enemies to lovers grumpy/sunshine found family slow burn

All right, ladies, gentlemen, and friends beyond the binary. This time for real. Hello. I just did like the entire opening of my stream without realizing that I had to push a button to actually go live. Hi, it's me. It's me, Tristan. Hi. Um, welcome to the stream. I am the host of Stepback and It's Probably Not Aliens, uh, the YouTube channel and podcast, uh, respectively. Uh, you can, uh, check out my work at stepbackis. com or at probsaliens. com and, uh, support the show by, uh, signing up for Nebula, uh, and mentioning Stepback as the, uh, as the thing or going to nebula. tvback TV/stepback or, you know, um, Patreon, super chats, all those things are wonderful. Uh, yeah. So, uh, this is a stream I do every once a month or so where I kind of just chitchat for a couple hours just to let you know that I'm alive and I'm thinking about stuff and I'm still following along with current events and uh, you know, just keep ourselves entertained. Um, yeah. So, just to set things off with a bang, I'll give you guys an update on content because there is updates on content. So, I would say that like about a month ago, I was in a pretty bad place when it came to all of the stuff that I was working on. But then I had my medication all sort of changed up and it got a lot better. So I have uh at this point in the process I have more or less uh finished all of the research for the next podcast season. Uh there's about eight episodes. All that really needs to be done now is I need to find time with Scott to actually record the damn things. But then they are done. They are ready to go out to the masses. Um, as far as the next step back video goes, also in a good place. Um, I have most of the research done for the next Stepback video. it is uh the only thing I have left to do is I want to do some interviews and I'm working with another organization to uh talk to some experts and once I have done that I think it'll be script writing time and video making time. Um, while I'm waiting, I think I might start doing a little bit on the next either stepback video or I had this other channel that I was working on developing right before I started working full-time called Rolling Ones, which is like an RPG channel. And I have a video for that I have been sitting on for ages. So, I might actually just, you know, do one more interview and then I have uh then I have some uh most of the research done and I can start working on um actually writing the script and getting it filmed. All of these I'm going to hire editors for. So expect them to come out, you know, in uh quickly after they are uh written and filmed. Um so there has been progress. We are making progress towards new stuff coming out and now with uh I mean with a couple of things. one, now with my meds putting my m mind in a better place, I can start uh working more. Uh and two, um I'm sure that uh I'm sure it won't surprise anybody given the state of the world, but uh it's fairly likely that sometime in the next year or so, I'm probably going to get laid off from my job. So, I'll be probably transitioning to a kind of freelance position. And so, I'll probably try to do my uh best to freelance some stuff and um that'll mean that content creation will go back into being part of my tool belt. So, that'll be fun. All right. On that note, uh one of the things we do to start every

every stream is we talk about our wins. So, please, I wish for you to uh to give me your W's because we do not live in a world where everything is doom and gloom. No matter how hard the world tries to convince us of that, there are wins and little victories happening in corners of the world every day. And we are here to celebrate each other's wins to keep ourselves going and having a fun time. So, I got uh regrets from Matt, one of the uh Discord moderators, who said he wouldn't be able to come tonight, but was very keen on making sure that he knew that his win was that he is not here because he's doing volunteering to make the world a better place. So, congrats on that. And I mean, my win is the fact that I uh I I'll like I'll put up the I'll lay down all my cards to kind of explain situations. So, when I stopped doing Stepback full-time and I started a full-time regular job, um it was one of the worst experiences of my entire life. Um, and it's still not like all I can say is um there was a time in my life where I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what I was put on this earth to do. And then inflation basically killed my entire like reason for existing. And um and then I got another job that's you know it's depending on the day it's fine but it is a far cry from like it is very obvious that this is not the thing that I'm supposed to be doing with my life. And after, you know, being independent, self-employed, and making content and being a living working artist for years, it uh completely it hit me so hard that I basically went into like an extraordinarily deep burnout/depression and I just was uh unable to function. I even if I did have free time, I found myself literally staring at the walls waiting for a time to go to bed because I just could not bring myself to start anything cuz I basically was like there is no point to my life. Um, and that sounds pretty bleak until, you know, I got um until I got pills, until I, you know, until my doctor started putting me on stuff. And now I'm like, okay, that was just my brain not handling my life being ruined very well. And now I have to uh, you know, now I can kind of feel more like, okay, it's time to claw my way out of that. There's no way I'm going to get back into doing Step Back full-time by not working on it. So I started making plans, business plans, and you know, try to build up whatever is going to be next for Tristan in this world. That feels pretty good. And uh that sort of boost in uh you know, no longer thinking my life is basically over. Um I you know, did a whole podcast season and I researched a video uh two videos pretty much. So, I'm ready to go. And I also have uh since I got my G2 months ago, I have been very much enjoying uh my life as a motorist. Uh I I know that, you know, car good train or car bad train good. But I've been enjoying driving around and doing stuff. I I I am I I don't live in a pedestrian or, you know, uh public transit friendly city and so I'm enjoying the sort of like ability to do things that I didn't have before. Anyways, that's all the stuff that I have to kind of get started. Those are my wins. Um what are we looking at the chat? Hi, American here. just like to start the stream by saying sorry for the current administration. Yeah, I mean y'all are the ones who are going to be the uh hurt the most. I feel like you guys are going to punch yourself you guys punch yourself in the dick pretty badly and uh I have no idea what your future entails. That's for sure. Uh let's see. Space potatoes. Excellent. Love a space potato. Congrats on the more effective Dukes. Thank you. It was just more viveance and a little bit of that Wellbutrin to uh to take the edge off. Um does Trump have some kind of secret strategy behind the chaos? Uh if you have a solid answer to that, then you sir know more than I do. Um my instinct

