The Big Issue with Billionaires

0:00SPEAKER_04:Welcome to It's Open with Alana Glazer. Hello, openers. Today is uh another compilation episode. After reflecting on season one, we found that a theme that arose was big tech and billionaires. When did it become okay to be insanely greedy? Hoarding wealth is clearly destroying humanity, aiming to destroy humanity. It won't, but it's trying to. And uh I found over this season that talking with thinking and feeling people, this is just wrong. And that when the people unite against it, we can overcome it and get beyond it.

0:34SPEAKER_04:So I hope that today's episode provides some connectivity around this. When I think one of the biggest tools of oppression by these people is the feeling of isolationism. And um, because that's how it made me feel to talk about it, address it, and talk about it, and see that like most of us are on the same page about it. So hope you enjoy.

1:02SPEAKER_01:Right? You can't earn a billion dollars.

1:07SPEAKER_04:That's right.

1:08SPEAKER_01:You just can't earn that. That's exactly correct. You can you can get market power, you can break rules, you can do all sorts of things, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they're worth, but you can't earn that, right? That's right. And so you have to create a myth that since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it. And so if you're making minimum wage at a Walmart and you're making seven bucks an hour, and I mean, damn, with these cash prices, it takes you seven bucks to get to work.

1:49SPEAKER_04:That's right.

1:50SPEAKER_01:And so as a result, we've kind of internalized this moralized system, right? The people at the top are smarter, better, you know, uh more sophisticated, and therefore the people at the bottom are uneducated, lazy, etc. And so if you are there, and if you have internalized that code, you need somebody under you because you feel like you are kind of good. And the truth is, most like you are. Right. Right? But if you've internalized that, you need someone, you need someone to point to that's broken the rules, right?

2:37SPEAKER_01:That's lazy, that's whatever. Because in a way, it's like someone else has got to be locked up so that you're not. Right.

2:45SPEAKER_02:Why do we have billionaires? 100. I I actually don't like I would really like to have a debate with someone who is pro-billionaire. And we should talk about the positive and negative aspects of people being able to have over$1 billion each. Because if you think about it just logically, all they do with that extra money is buy shit they don't need, more of it. And they used it to control and undermine our democratic process. So it's it's it's a negative, and obviously the money could be used for so many other good things like child care and healthcare, and you know, anyway.

3:25SPEAKER_02:But we could we could do that, right? I mean, if both parties weren't bought off by the corporations, or at least sizable majorities of each, then we could you can tax things at 99%. You can say, Yeah, you can't have that money.

3:38SPEAKER_04:Because also the system is so rigged that they'll never if if they got cut off at 999, 999, 999, yeah, they'd never be below that.

3:45SPEAKER_02:Yeah.

3:46SPEAKER_04:They would never be below that.

3:47SPEAKER_02:You're always gonna have a billion dollars. So crime your river. You can, you know, you've got many, many houses, you've got boats, you've got cars, you've got planes. You never have to work a day in your life. You can live off the interest that you've already of the money you've already made. So you're fine. But for the rest of us, we would like uh, you know, roads without potholes, we would like transit systems that actually work, we would like healthcare and childcare and all of these things that are all achievable because this tiny segment of the population, there's like I think there's like a thousand.

4:16SPEAKER_02:Three thousand three thousand. Three thousand. A thousand in America or maybe three thousand.

4:20SPEAKER_04:Yeah, like nine hundred in America, three thousand in the world, eight billion of the rest of us.

4:24SPEAKER_02:Right. And they control some staggering amount of wealth, like trillions and trillions of dollars, more than the 50% of the population, the bottom 50% combined in the hands of less than a thousand people.

4:35SPEAKER_03:I don't mean to demonize these billionaires. I am in fact, I think taxing this kind of wealth, taxing trillionaires out of existence, is not just good for all of us, it's also good for them. I agree. We have to protect them from themselves, I think.

