know, they talked about I mean, the reason America
is America's because it was one of the first places where there was this vast
ownership over your own land, your own kingdom. There was this land to
spread out and to have autonomy over your life and to be part of a
community. And so it's just the live in a pod idea that people have
for us. And maybe if people aren't familiar with that, that's maybe another
good question for you, Carol. I think it's just they live in the
pod, eat the bugs, you will own nothing. Meme is like it
is so dismissed. And I think it's probably true that not everybody who's part
of, you know, creating a system like that is nefarious and understands themselves
as a puppet master, but as somebody who knows this world and knows people
in it, what is the you know? Not for the Justin Trudeau.
I think we all kind of can understand the Justin Trudeaus and the cloud Schwabs
because they're all over telling us what their motivations are left and right. But
for the average person who is involved in this and is maybe facilitating it,
why are they rationalizing in their own mind? You know, Yes, we
need more central control, we need to more surveillance, we need to take
people's decisions away from them. What's going on that they justify that? I
mean, this super basic human nature. They're doing it because it benefits them
and they can never imagine being on the other side of it and having it
used against them. I mean, it's just, you know, it's it's
simple, short term thinking. It works for me now, and so I'm
going to go along with it. And I think that is sort of the
the crux of the issue is when you have these people and you know,
kind of goes back to the idea of right now, we're the center of
the global financial universe and they're just a whole flow of people who can't imagine
that that was ever different or that could ever change. But I guarantee you
if you went back to Britain, you know, before World War One,
during that time of you know, the the British Empire's reign, the people
of Britain probably went, oh my god, yeah, like we're always in
the center of the financial universe. And I was like, well, what
about the US, the United States? Like how are they? How are
they ever gonna do anything? And so I think that's just human nature is
like people, there are a lot of people who just can't see what they
can't see. They're aligned. It works for them until they're on the other
side of it and it comes for them like they find that shocking, like
how the system terms Like, wait, I thought I was part of I
was aligned with you guys. I was for the right thing, Like,
what do you mean that you're coming after me? So I think a lot
of this is just like really basic, simple stuff. I also think there
is sort of this this savior complex where you know, like people buy into
that there's a group of people who are smart and amazing and they're working for
the good of the people. One of my favorite things that I shared in
the book is a little Twilight Zone episode. I don't know if that reticonated
with you, Emily, but basically, you know, for the listeners who
aren't familiar with it, and the old Twilight Zone Nut show, which is
just phenomenal all around, had a particular episode where these aliens came down to
Earth, and you know, at first, the people of Earth were really
skeptical, going, you know, why are these aliens coming here? What
do they want? You know, they can hurt us, And so they
always go, look, we have amazing technology on our planet. We see
that you guys have wars and you have famines, all these things you don't
need to have that We're going to show you our technology, and we're going
to make your lives better. And of course, you know, at first
the people who Earth are like skeptical, going, that doesn't make any sense,
why would they want to do that, Like, no, we were
just here to help you out. So they put the alien through a lie
detector test and he passes with line call and they start using the technology and
it's working and they're like, this is great. Well, at the same
time, there's like the CIA type group and they find one of the aliens
like books that he's got behind. It seemed like some kind of a guidebook,
and they decode the cover and the cover says to serve man, and
they're like, oh, well see they said they just want to camp,
come here and serve man. Like that's amazing, We're amazing, Like this
is great. So things go along for a little bit. The aliens start
inviting people of Earth to their home country. They've board the spaceships. Great
the CI, one of the guys from the SA starts boarding a spaceship and
it turns out one of his colleagues has just decoded the rest of the book
and she runs to the spaceship. But she's like to third man, it's
the cookbook, and I just feel like that the takeaway here is like to
serve man is a cookbook, Like it sounds like great in theory, but
at the end of the day, you're totally misinterpreted what it is that they're
telling you. And so anytime I see these guys and no, I don't
think there's a plan to serve us up and eat us, but maybe there
is, I don't. I don't know yet. Then the bugs, you
know, and the depopulation doesn't work. But I just I feel like,
like, why these people who have these amazing lives and they could go sit
on their yachts, Like, are they really concerned about your life? Absolutely
not? And I think this blind faith and we need to follow this next
leader and find the person who's going to save us and make us better.
