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Musk Says Nobody Will Need to Work. Here's What You'll Do Instead. · Man in America Podcast

• 0:14
  Speaker 1: There are two things happening right now that I think are very important to watch because both represent systems that fundamentally oppose so much of what this country was founded on. In New York City, mayor Mamdani is preparing to roll out government run grocery stores. Now supporters say they're gonna make food more affordable, but critics are warning they're gonna undermine the small independent grocery stores and mom and pop businesses that have been the cornerstone of New York City for generations. At the same time though, Elon Musk is now talking about what he calls a universal high income. And recently, while standing beside Musk, president Trump basically appeared to throw his entire support behind the idea.
• 0:52
  Now, on the surface, cheap groceries and a guaranteed income probably sound pretty good to a lot of people, but we've seen versions of these ideas before, and history gives us plenty of reasons to be very careful whenever the government promises to provide the basic necessities of life. Because whoever provides those necessities ultimately has tremendous power over the people who depend on them. My guest today is Joshua Philip. He's a longtime investigative reporter with the Epoch Times, a host of Crossroads and the Joshua Phillips Show. And he's spent much of his adult life studying communism and the systems of control that have emerged around the world.
• 1:32
  And so Josh actually works in New York City, so he's watching what's happening there up close. But he's also looking at the bigger picture. He's looking at artificial intelligence, automation, guaranteed income, and an increasingly centralized technological system that he believes could be pushing America towards something different from traditional communism, a technocracy. That's really the question at the heart of today's conversation. Are we watching two separate political ideas emerge at the same time, or are they pieces of a much larger transformation of America?
• 2:02
  This is a pretty important conversation that you don't wanna miss. Welcome to Man in America. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse. Before we jump in, please hit that like button, the share button, and the subscribe button. It's free.
• 2:12
  It's easy, and it helps me stay independent and continue to bring this content without having to put it behind a paywall. So thank you. Alright. Now let's get into my conversation with Joshua Philip. Joshua Philip, man, it is great to have you on the show.
• 2:25
  I've been following your work for a long time with the Epoch Times, and thank you so much for coming on the show today. I'm looking forward to talking with you.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So, it's great being here, and great to finally do the show also. I watch your stuff too sometimes.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you. And we've kind of been trying to do a show for some time now, but, you know, sometimes it just takes time and it just lands. And I think that today's topic, which we'll begin to, is a really interesting one, because I know that, you know, you're you know, working out of New York City. And I also know that in addition to that, you've spent much of your adult life studying communism, and and not just what's happening over in China, but, you know, global communism, all the different movements.
• 3:02
  And so you're kind of in a unique kind of petri dish of understanding and seeing what a lot of communist like principles are in real life, which what we're seeing under Mandami. So I guess you can start wherever you want to, but I I just... I'd like to see what are you seeing happening in New York City.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I... I'd say New York right now is kind of putting in place communist light. And I I know a lot of people would say, well, he's just... It...
• 3:31
  It's socialism. It's not communism. You know? There's a lot of different definitions. I I think we should probably start by defining what these things are because, you know, I I don't think a lot of people could even say what, you know, what is communism, what is socialism.
• 3:44
  Right? You you have a million different definitions. And I I think that's a good part... To start on with that. So simply put, what is socialism?
• 3:54
  Socialism is communism when practiced by government. That... That's the simplest answer. You know, prior to the Bolshevik revolution nineteen seventeen, there there was no... Socialism and communism were used interchangeably.
• 4:09
  Right? They they were used interchangeably. If you wanna define it, socialism later became defined as the state capitalist monopoly. Basically, when the government has achieved the stage of seizing the means of production. Right?
• 4:24
  A lot of people say that Lenin said so... You know, socialism leads to communism or socialism step pro communism. He didn't say that as, like, a poll quote, but he did write a paper that explained that. Shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote a paper. I believe it was called, how can we advance to communism if we fear the stage of socialism?
• 4:46
  And and it was kind of his, his old, like, sleight of hand. You know? He's like, okay. Everyone, we're marching towards the communist utopia. And then everyone's like, great.
• 4:57
  How about that utopia? And then he's like, surprise. It's a state capitalist dictatorship. You know what mean? Basically.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: So, basically, we say, okay. So state kinda state capitalism, you know, in essence, when the means of production, like, also in in the distribution of of goods and and the source... The the kind of output of the production becomes centralized. Right? When when the government seizes control of who gets what, how much this person needs, how much this person needs, how much this person produces.
• 5:30
  Right? In essence, right, as you're defining it.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well well, so here's the thing. There's no such thing as a communist government. Like, communism exists through the negation of systems. You cannot have a communist government.
• 5:45
  What you can have is a government run by a communist ideology. And and that's what socialism is. You see, that's what socialism is. If you wanna understand what communism really is, the simplest answer is dialectical materialism, which which is identify, contradict, and eliminate the middle. Communism is more like a like a religion or or or or a religion that has become completely material...
• 6:13
  Based in total materialism. Right? But it... But it's more like a belief. It's it's more like that than than it is anything else.
• 6:21
  It's not an economic system. It's not it's not like a government system or anything like that. It's it's a belief. And so communism, the whole theory was based on Hegelianism. Right?