4:49SPEAKER_04:I agree. The demonizing of the billionaires actually adds to their own mythology, whereas the humanizing of them, it unfortunately sheds like a very ugly light to look at. Like, really, you, a person flesh and blood like me, really want to cause this much pain, suffering, destruction, and murder of people. It's hard to hold, but I think it's so important that we humanize them as well. They are not the um the demons that we we uh almost wish they were, because it would almost give an out to our own humanity to have to hold it.

5:22SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's right. And uh, you know, our history is filled with very wealthy people who use that wealth to help others. You know, if we think about Franklin Roosevelt, Bobby Kennedy, they were trust fund babies. You know, they would probably be the billionaires of today if you adjust for inflation. But they use that power, that privilege to help people who didn't have as much. And so I I always try to put forward those examples to show that there's a better path for these folks.

5:49SPEAKER_03:Um, you don't have to hoard. You you can share what you have, what you've been given, and help lift up someone else. You know, I I don't want to demonize success. I want people to be successful. Of course. A lot of people in Texas, including me, we we want to provide for ourselves and our families, and that's a good thing. Right. And I want an economy that's gonna create more millionaires and fewer trillionaires. You know, we we wanna we wanna grow and thrive and prosper together as a country.

6:14SPEAKER_03:That's right. And right now we have an economy that only allows for the people at the very top to be successful. And the rest of us, no matter how hard we work, no matter how many hours we put in, we can't seem to get ahead.

6:25SPEAKER_04:I I saw that Jeff Bezos got his wife a five million dollar ring. It's like that's not even creative. A ring that costs more than everybody else's. He has a yacht. The New York Times once covered Bezos' yacht. He's got the biggest yacht in the world. Yeah, of course he does. He's got all the all the money. But what you did with that all that money was the bigger yacht, the biggest yacht. I mean, it's so uncool and so lame and so uncreative. And it proves that this system is rigged not about creativity or merit, but rigged for a certain type of person to profit.

7:01SPEAKER_04:Because if the wealthiest person in the world, if their idea of spending their money is a bigger big yacht or a bigger big ring, you know it's fucking rigged. Hi, just popping in with my ground news segment. So ground news is an app and a website that organizes and collects and amalgamates and aggregates uh news articles from around the world. And then we'll organize them from left-leaning bias to centrist to right-leaning bias. And it will also tell you who owns the news that is coming at your face, as well as um whether the news is original reporting or recycled.

7:40SPEAKER_04:So, what I love about ground news is it gives me a distance of looking at the news rather than being swallowed up. You know, for so long I was before I used Ground News, I would scroll and scroll and get swallowed the fuck up in whatever narrative the publication and who owns that publication was trying to catch me on, right? Hook me on. And now I feel like I'm in the driver's seat when I'm taking in my news. So let's look at an article. Trump touts best economy ever in Father's Day message.

8:10SPEAKER_04:Wow. I think most of America would agree it is not the best economy ever. Newsweek says Trump uses Father's Day message to make bold economic claims. Loving this shit from Newsweek. That is a read, bitch. Okay, here's from the right, OAN. If you don't know OAN, good. Trump touts economic success in Father's Day message. And that's from the right. If you want to take in your news this way, go to groundnews.com forward slash open for 40% off of the vantage plan, which is the one that I use.

8:45SPEAKER_04:Uh ground news helps me make sense of the media I'm taking in and makes me feel like I am got my hands on the steering wheel when I'm consuming news rather than being fucking whiplashed around left to right and center. Ground news is uh female founded and subscriber funded. So the reason that I read ground news is I feel like I am getting a better sense of a shared reality, a global, international shared reality. And because it's subscriber funded, it's like we're investing in sharing reality when it comes to the news.

9:17SPEAKER_04:I love it. So that's groundnews.com forward slash open for 40% off the vantage plan. And you got a direct link in the episode description on any of the platforms where you listen to or watch. It's open with a lot of glazer. Pausing your regularly scheduled programming to offer you a great discount on a great product. Thank goodness springtime is here. I was losing it and dog, but I'm so happy it's here because when I put my boots back onto shelf, I put on Bomba's footwear.

