Ep 5: The Most Dangerous Thing In The World

So what is the most dangerous thing in the world? Is it nuclear warfare? Is it a global pandemic? Is it the total collapse of our climate? I would think that's a big one. Is it rogue AI coming to take all of our jobs and then ultimately sky net us? We face many crises that threaten to destroy us. But none of them would have any strength at all without the biggest nemesis of all, which in my opinion is corruption. And that might seem banal, but only because you haven't fully comprehended just how devastatingly dangerous corruption is. So today, how about we do a nice big deep dive on the concept and consequences of corruption? Now I think you can make a case that the collapse of every empire ever was due to corruption from ancient Rome up to the United States today. And the collapses in history seem to follow a similar trajectory in my mind anyway. You start with some state right. So you would start with some state somewhere. It doesn't really matter who it is. And through circumstance or culture or location or maybe just luck, they find themselves in a position of power that allows them to expand. For the Romans, it was the discipline of their armies that allowed them to just get an edge that allowed them to grow into a sizeable power. For the Mongols, it was their mobility and ability to basically just beat anyone in the world that they came across. For the British, the isolation of their islands and then the group of their navy, for the Japanese empire, the fearlessness of their armies and their insanely high morale gave them an edge that allowed them to be victorious more often than not. And for the United States, it was the wealth of slavery and the industrialization that that funded. And all of these nations had some advantage that they used to become a strong regional power. And then from that position, they used that power to turn themselves into an empire. But when a state sees a rapid group of power, that also means a rapid increase in fortune, literally. As in, they make so much money. They don't know what to do with it all. The money, the stolen goods, the loot from battles, the stolen resources from colonization, whatever, it's all just a kind of money that floods into our nation. And when that money starts flooding in, this is always the point where the corruption begins. And it's funny that you can pinpoint the exact moment in all of those empires. For example, with the Romans, once they defeated Carthage, they took the wealth of Carthage, and that's what set them on their path to corruption in their empire. For the Mongols, when they conquered China, they took all the wealth of China and they made themselves fabulously rich. For the British, it was colonization and the ability to steal all of the resources of the places they were colonizing. You could say the same for the Japanese too, when they started colonizing. And of course, the United States, the wealth that came from the corruption of slavery is what infected them and is a poison they steal they still deal with today. And it might take decades or even hundreds of years before the collapse of that empire from corruption happens, but the collapse itself is always guaranteed. The moment corruption seeps into an empire, its fate is sealed. And once the corruption gets in, nothing can ever get it out. And it's crazy because once the corruption does get in, the corruption has a 100% victory record for bringing down empires. And it's brought me to the conclusion that corruption is a single most dangerous thing in all of history, because corruption is danger for everyone. When the corruption starts, the first thing to go are ethics and responsibilities and accountability, which will slowly see civil services be cut or sold because the safeguards or red tape are, you know, it's a first thing to be cut. And once the civil services start getting gutted and sold, the country then stops running efficiently and the public money is then looted because there is nothing to stop the oligarchs and the kleptocrats and the generals from just taking whatever they want. And then from that point, the nepotism starts to seep into everywhere because whoever is rich, obviously wants their children to take over. And the children are not necessarily qualified for this position, but because all the power lays with whoever took it, the meritocracy in this government will pretty much always be destroyed. And from there everything starts to degrade across the board. And as everything starts to degrade, the people empower increasingly become desperate in looking for measures or any way to stop the collapse from happening. They'll spot it before anyone else does. But of course, being all nepotism hires, no one really knows what they're doing and they are not equipped to deal with the crises they themselves have created. So usually what they'll end up doing is just going, well, maybe all we need is just more money. So let's go start more wars, let's go pillage more places, let's go get more gold and that'll be enough to offset whatever crisis is happening. And of course, the more wealth and the more gold that is brought in, the more the corruption increases, which leads to more suffering for the people. And this becomes a vicious cycle. As remember, all of the safeguards are long gone by this point. And now that there are alarms going off everywhere, all the ruling class and all the garks and the clippet crats, love that word, all they can do is just hit the snooze button. They don't have any faculties or any ability to actually stop these crises anymore. So all they can do is just ignore them and distract from them and hope that it all just works out, but it never does