• 6:32
  Or at least this part of it. So Hegel, prior to Marx, wrote about what he called the negation of the negation. It was one of the big... You know, Hegelianism was one of the big metaphysical theories in in Germany at the time, right, of Karl Marx. Was one...
• 6:47
  It was, like, the main metaphysical theory going around at that time. And so what he talked about was this theory of the negation of the negation. Basically, through the destruction of an existing institution, a new one is born or, a a more evolved system is born. And he talked about how, you know, through the negation of the egg, the chicken is born, through the negation of the seed, the plant sprouts, through the negation of whatever, you know, institution something exists in, something else is created. And so they they took that and applied it to everything.
• 7:21
  Right? And and so Marx took that and and applied it to basically... At literally everything. So so communism requires the the negation of all things. If if you really wanna break it down, what it talked about was the negation of the god made world.
• 7:38
  So the theory is we've all existed in this society that has been based on religion and morality. Right? And so how do you create a system whereby man's pure unrefined human urge creates a system? Well, you can only do that if you destroy everything that the God made world created. So culture, tradition, history, governments, every...
• 8:06
  Everything. Right?
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Oh, so is it kind It's of almost like there's this this idea that this system that God, the divine created, right, with all these things you mentioned, your culture, and, you know, the the natural order that occurs, that someone might look at that and say, well, yeah, that's a system full of restraint, and it's it's full of restraining our innate human nature. So the only way to create something better is to negate or just destroy the old system. Right? To absolutely just bring the old system to ash and rubble, and then let the human nature driven system emerge from, like, a phoenix rising from the flames.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: That... That's exactly what it is. And and so they they believe you can only achieve that if you destroy not only everything, but even the memory of it. Right? And and so if you if you look at what China did, they did that with the Cultural Revolution.
• 9:00
  They had the campaign against the four olds. Right? Old beliefs, old customs, old traditions, you know, ever... Everything. Architecture, sculpture, like, people were digging up, like, artifacts and destroying them.
• 9:11
  You know? It's like, they destroyed everything. And then the new culture is the China... Is is communist culture. It's, you know, Mao's Mao Zedong thought became the basis of everything.
• 9:21
  Now Xi Jinping thought is the basis of everything. So that... That's what they do. They've they've all done this to different degrees, actually. It's it's why communism persecutes religion, you know, basically.
• 9:34
  It's why communism kills and purges all the intellectuals, intellectuals, like, like, at least the ones who hold the traditional values. It's because they're trying to destroy those things. If you wanna get into the kind of origins of it, this is where it gets weird. So communism was actually originally more of a religion. And and I'm not the only one saying this.
• 9:54
  You know, Pope Pius the eleventh, this was his big thing. It's why it's why commune... One of the reasons why communists used to be excommunicated from the Catholic church, you know, for example. It... It's it's more of a religion.
• 10:08
  And if you get it... And in fact, even during the time of Karl Marx, one of the big debates was whether they should be religious or atheistic. And and the main the main competitor with Marx to kind of dominate the communist ideology, what was what was called the communist church, in fact. And and if you read their writings, they were freaky. They they literally talked about merging god into Satan, you know, like like, in their own writings, actually.
• 10:35
  If anyone wants to read that, by the way, you can read it in the history of Austrian economics, volume two. But, wild stuff.
• 10:46
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• 11:44
  Speaker 2: Going deeper into this, if if you wanna... I mean, we could talk about the old beliefs of communism for days, but if if you wanna really break it down, there... There's effectively two different schools of thought. Right? So communism basically comes from, you know, Hegelianism and this whole rise of Gnosticism that was taking place seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds.
• 12:06
  Right? If if you wanna break it down. You could define also the global kind of paradigm between the American led system and the communist system and kind of the back between these, even between between the differences in the American Great Awakening and the European enlightenment. Right? So and so in Europe, you had this kind of belief that, you know, new technologies were coming about, technologies advancing, and people said, well, how does God fit in with this new world?
• 12:36
  How does God fit in with, you know, human advancement and so on? And so they had the enlightenment. Right? And so and so I think some of it was good. You you could even argue that the American idea of the republic was part of that.
• 12:47
  Although, I'd argue the republic was was a going back to, like, ancient Roman philosophy or so, or even ancient Greek, but more more so the Roman model. But in Europe, they moved away from God. In Europe, part of that movement led to the French Revolution. They had the de Christianization movement. They had the first government run institute of of atheism, which was the cult of the...
• 13:13
  It was called the cult of reason. They killed Christians. They took over the churches. I mean, everything. This is stuff no one talks about.
• 13:20
  That... And that's what the enlightenment looked like. Communism was born out of that movement. So what what happened was you had, you know, Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety that that ran the, you know, the French Revolution. Within it, you had two factions, the Girardins and the Montagnards.
• 13:40
  The Montagnards killed the Girardins, you know, spoiler alert, and then, you know, and then created, of course, their system. Later on, you had a guy named France France... Francoise Noel Gracus Babouf who tried launching his own revolution after the after the French revolution failed, and he became kind of the eye... It failed, his movement also. But he was named kind of the the first revolutionary communist.
• 14:07
  The Marxist schools, those first came out of what was called the... It was called the society of outlaws, then they called themselves the society of the just. That led into different debates which formed the the workers, you know, organizations, which Marx and Engels were later part of. And and that... And that's a long story short of communism.