And then plus they sell us the propaganda right like the oh, the climate
catastrophe, don't mind me on my private jet going back to my mansion on
the waterfront. No, no, no, that's you know, don't worry
about that. But you you need to do this, and it goes back
to where we started, right, you will own nothing, not me,
Like I'm gonna be go over here having the time of my life, but
you will own nothing. And the other thing I wanted to ask was how
important this question of children You write about it in the book. This is
the one that probably will freak a lot of people out when they read it,
but it's also really central. I mean, when we think about property,
we think about land, we think about material possessions, but actually the
ownership of your own children shocked a lot of parents out in this area of
Virginia. One dad all of said, you know, you let the teacher
handle this. You know, the teacher knows better than the parents tell us,
particularly about children, and how central all of that is. So this
was a really difficult part for me to write. One for full disclosure,
I don't have children, as if some people don't think I should be weighing
on this, which is I think is fair. But the other part is
just the concept of ownership over another human being is an uncomfortable discussion. Endpoint.
But you know, as a parent who is responsible for your child,
you know from from the time that they are born, even before they were
born, you know, up until the age of eighteen. I think the
delineation is that you know that they're still your kids. And that you know,
as much as we can have ownership over a person, I think that
parental relationship is important. And certainly there are times when they are really bad
parents who are infringing on their kids' rights, and you know that there are
times when you know, we need to have some mechanism to shift that too,
because you know, not everybody's great and a good parent, but the
idea that like the state or the teachers or the school are in charge.
Like I keep saying these talking points out of the left that are like you
know, oh, well, you know, they're all of our children,
and like no that, but like hands off, you know, step away,
Like if you know, every think of my parents, And if somebody
from the state was like, oh, your mom said like I'm yours,
I would kick them right because she would have said absolutely not, stay away
from these crazy people. But there's this seeping of interference into it. And
I eat again to make Nazi Germany comparisons, and I hate to use nineteen
eighty four as a playbook instead of a work of fiction. But you know,
as a Jewish person who saw my people go through this, I think
there are important parallels. And you know, if you think about the Hitler
youth program that was incented to get children away from their families, have them
indoctrinated with propaganda, go and spy on families, friends, neighbors, and
turn them back into the States. And also, by the way, the
plot of nineteen eighty four right where the party that they called it in nineteen
eighty four had the same mechanism, and there were these, you know,
two main characters in the books through es central characters where their kids were the
way who actually ended up turning them in. So you know, the idea
that you as a parent shouldn't know what's happening in a classroom and that your
parents that your teacher knows better. It's a guy on Twitter who is like,
you know, they don't ask people, don't ask doctors for second opinions.
Why would you ask a teacher? And I'm like, you don't ask
your doctor. You don't ask a doctor for a second But you just assume
that that he's like, what are you talking about? Of course you should
be questioning everything. You have to get here. If it's something made,
you have to get a second opinion. So this idea that they're trying to
be like, no, just because somebody you know, shows up at a
school and as a teacher that all of a sudden, they're like, you
know, a godlike figure, really really creepy and get there are a lot
of great teachers out there that you know, work really hard and care about
the students. The teacher's unions are professional extortionists, so we'll just leave them
to the side for a second. But just the idea that there's this,
like any question about who should be deciding what's in the rights at any point
in time for your child other than you really resonated with the theme. And
so you know, with my cover when I like went we went through all
these kind of tangible things that you own and we crossed them out. The
last one was your life, and so you know, it could be your
freedoms, it could be your children, it could be a lot of other
things that's sort of encompassed that um. But you know, we tend to
to think of these these tangible material things, but there is sort of this
this broader issue that touches you know, freedom, agency, family and the
like. Yeah, we did a podcast with Nita Farhanei from Duke earlier this
year, who was talking about AI's ability to decode brain waves. Um and
again sounds like science fiction. That's your life, right if that is getting
uploaded sort of constantly to a cloud or to a database, and you know,
you may say Google as a private company and they able to defend your
data, protect your data, good luck when the government comes docking with subpoenas
or is accessing them through their back door seven oh two authority or whatever.