because everything that once existed to fix these crises has long been sold off or run by such incompetent, you know, you put your cousin into power and he runs it. He doesn't know what he's doing. There's nepotism hires everywhere. There's no expertise because any of the expertise has long been rooted out because all the experts are telling you to do the opposite of the corruption and all the corrupt people are not going to do that. They never do. So instead of listening to the advice of the experts, they just decide to get rid of the experts, you know, hitting snooze on the alarm, right? And eventually the whole rotten structure eventually catches fire and then there's nothing anyone can do to stop its collapse. You know, there's a lot of mixed metaphors there, but the point is corruption is like a political cancer and once it gets into a political system, even if it spreads very slowly, the corruption is always terminal. So let's look at some example, shall we? Let's do a whirlwind tour of historical empires and see if this corruption shoe fits the more, shall we? And for everything I just said then, I'm willing to bet that who you were picturing when I was talking about that corruption was the world we live in today. But it's worth remembering that all the cucks have always been this way. This is a story as old as time and it's just hilarious that the lesson just never seems to be learned. But let's go back as far back as I can definitively prove my point here, which is ancient Rome. So if you look at the Roman Empire, when Rome was still a republic, it was a regional power in the Mediterranean, it controlled the Italian peninsula half of Sicily, some of the islands around Italy, but that was pretty much it. And there was another empire that rivaled them for strength, which was Carthage in North Africa. And eventually, of course, these two will get into three wars together over about a hundred years called Punic Wars, which is like the ancient world's version of World War I. It's absolutely massive. But eventually, the Romans triumph after the third Punic War. It ends with them sacking Carthage and stealing all of the wealth of this massive trading empire and just taking it back to Rome. And this unimaginable level of wealth just floods into the hands of all the nutrition families, which are the oligarchs of their day. And they use that money to just start buying everything. They're viable. The farmland, they kick all the peasants off the farms and say, "Hey, you work for me now. They bribed the Senate into total submission. They used their money to block any kind of reform that would see their money be distributed amongst the rest of the people. There will be many attempts to try and stop this obvious corruption from happening. They're even aware of it back then. There's the famous crack eye brothers that do their absolute best to try and mitigate this flood of oligarch money that is just taking away all of the laws and all of the standards in Rome. They're of course murdered. And Rome will descend into this period of such utter chaos and corruption that will eventually see the rise of several dictators, including Lucius. Julliah Caesar and eventually Augustus Caesar who will form the Empire and the Republic will never ever come back. From that point off, in the moment all of that money comes in from Carthage, Rome was a relatively stable state, but from the moment all that money comes in, there's pretty much non-stop civil war for the rest of Rome's entire history all the way up until about 100 AD. The corruption just keeps seeping into everything and even though it takes hundreds of years for Rome to fall down, I think you can safely pinpoint the moment that they took all of the money from Carthage and instead of say putting that into the coffers of the government and using it to improve the lives of everyone around them, they just started to embezzle it. And once this standard was set, it became the norm and that's what every subsequent ruler and subsequent emperor of Rome will do. It is always just embezzlement and corruption and slowly and surely all of the standards and all the laws in Rome just start to collapse. Now obviously that's a very quick version of that story, but the pattern fits if you look into it. Like there are moments when people try to reform things but it's always short lived, it never lasts more than the generation before the corruption comes back and it's a continuous downward spiral all the way until the Huns ultimately sack Roman. Well that's the end of that. So let's fast forward about 700 years to the Mongol Empire which is one of the biggest yet shortest lived empires ever. It will rise in 1206 under Jankus Khan who is one of the most important people in history the way he manages to unify people and conquer massive empires and he has this whole doctrine and ideology about him which is all about everyone standing together. A lot of his ideas, we are strong and we stand together and every time you went and conquered somewhere, although he would kill all the people that opposed him and do all sorts of horrible things to the civilians once the dust settles. His policy is actually to assimilate them into the tribe and get them to join up and to help them flourish in their own particular skills like what can you bring to the Mongol Empire. I want you to do that. We're all strong together. That really is one of the mantras of Jankus Khan and when he rises, they're quite poor. They don't have much. They haven't conquered anything. They're basically making their own clothes out of whatever animals they can hunt on. Mongolian and Russian steps. But once they start conquering places like China and there's a lot of wealth in China