• 14:27
  It has a direct lineage within the French Revolution. The American side was different. You know, during the whole debate of how does God fit in with the world, America was going with it for a bit and then did a one eighty. And America had the great awakening. Right?
• 14:42
  We we had a... We had revivals. We had we had religious revivals in America. So America moved back to God. Europe moved further away from God.
• 14:50
  And and that that kind of dialectical shift is what created, I I think, the two different worldviews that we're living under right now. We're we're really having more of a religious debate disguised as a political debate right now. You know? And and and I think that's the real story of the world that we're living in. And so and so, you know, with that history, then what is communism?
• 15:13
  Right? Well, as they began moving away from it, they started... You know, there was a lot of philosophers, and they were looking into, well, what is society without God? What is morality without God? How can we create these things without a religious foundation?
• 15:30
  And what they found basically is a couple of things. Well, the only way you can have social order without God is through what they call strong government, meaning totalitarianism. If there's no internal morality, then morality needs to be entirely external. It needs to be a a totalitarian system that basically watches everything you do. You know?
• 15:51
  This is what... And that's what you get with that system. You know? It's it's actually interesting that when people are when people are able to govern themselves, they need less government. And and and that's also kind of the American idea.
• 16:08
  Right? Was was more more person... And and that's what the founding fathers talked about also, was that people being able to have a moral code which holds them to a certain standard basically makes totalitarian regimes unnecessary. And they believed, you know, with the American system that a strong system of law that just punishes wrongdoing if you're caught doing it, but that also has faith in the ability of the individual to govern themselves can create a prosperous society. This is basically what you have now.
• 16:41
  If you wanna get into the crazy beliefs, which really formed communism, as they started abandoning the idea of god, many of them started pulling up old gnostic beliefs. At the time, you know, the Rosicrucians were having kind of a revival. They're the... They're Luciferians, by the way. And I'm not just saying that, you know, they would call themselves that.
• 17:03
  In fact, I've known Rosicrucians who call themselves Luciferians. The Rosicrucians, seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds are coming out. They released different pamphlets saying they were gonna launch a revolution, and they were going to overthrow kings... The kings and gods of Europe. Right?
• 17:20
  Which, you know, if you understand in Europe, of course, the Catholic church was basically part of the government. You could argue based on that. But they but they were they were publishing stuff saying this. And they published a of really weird esoteric pamphlets retelling, like, old stories trying to, like, rewrite history and morality. It was it was a lot of weird stuff happening around that time.
• 17:40
  But when you get into the the beliefs that form communism, it gets into the the the the kind of two different divergent theories over God and why evil exists. Why does evil exist?
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: So these are... And kind of as you highlighted though, it's not just two political systems. Like, these are very, very fundamental, not even worldviews, but just almost like ideologies or understandings of where we came from, why we exist. You bring in the Rosicrucians, mean, a lot of the mystery schools, like, they've got some really strange stuff without digging into that, where, you know, strange sciences. I think a lot of them...
• 18:20
  A lot of the old world sciences and knowledge get kinda hidden within these mystery schools. So they're doing things that might go back a few thousand years ago. And so there's just... Yeah. There's some really strange stuff.
• 18:32
  But again, as you're kinda getting into it though, yeah, makes sense now that it's not as simple as saying what happens when you use government A versus government B? Like it's kind of, you can't get into that without looking at what is the belief of mankind and where we came from and whether we came from God and our our rights come from God or whether we did not and our rights come from our from our own will, like, you know, do as thou wilt. Right?
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in in in... On that point, I I don't think many communists these days, like, understand any of this stuff. You know?
• 19:07
  I I I think we're at a point now where the systems are just... People pay attention to the surface practice of the system, but without understanding kind of what what the ideology actually is. Right? I I I think for the most part, a lot of people who follow these things, they're like, okay. Totalitarianism, big corporations, I I don't want I don't wanna have to live under some, you know, system that basically strangles me out with, you know, high cost of living, and communism says, well, hey.
• 19:36
  Everything's free over here, little buddy. You know? Come and get it. I I would actually say as would many economic philosophers during, like, the early nineteen hundreds, like Ludwig von Mises, that actually what we're living under right now is is still a form of communism. A lot of the early thinkers were just as much opposed to, you know, corporate monopoly as they were as they were to government monopoly.
• 20:04
  And on that point too, communism and socialism don't just exist through government. You have military communism. You have even religious communism that even infiltrates different religions, for example. You know, in in Latin America, for example, you have, like, you know, like, you know, these revolutionary theologies that exist even within, like, the shell of, like, you know, religions down there. You have, for example, you you have, for example, like communism through unions, which is syndicalism.
• 20:36
  Like, there's all kinds of stuff. Like, it's it's not it's not as black and white as people think it is. Right? Even the systems we have right now is what would be called a mixed model system. So we we don't live under pure capitalism right now.
• 20:49
  And and the irony is a lot of people who have problems with capitalism, most of what they criticize are the state interventionist policies that come from socialism. Right? The high taxation, the the restraints. You know, I'll give you one clear example. Why is rent so dang high?
• 21:08
  It's because of red tape preventing new construction of homes. And if you have a finite resource and you artificially increase competition through, say, like, mass migration, but you don't build enough new homes to compensate for it, you create more competition for a finite resource and the price goes up. You know, it's it's like... This is like the most basic economics you could deal with. And then there are a lot of people who do it intentionally because they wanna make money.