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11:05SPEAKER_02:Crypto is sold as a story of technology, but it's not. It's actually a story of human behavior. And the crypto market really just exists as a projection of the hopes and dreams of all of these investors that think they're gonna make a ton of money on this. And then it's wrapped in this political ideology for a lot of them, this sort of libertarian type type thing. Um, it's very male. It's we should definitely talk about that. Holy shit. And so I think it becomes about belief systems and stories that we're telling ourselves and each other.

11:35SPEAKER_02:And you know, Trump, this notorious con man, like he his one neat trick is that he never apologizes and he always pushes through with bluster, and he ends up conning his own people, right? Like he cons his own people over and over and over again, and they just keep coming back for more. Um, and in the movie, I tried to sort of like talk about a similar thing by showing uh I interviewed victims of this fraud called Celsius, and I bonded with them earlier in the movie.

12:02SPEAKER_02:And then at the end I come back and I ask them, Do you still believe in crypto? And some of these people have lost their life savings. They all said yes. Every single one.

12:09SPEAKER_04:Oh my god.

12:10SPEAKER_02:So we're really talking about beliefs rather than like technology or financial markets or anything like that.

12:17SPEAKER_04:For someone who like doesn't know at all, can you just like lay out what crypto is and why it is a scam?

12:24SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I can try. So uh crypto started in 2008 with a paper that was released on the internet, which was it was the height of the financial crisis, and it said, wouldn't it be great if there's a currency that you could send directly person to person and avoid the banks? And um it was using cryptography and a particular uh uh kind of data technology called blockchain technology, which is just like a ledger, just a way of storing information. And what's neat about it is that you can send stuff back and forth over the blockchain, like payment uh things of value, different cryptocurrencies, but your um your identity is obscured.

13:01SPEAKER_02:You're it's a pseudonymous blockchain. So you don't know who's interacting with what.

13:05SPEAKER_04:Okay.

13:06SPEAKER_02:So the aspirations may have been good, but like it kind of floundered for a while because, like, why would you give this thing any value unless you can actually do something with it? And it pretty much, I mean, the its first use case was the Silk Road, which was a dark web drug marketplace and uh weapons and assassination attempts and things like that. So like it was it was very quickly co-opted by criminals, like very quickly the thing that it was was good because it was again, why would you want to send something to someone that can't be traced and that was outside of the banking system?

13:36SPEAKER_02:Right. Like it could be for a good purpose, but it's probably for bad things, right? I mean, most likely, right? Just being honest, being real. And so it very quickly became this element of of uh a way of being paid for crime. And then it just exploded, you know. And and it's interesting. I mean, you mentioned Epstein earlier, but now we're finding out that Epstein was involved in funding Bitcoin development at a certain point.

13:59SPEAKER_04:Yeah, duh.

14:00SPEAKER_02:That makes his job much easier.

14:03SPEAKER_04:Yeah.

14:03SPEAKER_02:If your businesses are money laundering and and uh tra human trafficking, then you know, uh uh uh a currency that can obscure your identity is uh is pretty valuable. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

14:12SPEAKER_04:It's so sad that after the financial crisis and seeing the government bail out banks instead of people, that crypto was born.

14:22unknown:Yeah.

14:23SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I th you nailed it. I mean, that is one of the saddest things to me is that it wouldn't we wouldn't be in this place if we'd actually address the underlying issues and if anyone had been held accountable. You know, nobody went to jail for that. This thing that where millions of people lost their homes, where many, many people in positions of power knew better or should have known better. And nobody, and not only did they not pay the price, they often got bailouts and payments to like, you know, sort of cover up their losses.

14:51SPEAKER_02:Um and we had to pay that, you know, the American taxpayer had to do that.

14:55SPEAKER_04:It takes work to remember that the internet used to be almost like a public space, but digitally, where people were sharing works of art. Just like public spaces, there were also creeps popping up in our chat rooms. But I I don't know, people figured it out together. It wasn't such a manipulative, weaponized tool the way it is today. You know, Instagram used to be chronological. You would see your friends in real time, they went to the beach, somebody saw a movie, so cute.