and once all that money starts coming into the core clan of the Mongols, so does the corruption. The ideal is that Jankus Khan has doesn't last more than two generations. Once he's dead and his grandchildren and great grandchildren are taking over, they're thoroughly corrupted and they don't have anywhere near the standards that Jankus Khan has. It'll only take about 150 years before the entire Mongol Empire collapses, which is why it's one of the shortest-lived empires. But it's massive. It stretches all the way from China to Hungary like it is literally one of the biggest empires that has ever existed. It deserves an entire podcast because I like the Mongols. It's such a good story. Jankus Khan is a very complicated character. He is absolutely an unrepentant monster. He's also really visionary and a lot of his social ideas and religious ideas and way ahead of his time in a lot of ways. He's very interesting and I'll do a whole podcast a minute later. But the point is here that what starts strong ends up being destroyed by corruption. Of course. Anyway, let's fast forward another, what do we call it? 400 years. Let's go to France. Shall we? Bourbon France. Just before the French Revolution. So we're talking France circa 1780-ish. And this is the first kind of corruption story I think that for us in the modern world is easily identifiable. And this is probably the example that is closest to the world we live in today because at this point in France, they have emerged from the Dark Ages, which was very rough for France. Everyone was taken a bit of French land. The British owned a fair bit of France at one point. But they've kicked the British out a long time ago and they have become quite formidable on their own right. And all of the wealth that is flooding into France in the 18th century is going straight into the hands of the nobility into the Bourbon regime. And all the French peasants are starving. And all the nobility are living in obscene opulence and luxury. The greatest example of that, of course, is the palace of Versailles, which was famous for just how over the top it was, like gold and jewels and exquisite paintings and every level of luxury was meant to show off just how rich the French were. And to that end, it was very successful. The problem is all of the starving peasants could see that as well. And they were not particularly happy about it once the bread starts running out. And there's even like warnings again, the corruption is already seeping in. And the king's finance ministers can see this happening. They can see it's a danger. And they constantly warn the king. They need to start taxing the other oligarchs, the other nobility and start using that money to avert some of these impending disasters and crises that are on the horizon. But you know, all the aristocrats and nobility, they just refuse. Like, no, no, it's fine. You know, they live in their own world. They are completely insulated by their wealth from the reality of what's going on in the rest of the country. And they live so sheltered they don't comprehend the threat that is literally awaiting them outside the palaces. And finally, when a drought and a famine hits France, the people hit their breaking point. And it's the start of the French Revolution. That's when they storm the Bastille and they get all the guns and they, you know, start taking out all the oligarchs and the ruling class really just knew. We learn to lay that no amount of palace guards can stop a massive hungry mob, which is maybe a lesson today's oligarchs might want to remember as well. Anyway, this of course will ultimately culminate in the rise of Napoleon and the rise of the French Empire, remarkably similar to Rome, isn't it? And it's worth noting that one of Napoleon's first kind of policy ideas is anti-croption measures. It's the danger as well. But as I'm saying, once that corruption gets in, you can never really get it out. It's like whack a mole. You know, you can pop one, but there's going to be another one that pops up somewhere else. And you can't get that corruption out once it gets in. And ultimately, it will be one of the things that brings down Napoleon as well. Let's fast forward and have a hundred or so years and go to the Russian Revolution, shall we? So, the Tsarist regime under Nicholas II was one of the most opulent and crop regimes in all of world history. It's almost comically bad how much money the Russian oligarchs are hoarding. And by the time the First World War breaks out, things are already bad in Russia. But the war just makes it so much worse because not only is all of the meager food that the peasants usually get to enjoy being sent to the front lines, so are all their sons. And everyone is dying in their millions of evistarvation or at the front. And this will see eventually the first of the Russian revolutions where the peasants have just had enough and they start protesting in Petrograd, which is today's Petersburg and used to be Leningrad. And the protest starts spreading throughout all of Russia. And there's the first revolution, which isn't the Communist one. It's not the Soviet revolution. That's when the doom of the Russian parliament takes control under a guy called Alexander Karenski. And I'm going to go on a very slight tangent here just because I find this an interesting historical fact. Karenski will only stay in power for about 20 minutes in Russia before the Soviets launch the second revolution later that year in October. And when Karenski's government is overthrown, Karenski will evacuate Russia and will leave it to Russia. And we'll go to one of the most random countries imaginable. Like if I told you, the leader of Russia has fled the most pivotal moment