• 21:33
  You have the politicians who own, invest in real estate and they're the ones opening the floodgates. Like what do you think is going on here? Or the financial institutions, for example, the banks that have massive investments in, you know, real estate, even where they're buying up all the single family homes, for example. And they're some of the biggest advocates for mass migration and for red tape on new construction. So, know, what do you think is going on here?
• 22:02
  That that that state intervention is... That's that's not free market capitalism.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I I feel like that, you know, in America at least, it's almost like we live more in a corporatocracy. Right? Where it's not even really just like we had this government. The government in many ways is just a a pawn for the giant corporations, whether it's the the massive pharmaceutical companies, the oil and gas companies, the the banks.
• 22:26
  I mean, it's it's almost like, you know, obviously you have lobbying and it's easy to say, oh, well, lobbyists are spending less money. I think it's so much deeper than that, especially if you get into, you know, some of the work of, John Perkins. Right? He wrote, you know, the, confessions of economic of economic hitman. And I've interviewed him before.
• 22:43
  Like, fascinating guy. I I really like his work. But he's talking about these corporations that have their own private armies, and that they're setting up these these debt based slavery deals with these second and third world countries where they know they're gonna go in. They're seizing resources. They're seizing military ports.
• 22:59
  They're seizing farmland. They're seizing oil resources. And so it's... Yeah. It's the idea that, you know, the America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, all we're constitutional republic, and it's the will of the people.
• 23:11
  It's... I think it's it's... They got the founding fathers if they saw what the country has become. And they're like, what? You guys are, like, paying 40 percent a year in taxes and no one's revolted and, you know, taking your pitchforks to the local government office?
• 23:24
  We'd... Was like, well, no. Because the Super Bowl's on. We gotta watch the Super Bowl instead. Right?
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Yep. So so technically, what we're living under is a mix of technocracy and syndicalism.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: So technocracy, I know. What's syndicalism?
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Syndicalism is communism through the use of the use of unions, basically. Right?
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: Or or a syndicalist state where, you know, big corporations are basically form of the government. Right? Like... So a lot of the big... And and and by the way, the tech...
• 23:57
  The technocrats was also kind of this view that corporations and the advance of technology could create consolidations of power, and whoever controls that controls government, basically. Was the whole technocratic movement, which was also around all of this. And... But but, you know, this is the problem when we try to debate communism and capitalism. It's like, it's not so simple.
• 24:21
  You know what I mean? Like, it's it's not it's not like some simple free market versus closed market debate. Like, that's not really what it is. Right?
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned technocracy, because I've been really hammering on that a lot lately. You know, with the data centers, the flock cameras, and that's just, like, that's just the tip of the iceberg. But even in the past, you know, couple of days or recently, there was, you know, I think someone was asking President Trump is a conference... You know, Musk was there, and they're asking...
• 24:52
  They're asking Elon about universal basic income, or what he says is universal high income. And and Trump is just kinda throwing a support behind it. And I'm thinking... And you have all these people. Was just looking on Twitter.
• 25:03
  You have all these, you know, very, very pro Trump accounts saying, do you guys realize what this is doing? This is amazing, universal high income for everybody. Don't have to work anymore. And I'm just thinking, this does not seem like it's a good thing. Like, this is this is bad.
• 25:17
  Like, how how long before universal basic income becomes, you know, programmatic income based upon your social credit score, you know, based upon your flock driving record, based upon your social media activity? I mean, I I just maybe I'm too much of a conspiracy theorist or too much of a of a doomer, but I'm looking at this thinking, this leads to a very bad place. And that's without even getting into Kurdish Yarvin and some of the, you know, the dark enlightenment and some of these other philosophies of the technocrats, which have completely surrounded the current administration. So, anyway, maybe I'm going off on a little tangent there, but I think I think it's a it's a pretty big deal right now.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: So what... What's actually really interesting is is that whole movement of high... Of high-tech kind of communist society of of universal basic income, you know, basic free services, and, you know, what is man. This is what Karl Marx actually wrote about as what communism would lead to.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: And and and a lot of people have never read any of this because it's it's about halfway through Das Kapital. You know what I mean? Like... And and Das Kapital is, you know, a big book. Right?
• 26:26
  I I I think most people, when they understand Marxism, they understand the communist manifesto because it's a quick read. Frankly, I think a lot of communists are not big readers. You know what I mean? But if if you read Das Kapital, don't recommend it, by the way. The first half, Karl Marx basically just lays out, you know, the problems of the economic systems and so on and, you know, destroy everything.
• 26:51
  And he's going against the factories and going against all this. The second half, he's praising all of it. Like, he he does a reverse course, and he's talking about, you know, technology and and all this stuff. And he proposes this idea of what communism will lead to, which is basically a high-tech society where people don't have to work and robots do our work for us effectively. And, you know, we can all be poets and musicians and wherever else.
• 27:16
  Then, and, you know, hey, we don't have to do anything now. Like, the machines do the work for us. Like, we're heading towards that. I think I think we're in a weird state now, though, where AI is even replacing the creative jobs. You know?
• 27:29
  So it's hard to be a poet or a writer or a musician because AI is taking up the creative jobs. Like, I I think I think we're gonna end up with a really weird state soon where there's gonna be a real question of whether... What it means to even live. Like, you know, what what is it... What is the purpose of life if if if everything that defined who we are as as people is is taken over by something else?