15:21SPEAKER_04:It wasn't targeted to make you fucking enraged and hate half the country. And I I I feel, I believe that social media and the internet has been this tool that because humanity rises above all, most of the globe believes in a global standard for basic human rights. You know, it's like eight billion people minus eight people believe that everybody should have access to clean water, clean air, food, shelter, clothing, education, health care, and not be bombed and abused.

15:57SPEAKER_04:Most people believe that believe that. But you know, these communication tools that are owned by those billionaires make us think otherwise. It takes like I get swept up in it and it takes practice to remember and talking, talking over and over and over again to remember the fucking construct we're in. You know, when people like trip out and they're like, we're in a simulation, like in a way we are, in a in a way, you know, um people, white guys who didn't want to pay their taxes in England came here, stole land from Native Americans, enslaved people from Africa, and then hoped their ancestors would be the ones who reaped the benefits, and essentially they are.

16:37SPEAKER_04:It's one way that society could be organized, but it's not the only way.

16:41SPEAKER_00:So I used to say if I was ever in a deep fake porn thing, I'd know it wasn't me if I was on top because I'm so lazy in the back now in my 40s. Sometimes I'm like, it's not me. I never meant anymore. But that stuff really like poor Scarlett Johansson, they won't leave her alone. Oh Scarlet.

16:58SPEAKER_04:Oh my God. I'm so um like proud of her for suing over and over.

17:01SPEAKER_00:A hundred percent.

17:02SPEAKER_04:She's literally lead a Paris Hilton too. They're leading the way. They are they're leading the way. And now we're all gonna stand on the shoulders of them. It's like the Wild West at the moment.

17:09SPEAKER_00:This is always the way disgusting. But like I when I look back, I am very suggestible. Okay, very, very much so. And I was telling a story um about on the podcast, I'd seen because I love I I live alone, so there's a lot of googling.

17:23SPEAKER_04:Yeah.

17:24SPEAKER_00:A lot of googling, a lot of nature googling, a lot of VNO Googling, yeah, purchases, treating yourself, Googling. Top of that. I read a story one night that a woman had been killed by a frozen shaft of urine that had been released over a field from an airplane. Okay. Now I held this story as true for many, many years, Alana. Like many, many years. And then eventually Vogue on the pod was like, Are you sure? I was like, absolutely. I Googled the photo.

17:48SPEAKER_00:When I say this photo, it looked like it was sketched by a child. The shot it was so clearly fake. But I held that in my heart. Because you were drinking some wine. I don't know. Yeah. No, I wasn't. It wasn't even like I was in a blackout, like, even if you were in blackout, you'd know that this was clearly not real. But so with the AI of it all, I'm goosed.

18:08SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Um, I have like boundaries around taking in the news. I can't take it in at night. I don't want to take it in on the weekends. How much can one human being take?

18:15SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you seem like a very empathetic person.

18:17SPEAKER_04:And it I take it. I am, and I it stays that way by having boundaries around how much I take in. Otherwise, I'm just dead, which is their their goal to deaden your heart.

18:27SPEAKER_00:But we're not supposed to take in that much. We're not equipped to take in that much information. We're not equipped to watch that much horror. We're not equipped for it. It's supposed to be plowing someone in a field, plowing off someone, something. I'm hoping to get plowed in a field. I'm just supposed to be face down in the rain getting plagged by a bite tackle. I'm not equipped for this much information.

18:48SPEAKER_04:This has been a Starfix production. This has been an exclusively human-made production. I want to thank Amanda J. Stern for producing this episode and Toba Lipowitz for editing it so elegantly. I want to thank Raymo Ventura for the gorgeous graphics and opening musical sting, as well as the band Donher for the outro music. You know, liking, subscribing on YouTube and anywhere you podcast really helps us make this show possible and come to you. And uh, it feels good to be in community with you.

19:16SPEAKER_04:So just a little reminder to play in that way. Hope you've enjoyed the second compilation episode and see you next time.