in Russian history. He would go to some more important, right? He's going to go to Paris or London or New York and no, he ends up coming to right where I am right now, which is British, but in Australia. And I just think that's really funny. Anyway, let's get back on topic. So, ultimately, the corruption of the Tsarist regime became so insurmountable. And the only thing that they could do to try and slow this situation down was just to send the military and the police out to kill people and hope that that was enough to make them stop. But the people in Russia, by this point, are so desperate again. Even the bread is running out. And when you face the threat of starving to death, there's pretty much nothing else you're going to fear. And that's one of the reasons they're able to successfully take down this very cropped regime. It's also worth noting that Russia kind of goes the other way to what Rome and France did because they're really. their revolution doesn't turn them into an empire. It turns them into the world's first socialist republic. And at first, the Soviets do a really good job cutting down on the corruption. 'Cause again, they see the danger of it. They've understood this for a long time. It's one of the reasons they launched the revolution in the first place. And under Lenin and Stalin, corruption is absolutely smashed anywhere they can see it. That's one of the major points of Stalin's famous purge. And again, we don't often hear that side of it much in the West. We was just here that Stalin is a megalomaniac who just wants to control power for himself. And there may be an element of that, that is true. But there is also a very important point that one of the things he's rooting out is the fear that corruption is gonna start seeping back into the government. And it's worth noting that for all of Stalin's time as premier, corruption is never a problem of his particular government. But it will be in subsequent ones when they start letting their guard down and the corruption starts to seeping and ultimately it will also take down the Soviet Union. So again, I firmly believe, you know, every time you see any kind of emperor, any sort of government truly collapse, corruption is always a big part of this story. And once you kind of see it, you really can't unsee it. Anyway, let's go to the next one, shall we? So let's move on to the big one, the one that's most pertinent to us today, which is the United States of America. I would argue that corruption is the very foundation of the United States of America. Since it is a nation that is founded in colonial violence, genocide, and industrial scale, shattel slavery, it doesn't really get much more unethical or evil than that. Not to mention all of it was done purely for profit. If you want more of an overview on that, go back to the first episode of my podcast 'cause I talk about that quite a bit. So let's just already assume that America is born into corruption, or perhaps better. Let's just pretend that America wasn't born into corruption. And let's pick up the story from the moment you can definitively say it absolutely does. And to me, the moment I think that corruption overwhelms the American political system and hits the point where the American Empire is going to be devoured whole, I would point to and always do point to 9/11 because the birth of the war of terror is also the birth of zero accountability government. Because the whole point of the war of terror, in my opinion, is it was just a heist. It was just about starting these forever wars and then funneling all the money to private companies via the Pentagon, via the Department of Defense because the Pentagon never passes any audits. The money literally disappears into the ether, but they just stamp the national security stamp on it and no one investigates any further. And it's worth pointing out that trillions of dollars have disappeared from the moment the war on terror began. And it goes into a whole bunch of private corporations. I think the most prominent of them are Halliburton and Blackwater, but I think you could argue even things like meta today or Palantir, Equan Boeing, Rayfian, all of these corporations basically use these wars and the war on terror and the age of zero accountability government to just steal everything that wasn't nailed down. And so my opinion from 9/11, the American political system enters a dev spiral of corruption. The military industrial complex, it's completely emboldened by the war on terror. Trillions just disappear into the contractors, the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then all of the corporations they get sent into Afghanistan and Iraq to, and I'm using big air quotes here, rebuild it. All they really did was start looting all of the oil, looting all the opium, stealing everything they possibly could, and building buildings, structures and massively inflated prices, where the difference between the cost of the constructions and how much they charge the US government for is it's insane, like the markup is thousands of percent, you know, it's huge. The corruption is so obvious. And the reason this is the downfall of America is once this precedent sets in, like the corruption is just so obvious. And it's massive, it is everywhere. All the politicians are in on it, and no one is ever found accountable for all of this embezzlement, all of the crimes, all of the wars, all of the violence, not a single person has faced any charges. And so what does that do to your institutions? If corruption is completely normalized, hell, it's celebrated, you will become fabulously rich if you take in this corruption. And there is no consequences for it. No one is gonna catch you, no one is