• 27:51
  Like, do do we just exist to indulge in entertainment? Do we just exist to sit around playing video games all day? Like, what kind of... You know, is that is that a good life? I think I think if you look at SSRIs and depressants and everything like that, people are miserable these days.
• 28:06
  Like, you know, and and so what what is the purpose of life? Like, we're we're heading in that direction really quickly.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah. No. I I... Yeah. I I agree.
• 28:18
  I agree. And that's the thing too is that what value do humans even give society? Because you could argue that for now, you know, if if a... If the leaders or the rulers need countries to have power, they wanna have a high levels of consumer spending. They wanna have money moving through.
• 28:38
  They wanna have a workforce. They wanna have all these things to populate an army to, you know, drive the economy. But if the army is now robotics, right, which is also... You look at Elon Musk and how he talks about his, his robot, and he refers to him as legions, which is a very strange term considering legions were the groups of, if I believe that correctly, the the Roman soldiers. Right?
• 29:00
  These these are war terms, a legion. And he talks about, you know, unveiling these, and you think, okay. Well, maybe they won't need us for the military because they can have either drones or robotic foot soldiers. They won't need us for a lot of the production, you know, factory workers, etcetera. Even a lot of restaurants you go to now, you might, you know, place an order at the drive through at fast food, and it's just an AI.
• 29:24
  It's not a real person behind there. Alright? Then, know, food delivery, all that. But then you're right, though, then creative skills. You know, you'll see stuff, you're seeing movies going around Twitter that some dude made in his basement that would have cost Hollywood $30,000,000 to make a five minute clip.
• 29:40
  And so, you get to the point, like, okay, well then, what role do humans need? And if you look at a lot of the people that have a lot of power and their ties in, their family histories into eugenics and depopulation, it's like, I think it's naive to think that they're trying to create some sort of utopia where we all have unlimited money because the robots are working for us and we can just, you know, sit around and drink, eat grapes and drink wine all day. I think that if more than anything, we almost become, disposable. And that's that's that's not good.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: Well, and and and there's a question too of what defines the value of human life at that point. Right? You know, is is it... What what what is the value of people? If if you eliminate value, then...
• 30:30
  You know, it's it's actually interesting. I was read... Funny enough, I was reading Starship Troopers by Heinlein, and the book is way different than the movie, by way. The book is actually more philosophy. He talks about the difference between the bugs and the humans.
• 30:44
  And, you know, and and if if you read it, actually, he defines the bugs as being the perfect communists. They live in a perfect communist society, and he defines the humans as being a place where a lot of value is placed on the individual. And he describes how they can kill a thousand bugs, but if they lose one human, it's a great... It's a... They lost basically because the bugs don't value the lives of their own, whereas people do.
• 31:10
  When when you don't create... When you don't place value on individuals, then why care about preserving their life? You know? And and I and I think you see this in China. You see this in the way that communists fight wars where, you know, the Soviet Union was even using, like, human wave tactics where they just threw bodies at the Germans.
• 31:33
  You know? You have a machine gun nest, and they just throw people at it until they run out of ammo, and then that's that's how they fight. Like like like, how can you care so little about human life? Right? Like
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: the same thing with Chinese. Organ harvesting is probably the greatest example of that, you're treating a human body the same way you would treat a stock of corn.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and and then at that point too, like, the people who then create value, why should they see value in the lives of others if we get to that point, right? Whereas individualism, you can appreciate what makes an individual valuable because they do different things. You know, we produce different things.
• 32:17
  We we we have different skills and different talents. Right? A a lot of us are really defined in terms of value by, you know, what we're good at, really. And if if alongside that, you destroy morality, and if alongside that, you destroy tradition, and you destroy, you know, the the systems that establish the idea of, like, you know, what's right and wrong, which is mostly about whether it's okay to hurt or take from people, you know, that... That's a scary place to be in, actually.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: No. It it really is. And so it's funny because we started off talking about, you know, Mandami in in in New York, and now we've gotten into a deep philosophical discussion about communism and technocracy. And so, you know, I guess, you know, looking at... I I guess, you're pulling in the whole the whole New York situation through just a little bit of a lens to kind of as an example and applying it to some of these larger topics.
• 33:14
  You know, when you see these things, like what what they're what they're doing... You know, I lived in New York City for a decade, and you know that the bodegas are the heart of the city. Right? The the people that run these things or even the taxi drivers. There's all this economy that's built around, you know, hardworking people that give a service.
• 33:30
  And so, you know, what what... Wait. What happens to a city like this when you bring in government and taxpayer subsidized grocery stores, where they're undercutting the costs. I mean, even, you know, some of the really nice kind of, grocery stores I used to go to in, you know, the Garden Of Eden in Union Square, and there's always really nice little grocery stores there. What happens to them when the government takes over?
• 33:57
  But then it's also historically looking at things. It's like what starts as the government coming in and giving something for cheaper. Once all the competition's gone, why would the government need to actually keep their prices down low? Right? Because then they could just do whatever they wanted to.
• 34:13
  So what do you what do you see playing out in some of these examples, kind of real world examples there?
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: I I see playing out exactly what every communist government or socialist government that tried this before experienced. People talk about the Soviet bread lines. It wasn't just the Soviets who tried this. It was it was most of them. Even even the Nazis, you know, they were national.