is no. My instinct is that um my Trump is not um does not have a secret strategy behind the chaos. Um but that there are people around him who do have some whether or not they are competent enough to actually do the thing that they're setting out to do is a whole different thing altogether. But um I think that Trump is not a smart person. And he's extraordinarily charismatic. He can be funny when he wants to be. He's really good at connecting with people. Uh but and understanding what crowds want, but he is not a smart person. Um, big case in point is that this like trade war thing that he's doing right now is probably the one like policy he actually cares about because he seems to uh have this like weird mercantalist ideology that apparently has been like a cornerstone of his like entire political career going back like over 20 years. And so, uh, when, um, and so that means that like this whole thing about like tariffs and trade deficits and stuff like that is apparently a thing he actually really cares about and it is going to be one of the most disastrous actions done by a president in the entire history of the country. So, that's going to be pretty wild to see what's going on. Um the uh the thing that's that I think will be uh that the the chaos is being exploited by is that one of the sort of constituents that Trump has definitely let into his uh his uh inner circle uh and that would enable something like this knowing that it would cause chaos and destruction are uh like Silicon Valley like neo-reactionaries who are followers of the blogger Curtis Yarvin. And like that whole idea, like a lot of the stuff that they did in the early presidency with Doge and Elon Musk follows what uh what Curtis Yarvin wrote as being a butterfly revolution uh to basically like decimate the civil service and have a caretaker president who then installs a CEO of the country who will then completely dismantle and uh tear apart everything because then you can collapse the United States, which is the ultimate goal of those people, and uh turn the world into a series of kind of libertarian citystates where uh CEO kings will rule and a bunch of stuff because they they think that them being good at coding means that they can solve literally any problem on earth. And it has led to this like sort of messianic god complex. And uh they are definitely using trying to use Trump's chaos as a ladder. The big problem is that he's really [ __ ] that they're also not that smart. They are under the impression that because they know how to code that they are some of the smartest human beings on the planet. They are so convinced that they are geniuses and that the world needs them in order to survive. Um and that is just not true. And the fact that like Elon Musk is doing did all his things and then immediately is like having like things backfire and is uh looking like he's not in a good place shows that is like you know borderline uh crying on Fox News like on the daily shows that like this is not exactly working the way that they intended. So uh so there are definitely even if it's uh even if there are people who are trying to use this chaos to advance their own goals, it's not exactly true that they're actually like you know uh are able to do the things they want to do. Maiden Math went to go see a play with their brother this past weekend. It was very nice. That's very good. I actually went to a play last week too. Um, so yeah, good times. Courtney Lee had uh started a watercolor class. That's awesome. I'm glad you're having fun with that. Mr. Doctor got to take their son to the first NHL game on your birthday. Pretty fun. I'm glad you had a good time. Um, how to change bra size from 40B to