gonna charge you, no one's gonna do anything to you of any kinds of why wouldn't you do it? Now once this became the norm, it started flooding into every single part of US politics. That's why both sides of the house now, the Democrats and Republicans are on the same side as everything, and that side is unmitigated corruption. They both support US imperialism for the same reason, they get very, very rich from it. And so they no longer have any reason to oppose each other other than just saving face and pretending that it's still a democracy. So don't pretend to fight for the cameras, but it doesn't really matter who gets in charge because anytime there's a war or any amount of money that can be embezzled, you can bet they're gonna find bipartisan support straight away. And now that this has become the norm, and now that there's no accountability, well then all of these politicians are rubbing their hands together and going, well what else can we do this on? What if we just start privatizing everything? What if we cut all the funding to schools, for example, and just privatize more? We sell education for profit. Ooh, what about we defund all of the prisons and sell them to private corporations and then we can have basically free prison labor, essentially slavery, and we can make billions of that. Ooh, what if we cut health services even more and privatize them further? What if we get rid of the regulations that say, how much you're allowed to charge for life saving medicine? You know, if medicine is needed to save someone's life, they'll pay anything, won't they? Who wouldn't pay anything to save their own life? And this is now the culture in every part of American politics, everything is about money. There is literally nothing here designed to actually run the country efficiently. No one cares about saving the country anymore. And even if someone did, how could they possibly stand up to this level of corruption? The money we're talking about here is trillions. And this is the amount of money that they will easily kill people for. So if you're some good politician, you think so, you're gonna make a difference. I just don't think you can in this system. I don't think there is any chance of reform when the corruption is this bad. And I think looking at all the examples we've already looked at, no one has ever successfully managed to stop the corruption once had his infiltrated, you know, what was the metaphor using cancer before? Once that cancer's gotten to the bloodstream into all of the treasury of a government, I don't see how you're ever gonna get it out. But then this is obviously extremely unpopular. I mean, the only people benefiting from this level of corruption are the politicians and the billionaires, the vast majority of people in America and indeed the rest of the world, they don't benefit from this at all. In fact, we have to suffer so that this can go on. And this is how you see the rise of fascism. Again, you see this in all, this is why Rome created an empire. It was about having internal security as much as external security. You need to have the Praetorian guard on the streets, on the streets to make sure that the peasants don't rise up against their petitions. You see fascism playing the same role in the modern world. The fascism, the police state, the massive surveillance state. All of that is there to make sure that the peasants, the plebs don't rise up against the petitions and the oligarchs. It's exactly the same story. It's just that the technology has become more advanced. Another thing you saw in Rome that you also see in America is they used to have a functional republic in Rome. Power of that republic was eroded away by subsequent emperors purely because they feared it. Like if the power of the republic can actually start making orders against the emperor and asking them to be accountable for their actions, well, that's dangerous for the emperor, isn't it? So what is the emperor going to do? They're going to destroy the republic. And the first thing a lot of these emperors will do is basically make the republic nothing more than just a little puppet state. It's the theater. It's there to make people believe that they have a say in the government, but ultimately everyone answers to the emperor and his oligarch friends. America's no different today. There is no actual democracy in America. You just have a bunch of puppet republicans and puppet democrats pretending to play democracy or the oligarchs run everything. They write all of the policy. There hasn't been a vote on a popular platform in America in a very, very long time. that the people support is always shot down and all of the interests of the corporations and oligarchs are always put forward and always pass with bipartisan support. That's not a coincidence. That's how that system is designed to operate, to preserve the corruption, to preserve the capitalism and fascism helps them do that. To give you an idea of just how hollow the American democracy has begun this year, so 2025, Congress had an approval rating below 10%, below 10%. Like, below 50%, you would argue that's barely a democracy at all, but below 10%, my god, literally no one in this country except the very rich people believe that this democracy is actually serving them. That's insane below 10%. I've never seen anything like it. It's also worth noting that while the approval rating of Congress is below 10%, the re-election rate of the politicians is 95%. So are these not oligarchs? You can't get rid of them. There's these Republican and Democrat politicians that are ancient, and they've held these positions of power for generations. The door is never open to any new blood to come in. There is no opportunity for