• 34:36
  They were socialists, you know, national socialism. And people talk about them on the race level, but no one talks about their actual political policies. They did similar things. You know, they they had mandates on, like, you know, milk and stuff like that that that led to basically the exact same problems. Effectively, when you have the government create an artificial subsidy of an industry on blanket level, not based on what people actually consume and desire, because in normal terms, availability, you know, production, it's all directed by what people want.
• 35:10
  Right? It's what people buy. If people want more of one thing, people are gonna be incentivized to to to create more of it. And and that's the way that the free market directs directs availability. And also sets prices when you have actual competition because people compete on not only production, but many economists note also based on quality and price.
• 35:33
  That's how the free market works. State interventionism was you put your finger on the scale. You force one side to succeed, but when you force one side to succeed, by virtue of that, you force others to fail. And so it it always causes that. So what...
• 35:49
  What's... This is my prediction on New York. Bombami is going to experience, you know, with with doing this, the same thing that happened to every other country that tried it. So they're gonna create these state run, right, or government run, I guess I guess, New York City. So city run, I guess, you could say, grocery stores.
• 36:07
  What's gonna happen? Well, the only benefit of having this is lower prices. If they cannot create lower prices, there's there's not gonna be a purpose. People are gonna go somewhere else. They're gonna go to the bodegas or they're gonna go to Whole Foods or they're gonna go somewhere else because the only reason you'd wanna shop there is for lower prices.
• 36:28
  Otherwise, what is the purpose? Right? What is the purpose? So they're gonna do lower prices. When you do lower prices, you're going to immediately force all your competitors to also lower their prices.
• 36:41
  And so you're gonna watch some people getting fired. You're probably gonna watch the big stores like Whole Foods or wherever else try to keep up, and you're gonna probably see more automation. You might see them replace some of the checkout people with self checkout kiosks. Right? You might you might see more of that taking place.
• 36:57
  Right? The bodegas will likely go out of business. And and already they see this coming because they're already suing the city, in fact. They're already they're already trying to sue over this because their profit margins are very thin. Like, they don't make a lot of money.
• 37:13
  So the bodegas are probably... Most of them probably go to business. The big the big grocery stores will then compete with the government ones. And then you're gonna have a demand for more locations. Because how do bodegas exist?
• 37:26
  People buy from them. So when people stop buying from them, they have to go somewhere else. You're gonna see more foot traffic then to the corporate stores and the government stores. What does that mean for the government stores? For the government stores, that means it's gonna be...
• 37:44
  That means there's going to be bread lines, basically. And because people are gonna be going for finite resources, you're gonna have some goods that are more in demand than others. And the way communism works is we direct what needs to be sold, not what people want to buy. So we believe people need vegetables. We believe people need this or that.
• 38:06
  People might not buy it, but when you mandate it from the top and you're not not listening to free market capitalism and what people actually buy, you're gonna have stuff going bad, and you're gonna have fewer or less of what people actually want. So there's gonna be demand for finite products. What's very likely gonna happen then is you're gonna have scalpers go in, and they're they're already trying to solve this and they can't. They they can't find a solution to it. You're gonna have scalpers go in, and they're gonna buy all the things people want.
• 38:37
  And they're gonna grab as much as they can and they're gonna empty the store shelves and they're gonna go outside and sell it on the street corner or sell it across state lines like like they do with cigarettes and stuff like that because they get around the taxes. So you're gonna watch markets spreading probably outside of Manhattan, probably into New Jersey, probably upstate outside the city, maybe even into Connecticut. You're gonna watch that take place if the prices are low enough to justify it. New York also, because good old good old communism, they also legalized because they don't they don't go after real criminals these days. They also legalized where you can go outside of a shop and just put a little booth there and start selling, like, you know, street side markets with...
• 39:27
  Which don't have to be taxed. So you're gonna have people doing that outside the stores and all over the place. I think very likely, you're gonna start seeing that the the bodegas are out of business. The, you know, Whole Foods stuff will probably... I don't think they'll be able to this either.
• 39:45
  And the government stuff is gonna have lines and shortages and scalpers. And that's gonna be the reality of it. Because think this what happens every time.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: What happens is that when you get down to these finite resources where, you know, you're going to get your bread, your eggs, I imagine it'll put restrictions on meat, right? You know, that's part of the overall You know, you have to limit your meat and, or you get your cricket milk instead of regular milk or whatever it is that they're doing.
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: That cockroach milk.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: Oh, there you go. You have plenty of those in New York City. You can milk them if you have them. And so... But then, I can imagine though that, you know, for a lot of people in New York City, there's, you know, again, from living there for so long, there is a very large class of people that are on poverty line.
• 40:33
  Right? That you go into the projects, you go into Alphabet City. There's a lot of areas where people are literally living meal to meal, paycheck to paycheck. And so then what happens when the... There's some sort of disruption and all of a sudden there's no bread or eggs?
• 40:48
  Right? Because say there's some sort of new bird flu threat and everyone's burning down all the eggplants and who knows what, I think that that that could easily spill over into, obviously, obvious black market stuff, but then more violence. You might have gangs emerging, running black market distribution of eggs. And this is all things that happened in communist countries. You have though often as the party officials were involved in it, they've got their own kind of side gig going on.