Why is it that the media, where we're supposed to be challenging power,
supposed to be the fourth estates, supposed to constantly be questioning the abuse of
power, is uncurious about everything that you're describing. There's great independent media out
there, you know. Obviously the Federalist is part of that, and we
like to think that we're part of that. But for the most part,
the people who claim to be at the top of their profession, the Wall
Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times aren't asking the right questions about
any of this. Why, as somebody who studied this, do you think
that is Yeah, it's so weird because some of the places will do it
some of the time, it's just not consistent. One of the things I
try to do in the book is when there was a corporate press or a
means remedia outlet that you know, kind of supported the thesis. I try
to use them because I've made it seem like it was easier for those people
to you know, harder for those people to say it's a conspiracy. I
guess the best way to say it, Um, I can I just go
back to, like, you know, the raiser, Like the simplest answer
is the best answer. And I just think that it's how people are getting
their benefits. And I think we've traded. I've used this this raiser already
row a lot of ROI for aro. We like it used to be about
you know, getting the investment and some of those kinds of things, and
now it's all about likes and am I in the right crowd? And you
know, did I get a check on Instagram? And you know, those
kinds of things people are valuing, which I think it sort of enables this
you will owe nothing thesis because they're not valuing the same kinds of things anymore
up until the point that you know, the likes on social media are great
until you try to pay your rent. And I don't know anybody who accepts,
you know, Twitter likes for payments, So then that becomes very very
difficult. But if you think about just the way the circles have been built,
I think a lot of the corporate press is part of the elite,
and you know, it's like, it seems like it's been a recent phenomenon,
but I remember when I studied Murray Rothbard and him talking about the creation
of the FED, that he said, you know, it was the academics
and the press who basically carried the propaganda out and helped to enable the creation
of the FED because it was the only way that if you know, they
did that they would be getting better jobs, and they would be getting more
money, and they would be getting in the inner circles. So I think
that in some ways that we maybe just you know again kind of only look
at now and see it is so bad, But in some ways it's always
been there, at least at some level, and now that there are more
choices has become more apparent. And that also, you know, politics has
become more of a national religion and sports system than perhaps it has been in
the past. And I think twenty four seven news and social media has exacerbated
that. Perhaps there's more space to fill, so with more space to fill
that. You know, some of these things kind of go by the way
in terms of, you know, some of the principles that may have happened
or something may have gotten scrapped in the past because it wasn't as objective we're
now. It's like, yeah, well we got some rooms, so just
throw it in there. But you know, it's the reality. I mean,
think about the questions that the reporter asked Joe Biden when he first started
about his favorite ice cream flavor, and you know, just some of the
the interference, the amount of times I saw articles telling you why inflation was
good for you or that you know, you should eat lentil. Let me
just stuff where you're like, there's no again, no way that somebody printed
this in like a major outlet, and it's like no, no, I've
got like multiple examples of it, and so they've got to be currying favor.
And I do think, you know, very much like you see in
the Treasury and the Fed. You know, this kind of revolving door between
Wall Street and higher learning institutions and those positions and all of the sort of
wealth and power that's created within that dynamic. I think that's the same thing
that happens in sort of the press and politics. I mean, look at
somebody like Jensaki, who went in and she was you know, the press
secretary so that she can audition for her MSNBC job, and then got the
MSNBC job. And then you get people who you know, are with the
press who then go into you know, whatever it is the academics, or
they work for political campaigner, they become a spree speechwriter, or they get
the podcasts, like it's it's like career. Your security for them to be
in that you know, kind of circle, and again that protection that hey,
if something goes down, I want to make sure that I have the
right alliances, and so I do. I think a lot of this is
just basic human nature, which was, you know, what the founders really
anticipated. I think in the way that they crafted you know, the original
documents, the founding documents, they've had a really keen sense of that and
how things go awry, and unfortunately we just have done a really crappy job
over the decades of you know, forcing everybody to stick to that. One
last question, and this is kind of a big question, but so much
of this starts to change as technology starts to change, and things you're describing
about property, I mean even our concept of property rights, there's aspect of
it that you know. We have mass literacy, we have the printing of
books, and then people lean into this new wonderful sense of justice and government,
you know, the Enlightenment era and classical liberalism develops, and then you
see the twentieth century come along, the World War two nuclear technology. All
that goes to Breton Woods because there are these new ways to centralize control that
are sort of irresistible whenever you have a system. But also downstream of technology
you have marks. You if Nietzsche writing about what happens when a society is
kind of godless, right that there's not this consensus about the foundation of truth.