any radical change or even any reform to enter this system because it is gate-kept by these oligarchs at every level. And on top of that, there's constant gerrymandering. You're changing the voting districts to make sure they favor a particular candidate. There's voter suppression. There's no preferential voting in America, Eva. The whole system is designed to not actually give people any say in what's going on. It's all just there to be an illusion. And it's the reason you see the Democrats and the Liberals telling everyone that the answer to all the problems is go out and vote. Don't riot, don't burn cop cars, don't do any direct action to take some power for yourself. Just vote. Voting this in this system. Use the proper channels. We like it when you use the proper channels because we know they won't work. That's why they do it. And now the corruption is so deep. It would even make the Romans blush. I mean, we're at the point now where you see a whole bunch of US politicians. They'll just, you know, they'll know a war is coming and they'll go by stock in one of the companies that's going to profit from the war. And they make millions and they do it openly. They do it in front of everyone and there's no accountability of any kind like the corruption is blatant. And how long do they think this is going to go on for? Like this is a recipe for collapse. And nowadays it's even worse than it was back in the day because at least back in the day, back in the Roman times or even back in the French times, this corruption was more of a personal thing on a personal level. These are the people in charge wanting to hold on to power. The things are infinitely worse now because we have capitalism and capitalism is the only economic system in the world that demands corruption. It thrives on it. It encourages it. It needs corruption in order to keep going. So not only do we not have any chance of reform, this system is looking for more opportunities to commit corruption at every single turn. And that's why I firmly believe that the times we live in now are probably the most dangerous in all of human history because we are caught in the middle of the capitalism, F spiral. I mean, this is a system that was never going to work. Capitalism didn't emerge from peaceful trade. It wasn't born in peace. It was born in the violence of colonialism. The genocide of indigenous peoples, the transatlantic slave trade and the enclosure of common lands and a seizure of land across the world. The industrial revolution's factories were built on the backs of cotton picking, shatel slaves, textiles that created the money of the industrial revolution were created by child laborers. The tech billionaires of today built their fortunes on stolen, cobalt mines that was dug out by Congolese children. They built their money on the backs of AI that steals everyone's creative work, steals everyone's copyrighted work and cuts workers out entirely to maximize profits for a handful of tech burrows. There's no such thing as ethical capitalism there never has been. Most of it was born in war. Most of it is about exploiting and stealing resources. The only difference between capitalism and standard robbery is the scale of it. Of course, one of the reasons capitalism is particularly dangerous is because if you look at the corruptions of the past, usually they would result in one big main crisis that would keep growing until it exploded and took down the entire system with it. But capitalism isn't just dealing with one crisis. It has a whole bunch of them. In fact, I've already identified at least five fatal crises and all of them are accelerating here in 2025. And unlike the crises of the past, they don't just threaten our economic system. They pose an existential threat to the survival of the planet itself. So let's just quickly run through these five big crises and let's particularly remember that none of these are possible without the massive corruption that capitalism enables. So number one, the crisis of overproduction. These factories are churning out endless goods. But they're not things we need. It's all shit. It's fun go pops. It's a million brands of truth-paced. It's 20 versions of the same car. This isn't stuff we actually need. It's just consumerism for the sake of consumerism. And it ends up not only wasting so much of the world's precious resources, it also fuels the landfills with all this useless rubbish that just leaks toxic shit into the whole world. And none of the basic needs of humanity are actually being met. Like we have enough production capability to produce everything everyone on the planet needs to survive, eat and live safely and comfortably. But we have to waste it all by letting Apple redesign the same phone every single year and just waste the world's precious lithium supplies, building fucking Tesla cars and shit we don't need. The overproduction of capitalism is only possible because of corruption. And are these billionaires? All they're looking for is how can I make the most money? One of them are looking to actually feel a human need or to fill a demand that's in the world. All I'm just saying, how can I make the most consumption? The most consumerism to make me as rich as possible. It doesn't matter what it poisons, it doesn't matter what it pollutes, it doesn't matter what it was, it doesn't matter if people are starving to death. It's only about how much money I can make. So overproduction is one of the biggest crises and it's only possible because of corruption and capitalism. The second crisis is exploitation. Everyone on the capitalist pyramid, except for the people at the very top 1% are being exploited. Amazon workers who are still in the middle of the