• 41:11
  They're making money off of their, their black market, you know, products. But you could see how this could destabilize and spiral into something where you've got large scale food riots. You know, it's... So... Yes.
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: Well, a couple a couple of things. So first off on the affordability thing. It's not even just people below poverty line living in poverty. In fact in fact, I think in New York, because of, you know, welfare and everything else, poverty is kind of like middle class. You know, I I went I went to the bank the other day, Bank of America, and I was talking to the guy at the bank.
• 41:46
  He told me he has three housemates. You can be a banker, although lower end banker, you can't even afford an apartment. You know what I mean? That... That's what New York looks like.
• 42:00
  Like, it's it's really hard to get by. And so your mid level guy because of taxes is living almost the same as as a low income person here because of the way the taxes and redistribution works. And then if they incentivize, the people make a lot of money to just leave, like like with like with wealth taxes like they're doing in California, then you... Yeah. You're you're gonna implode the whole system.
• 42:29
  On the part of the gangs, you'll probably see that too. So there's a couple ways this is gonna go, I think. I'll give you a couple examples. Okay? When I was investigating Chinese organized crime, like, you know, Chinese
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: Triads. Right.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: Spy networks. I've... I... A lot of my early work as a reporter was investigating those things, include... Especially in New York.
• 42:51
  A lot of their business is illegal, but a lot of it is also gray market, like semi legal or or or illegal, but not super illegal. So, like, one of their big things is counterfeit cigarettes, and they they they sell counterfeit cigarettes. Why? Because of New York state, you know, cigarette taxes. So there's a huge market of going out of state, buying cigarettes, and then just shipping them into the city and selling them a little bit cheaper than than what what they cost here.
• 43:23
  And and that's that's one of the big black markets in New York is is is things just built around selling a little bit cheaper. You see the same thing with scalpers at... Yeah. If anybody tries to go see a football game or a baseball game, I know Pokemon playing cards are one of the big things of this, the scalpers go in and fight over boxes of it. There was a big thing at Costco recently.
• 43:49
  Go over... Go and just buy everything and and then go on the corner and sell it. And, you know, your little five year old kid can't buy his Pokemon card because the 40 year old man bought all the goods, he's he's selling it at, a 200% markup. You know? So you're you're gonna have those scalpers competing with gangs.
• 44:09
  And and and so you you might see territory wars. You might see behind... You might see people getting threatened. You already have this within some of these markets.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: It reminds me of... Did you ever watch The Office with...
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: I never I never did, actually.
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: Anyway, there there is a a part where one of characters bought all the popular Barbie dolls for Christmas and and and was then, like, selling them for, you know, quadruple the markup on it because he kinda cornered the market on these. Anyway, it's a... It it was a it was a good one. If you could go back in time and buy oil before the world relied on it, would you? Of course, you would.
• 44:43
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• 45:40
  Again, that's goldwithseth.com. And here's something a little extra. If you just mention my name when you reach out to Noble Gold, they're gonna send you a one tenth ounce of gold coin just as a thank you when you open a new qualified account. So again, that's goldwithseth.com. Taking a step back because obviously we see these things happening in New York City, and that's, I think, a good, you know, I guess a petri dish, right?
• 46:07
  Watching what happens when this is kind of growing and just observing it. But, you know, when you step outside, as we talked about earlier, and you look at just the country as a whole, and you're seeing the government involvement, you know, in investing in AI companies, investing in technology companies, where the government's actually owning a share of these things. But then you look at, again, what we talked about with technocracy and the ideas of universal basic income in in UHI, right, etcetera. I mean, for people that are... I think for a lot of people in America, I think for one, there's a very large population of Americans that have completely lost faith in the political system.
• 46:43
  And and they're just they're just like, we're screwed either way, basically. Like, they kinda see it as a uni party. And so... But then beyond that, they're also watching the the data centers, the flock cameras, the... And not just those, you know, the new vehicles now coming with all the AI, you know, kinda surveillance tools built into the vehicles.
• 47:03
  You're seeing this, you know, kind of very rapid kinda accelerationism of this technocracy, this technical grid, not to mention the... Really, you know, starting with Doge, the integration of these big military industrial complex technology companies that are integrating fully into our own government, you know, Palantir, you know, a lot of these other larger companies like that. So, obviously, you could you could see where that could take us down into a path where Terminator looks more like a documentary, not a fiction film. So, what do we do? Like, this is...
• 47:41
  Think it's important to kind of get to this in general. You know, for the average American that sees the writing on the wall and sees what's happening in New York City, but also sees what's happening in their own regions, where should people channel their energy into? What what... What's... What do you recommend people do about this?
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: My my own thought is this. I I think on an individual level, we don't have to live like that. I'm not saying, you know, burn your cell phone and, you know, throw your TV out the window or else like that. You know? But but I I I think that, you know, develop hobbies.
• 48:20
  You know? Don't don't abandon your faith. Keep keep keep your religion. Find hobbies. Get, you know, get involved in some kind of creative thing because, you know, you might not be able to make money with it in the future.
• 48:34
  Right? I'd like... For example, I I like to play music. I have quite a lot of hobbies, photography. I I play, like, Warhammer, like, you know, tabletop stuff, you know, random stuff like this.
• 48:45
  You know, find find the communities. Do do things like this. Because, you know, the reality is, I think the outer world is... It does have all these kind of encroaching systems. Right?