You know, when to destroy that concept of objective reality, you end
up one hundred years down the road with a generation of kids who say,
there's your truth, there's my truth, there's John's truth and Mary's truth,
etc. So how much is that question of moral elativism that's now been kids
have been conditioned to see the world as a place where objectivity is not real.
How much of that is laying the groundwork for then what you write about
people coming in and seizing ownership. I think it's all tied together. And
I do think that technology plays a big role, because before you didn't have
enough things to distract you during the day. So of course at some point,
you know, everybody drags you off to church or whatever, or you
read the Bible or the chur or whatever it is, because like you don't
have anything else to fill your time right now, Like you couldn't possibly do
all the things that you want to do. There's so many frivolous as well
as material things that you can access and via technology at any point in time.
It requires more discipline. And I do think that people have started moving
towards politics, you know, as a substance to you. I mean,
I think people view I always say government is not your God, and you
know, I think people think that it is and their political party is their
religion. And it's become a little bit crazy. And it's one of the
things I always ask people. It's like, you know, what, what
are your principles? Like I don't care what your political partis, Like,
what are your principles? And so few people can really, you know,
particulate. I think on the left can answer that question. I actually think
the Libertarians are probably the best at answering that question. But like like like
like where is this kind of like what what is just kind of baseline principle
set for you? And I just don't think people are thinking in that anymore.
So withn't that sort of backdrop and the idea that you know, you
can move through this digital world and you can not own things and things are
easy breezy for you, and kids are conditioned, you know, from day
one to kind of think about that. I mean, just if I think
about the number of kids now who own drivers licenses, um, you know,
versus fifteen and twenty years ago, I mean staggering. They don't want
to step into that that freedom role. They don't want to go out,
you know, they want to stay into in this bubble. It just makes
it that much easier to control people. And it's back where we started.
The prediction is you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. And so for those
young people who buy in either out of you know, they're conditioning, or
out of the fact that they are just worried that they're never going to attain
these things, so or obtain these things and so they've put up this wall
so that they you know, they don't feel like a failure. Oh.
I never wanted to own a house anyway. I just wanted to yolo and
you know, show my pictures on Instagram as I go around the world and
live in you know, Ben Breakfast, you know that set, you know,
whatever it is. I think it's it's you know, it's a it's
a clear to fence mechanism for them to say I don't want ownership because they're
worried it's not going to work out for them. So I think all of
those factors together, you know, I'd like to give you one neat little
reason, but I think it's more of a giant puzzle of all of these
factors kind of coming together at the right time that makes them more susceptible.
And I think it's one of the reasons why the book is so in particular
important for young people, because they haven't viewed the world in this way,
and they, you know, kind of in many cases are anti capitalists because
they don't really know what that means, and it's been painted in a different
light and they've been sold a bunch of things that sound really nice in theory,
but you know, don't work in any sort of practicality or math equation,
so you know, having a different perspective, you know it shown to
you and getting people on that track I think is really helpful because as we
talk about, you know, these things, some of them are really big
and like, we're not to be able to stop everything. But if you
can personally kind of help yourself and put yourself in a better position and manage
through the chaos of the changes that may be coming, I think that is
going to be a really good outcome for people. Carol, you have been
so generous with your time. The book is called You Will Own Nothing,
Your War with a New Financial Order and How to Fight Back. It is
out on July eighteenth. Like I said, it's comprehensive. I really think
it's an achievement. So go pick up your copy. Carol, really appreciate
your time. Thank you. And one thing, everyone's been buying hard copies
because you have to get in the habit of actually owning something solid. So
this is your first step. Think about buying a hard copy of it so
no one will change the words on you and you can start practicing owning everything
that's right a lot of people don't know. If you buy a book from
Apple or Amazon, you don't own it. You don't and they can change
it. And you just think about all the historical works that they're going in
and they're like, oh, to change that. So if you want to
know what I actually said at this point in time, they can't change unless
they break into your house with like, you know, a pen and some
scissors. A very poignant note to end on, Carol, thank you so
much for your time. Thank you for such a great interview. I appreciate
it. You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm
Emil Joshinsky, culture editor here at the Federalist. Will be back soon with
more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the friend