capitalist pyramid, you know, I have to go and pee in bottles and all the way to bathroom breaks. There are delivery drivers that aren't allowed to use the air conditioning because it'll waste too much money. You know, the pay and the rights and everything is cut, everyone is forced to be a gig worker with no rights of any kind. All of this is exploitation to maximize the profits for the capitalist billionaires. But then if you go down to the bottom of the pyramid, of course get things like the Congolese, kids working in the lithium mines, you have all the poor Palestinians being blown apart just so that Boeing can keep selling more missiles at every level of capitalist society is exploitation. And it is a crisis because it is destroying everything that it means to be human. We are not focusing, we don't have time to focus our energy towards any kind of development, any kind of progress, any kind of bettering the human spirit or everyone's too busy surviving. And this is a nightmare situation and it absolutely is a crisis. And again, it wouldn't be possible without the corruption that capitalism nurtures and encourages. The third crisis is the financialization and wealth inequality that capitalism creates. Now that our entire society is nothing but money, nothing else is valued, that money becomes the core of our entire, not just our economy but our culture, everything. And the way we treat it is also a crisis because we have again massive wealth inequality. Most of the money is in the hands of just like a dozen billionaires and the rest of us are just scrounging for whatever pennies we can find. But at the same time, these billionaires are so reckless with the money that money isn't going anywhere good. They're buying their 500th yacht, they're spending it on EFTs or gambling it recklessly on the stock market. The money. is so poorly managed because it's just about getting as rich as possible. They are constantly crashing the economy. We constantly have to bail out. We're the ones who have to bail out. So we lose more of our money. And then you've got things like crypto and AI speculation. And none of this is real. Like none of this actually matters. But now that our entire society is focused around it, everything else is collapsing. This is, you know, I love using this analogy. It's the center of the Chernobyl power plant. And everyone's just watching the one monitor. Well, all the other monitors are redlining. And they are missing the danger all around them because all we care about is money and profits. And all of these other crises are going to consumers. So that's why I consider, you know, who's broadly calling it the financialization of the world. The fact that we focus on that is blinding us from all the other crises. And it's also meaning all the resources that we desperately need, this money that we use as an exchange to make sure the resources go where they need. That doesn't even work anymore. It just all goes up to the top and it never comes back down. There's no such thing as trickle-down economics. It's just unfettered capitalism. And all of it is powered and encouraged by the corruption. Number four is the crisis of imperialism. We are seeing the exponential growth of the US military. And it wages wars all around the world. Proxy wars, real wars. There are drone strikes every single day. They are spending trillions of dollars just taking over the world in all sorts of different ways. And the reason they're doing this is to control the world's resources and they're controlling the world's resources to exploit them for capitalist profits. So again, the only reason they're doing this is because of the greed and corruption that is seeped into every single part of these systems. There is no purpose to imperialism except to maximize profits. So you wouldn't even have this dynamic. We wouldn't have all these wars if it wasn't for greedy people that have been fully corrupted, that are enabled by a capitalist system that values nothing but profit. The fifth final and by far biggest crisis, of course, is. I'm just going to call it the crisis of ecology. It is the fact that we are destroying the planet for profit, which is the most self-defeating policy this world has ever seen. It is absolute madness on a whole other scale because the death of the planet is kind of everyone's problem, including the billionaires. It is a suicidal system. We don't see any value in forests until they cut down and sold. Everything's just about profit. We will cut our own lungs out for profit. We will poison our rivers. We will pollute this entire planet. We will burn it all down than nothing more than profit. Again, this is an insane ideology. And it's one of the reasons I'm frequently saying now. The capitalism isn't just an economic policy. It's a religion. It's a culture because the people that subscribe to it do so with nothing more than blind faith that somehow it'll all work out. But the evidence tells you that it's clearly not going to. We are destroying the planet at a geometric rate for nothing more than profit. And that dynamic couldn't exist if it wasn't for the fact that the corruption is seeped into every part of our political system. You can kind of see how it's all tied together, right? And it's why there's no way we can fix this dynamic until we find a way to genuinely cut the corruption out and cut it out for good. Because this cycle, even though we're now in the most extreme version of this cycle, this is something that will come back if we just try and reform it. We need to fundamentally change our entire view of an economy. We can't reform capitalism because capitalism will always be corrupted. It will always come back to this point. We need something