• 48:56
  And as you mentioned, like smart cities, AI integration, wars, the kind of the negation of what what it even is to be human. Just because... What what it's gonna negate is the ability to make money on a lot of these things, which sucks, but it doesn't mean you can't do it still. It doesn't mean you can't be an artist. It doesn't mean you can't paint.
• 49:16
  It doesn't mean you can't be a sculptor. It doesn't mean you can't write music and play music. It doesn't mean you can't you can't live a normal life. Like, all the things of of the nineties that all of us grew up loving, they're still there. Right?
• 49:30
  You can still have them, but I think maybe we just need to change our relationship with them in some extent. At the same time too, I I do think on a political level, like, I don't want to have mass surveillance. I I don't like the fact that, basically, private businesses can do things that are unconstitutional because they're not government, like mass data gathering and, you know, predatory terms of service agreements and everything else, and then government just buys the data from them. Like, yeah, I I I think we should advocate for, you know, kind of a a stop on these things or some kind of... You know, we're like we're like government workarounds to violate our rights is not allowed.
• 50:11
  Right? I think I think we should require that. But but I do think when it comes down to it, the choice on whether you abandon tradition and religion is yours. And so I think as long as you keep these two things, nothing can take it from you, really. And and and I think maybe that's also a big part of the solution.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: Just stay human. Hold on to your humanity. Right? And Yeah. Even if it means moving out of the city, which is, you know, quite like where I'm at.
• 50:41
  I'm in Upstate New York now. Coming from living in a high rise in New York City for a lot of my adult life, and, you know, now it's like, okay, know, things are kind of crappy, but, you know, we're surrounded by nature. We've got animals. We've got chickens that produce our our food. We've got vegetable gardens.
• 50:58
  We've got guns, you know, which you can't have in New York City. I mean, I I went... I tried at one point, you know, trying to, like, legally get... Go through that process. It was a nightmare.
• 51:05
  Had to pay some guy, like, $9,000, and I ended up not doing it to, like, you know, get me, like, a handgun permit because I was working in the jewelry industry at the time. I could have maybe got it. It was such a nightmare. But it's, you know, also, I think, making some of those decisions of of getting back closer to the land. But you also mentioned community.
• 51:21
  I think that's also important is just building stronger communities, is is a big one. You know, doing real things with other people, having families over for for meals and and working together. I think those are the things that are important. I think they'll become increasingly more important too as our humanity becomes more of a target, for this system, this encroaching system, that it's kind of like the most rebellious thing you can do is just to be a human being.
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Fully agreed. You know, because because it can't take that from you. It may make it a little more... It doesn't even make it more difficult.
• 51:57
  I I I think in some ways, what... What's being removed is maybe the the the profit margin. Right? And so do we just do these things for money? Do we do we just create poetry and music for money?
• 52:09
  Do we just paint and draw for money? Like, maybe we need to rethink why we do what we do. Right?
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a good point. Well, Josh, it's been great talking to you. I know that, you know, you're obviously a prolific reporter, and you have a lot of stuff with the Epoch Times. So where can people find you?
• 52:28
  What are you doing with your show right now? Where can people tune into what you're doing?
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: Thank you. So, I mean, I have the show Crossroads on YouTube twice a week, but I have a new show that I'm trying to kind of just start right now called The Josh Phillips Show. Is that on YouTube?... On YouTube. It's my in-depth reporting.
• 52:45
  Yeah.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: Let me pull it up real quick. So the Josh Phillips show. And Philip with two l's and one p. Right?
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: One l, two p's, no s. Always spelled wrong. Oh, Oh, yeah. A weird spelling. Yeah.
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: I always always, reverse it. Oh, okay. Here we go. Oh, great. Okay.
• 53:02
  Yeah. Here we go. Awesome. There we go. So...
• 53:07
  Yeah. So, you know, right now, go subscribe Josh Phillips show over on YouTube. And so this is, this is more of your just kinda solo... Your kind of investigative reporting. Like, what what what are they gonna find here?
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So I I do I do live with epic times still, but, I mean, I have almost total autonomy for the most part. It's in-depth reporting. It's philosophy. It's it's everything.
• 53:33
  It's it's kind of what defines my work. So I I go into news. I go into ideology. I go I go into tradition. I go into everything on that.
• 53:43
  I I think I think kind of... Honestly, kind of the way I normally talk, kind of maybe how this interview today went, that... That's kind of my general tone, and so, yeah, people could find it there.
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: This is great. I didn't know about this. This is really good. It seems like, I mean, in your own way, you're you're doing something similar to kinda what I'm trying to do here is just to have a... Just a show about just having real conversations and looking at what's happening.
• 54:05
  I see even, like, right here, loneliness is the beginning. Isn't isn't... And it's the beginning. Like, I wanna go watch that. That seems that seems really good, actually.
• 54:14
  So... Well, good, man. Well, this is great. I I, yeah. It's been great.
• 54:18
  I've been wanting to interview you for, you know, quite a long time. You've done such good work with the Epoch Times. I appreciate all that you've done, especially a lot of your early reporting on China. It was really helpful. I I followed a lot of your stuff very closely.
• 54:30
  And so thank you for doing what you're doing, and I hope to have you back on.
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It'd be my pleasure. And, yeah, glad to be here too. Hit hit me up anytime then.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: Okay. Great, man. Thank you.
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
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