entirely different. So what are we going to do? And I'm constantly asked like, okay, we're not going to have capitalism. What's the answer then? And it's such a disingenuous question, isn't it? Because like capitalism's only been around a few hundred years. We've got tens of thousands of years of human history before capitalism. We're things, you know, they'd still be some corruption at various levels. But it was never destruction of the planet bad. So when people ask me what would you do instead of capitalism? My answer is always, I don't care anything but capitalism. Because capitalism is the only system that poses an existential threat to life itself. So getting out of capitalism into literally any other system is still a massive step forward. However, if you want my opinion about where I think we should go, well, you guys ought to know by now that I'm a pretty hardcore socialist. So I think that socialism is the answer. So I believe, I genuinely believe that a socialist revolution, a global socialist revolution, is really the only chance we have of survival. My history has already demonstrated repeatedly that capitalism will corruption at its core will eventually destroy societies. It's already destroyed most of the societies in the world today. We're already dead. These are zombie nations that are just lingering and going forward. And we've seen what corruption does from ancient Rome to the modern American empire. This pattern remains remarkably consistent. Private ownership of the means of production leads to a concentration of wealth, which corrupts institutions and eventually leads to collapse. And history also shows that revolutionary change is possible when the working class organizes collectively against capitalist power. But we now know, and this is something the Soviet Union and even China didn't know at the time, is it needs to be a global revolution? Because so long as some capitalist institutions exist, so does their violence, so does their imperialism. And it's impossible to actually have a global, functional, sustainable economy. For the whole world that serves everyone's interests, so long as we have corrupting forces trying to take it all. The two cannot coexist. It's got to be one or the other. And the corrupting forces already collapsing, so that only really leaves us one choice. And so to me, that choice is perfectly clear. Eventually, we're going to have to overthrow capitalism through socialist revolution, or we're going to keep facing intensified crises and potentially the collapse of society and even the planet itself. So I firmly believe that social revolution, global social revolution is the only way forward. And I have not come to that decision lightly. Remember, I used to be a liberal. You know, I used to think that there are central measures we can do. We can't go too extreme on either side. We're in our balanced approach. I used to believe all of that. The more you dig on this and the more you learn about these forces of corruption and the forces of imperialism, you do come to the conclusion eventually, especially after you read enough theory that the social revolution, a global social revolution is really the only chance we have of survival. You know, the corrupting influence of capital in politics, you know, the exploitation of everyone in the world, the pollution, all of it, it has to end or it's going to end us. And the only way we can actually have a sustainable future is via planned economy. And the only way we're going to do that is via socialism. So really our survival and, you know, the world, our children and grandchildren and all the generations that come the only way they have a chance is if we have the courage now to end this capitalism and end this corruption once and for all and build a good sustainable future for everyone. Because until we do that, we're just going to be stuck in this same right, in this same cycle until it all collapses. And I for one say, fuck that, I am going down quietly and I'm going to fight for my future, I'm going to fight for my children's future, I'm going to fight for your future. And enough of us say that, if enough of us come together around the world, if we have that solidarity, we absolutely can win, we outnumber them far far more than they could ever stop us. So that's my quick, quick rant about corruption and capitalism as new. All my rants never leave it to. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I really enjoyed making this one. I talk a bit about social revolution at the end and I'm aware that in my podcast, I have not talked much about the theory of that or the ideas behind it. And I'm also very aware that a lot of the socialist literature and theory is very hard to read. So I am going to make a podcast soon to break down all of these ideas as easily as I possibly can. Because I think that's just a good use of my time and I think everyone would benefit from hearing from it. Even if you hate socialism, hey, you might as well learn about your enemy, right? So I'm going to make that podcast pretty soon. Just talk about all the ideas behind socialism as quickly and easily as possible. So I really enjoyed this one. It's been a lot of fun. I've enjoyed recording it. I hope you've enjoyed listening to it. If you're enjoying these podcasts, if you're enjoying my videos and if you're like supporting me on this journey, please, you know, join me on Patreon, become a member, even just a free member on Patreon. The more support I can get, the easier it's going to be to keep going forward with this. So I would really appreciate your support. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you've enjoyed it and hopefully this has given you something to think about.