42 C. Huge W. Oh my god. Just All right. Are the Trump tariffs a distraction from the upcoming tax cuts? Will he remove the tariffs afterwards? Does he plan to keep them? Uh, I think he plans to keep them. Um, but I don't know if he's going to. There's So, are the Trump tears a distraction from the upcoming tax cuts? No. uh in Trump's mind and I think to the people who are advocating and actually believe in this thing in Trump's mind he thinks that the world is so dependent on the United States that he will be able to put in a system of tariffs and because he doesn't understand what tariffs are he thinks that it's going to force other countries to either um to open their trade their tariffs and trade barriers because he thinks that these countries have tariffs on American goods, but it just means they have a trade deficit, which is an unfact that like a trade deficit means that they have tariffs because Trump doesn't understand basic economics. So these tariff So he thinks that these tariffs are going to like that we need American markets so bad that we are willing we're going to be willing to have every economy on earth suffer um and that we will just pay up and give the American government tons and tons of money in order to keep uh selling to the US and that the US will become rich off of like basically being a landlord to the world when it comes to money. They don't realize that is not how things are going to go, that America is not as indispensable as it used to be, and that there are plenty of markets where uh people can sell their goods, and also just that many people would rather uh some short-term economic hardship rather than bend the knee to a very obvious uh act of bullying and aggression. He's basically just treating the world the same way they treated all of his contractors. he just like tries to find ways to [ __ ] them over, not set not pay them, not do the right thing, and it's going to be an absolute mess. Um, so I don't see I don't like but the thing is he wants to do tax cuts because his whole thinking is that well um cuz he's kind of talked about this and this is sort of like in line with the kinds of things because he's acting like I know this is a weird thing to say but he's acting a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. Um he seems to have like a 19th century idea of how to be president. Um, and he wants to go back to an earlier state, which is how the United States functioned before it had income tax, which was that it um used tariffs to raise the money it needed to run the government. The problem is that the government is a far more expensive uh thing today than it was in [ __ ] 1890 because there were like no social programs. There were no like even basics things. and the military was very small. So to think that he can do that in today's day and age and with this kind of economy is an absolute disaster. And also we learn very quickly that these kind of like tariffs and trade barriers are the kinds of things that cause economic depressions. That's why we stopped doing them. That's why after World War II, we set up a sort of order of like, you know, more liberal international trade to prevent those kinds of things from happening again. So, it's going to be disastrous. And is he's probably going to try to do the tax cuts and it's just like there's no way that America's going to pay for it because like I mean no, they can't afford most of these tax cuts, but it's going to put America in even more debt. And the problem is that once uh you know all of the uh countries start uh you know no longer dealing with America, America is not going to have the financial clout that it needs to basically bully the world economy into being the de facto dollar. Which means that uh not being able to pay back their loans is going to have more consequences than it used to. And America defaulting on its loans is going to cause more countries to do things like sell all of the American bonds they have, which is like basically uh you know the b a bond is is um so to kind of tell you when countries say that they are in debt, it's not like you have to realize like in debt to who, right? Like it's not like uh it's not like the United States has a bank account and they've taken out a line of credit, right? Uh when they say that a country is in debt, it means that they have uh

they are they're selling uh bonds. Bonds are a way that you sell to uh to investors of various kinds. Investors will give you money and you they sell you bonds. Uh these bonds are basically a promise to give you more money later. Um they're usually considered a rather low growth but stable source of investment. So when the United States is in debt, it means it is like it owes it has a bunch of these bonds open to bond holders in a lot of different situations. Uh there are a lot of them are Americans themselves who have owned bonds, but also a lot of governments that have spent a lot of their time being invested in the United States being a strong economy have also bought bonds because basically like buying a bond for a country is like buying stock in that country. you are relying that government is going to reliably grow and expand. And by putting that money into that economy to help it grow, you believe that you are going to make a return on your investment. And if America stops paying back its loans, which could be coming up because the interest on these loans is uh getting to a sort of dangerous tipping point for the amount that they're paying into just interest. And if they get to a point where that gets uh dangerous, I think it's about 20% or something like that, then people will stop. If they don't think that the money that they put in these bonds is actually going to result in them getting paid back and getting paid back by more than what they put in, then they're going to start selling their bonds immediately and then US is not even going to have money to deal with all the issues that it has. So that is like that's the biggest uh that's what's going to happen. Uh the US is in a precarious situation because um if you want I don't know how much you guys want to go into [ __ ] fiscal policy tonight, but um the United States is uh the United States owes its entire wealth and empire. Like the United States is an absurdly rich country and they manage to have an extremely high standard of living based on really huge subsidies on like you know uh on consumer items and gasoline and stuff like that. The reason why they are able to throw so much money at stuff is because they have been since the end of World War II the de facto center of global trade. Like when countries trade with each other, they do so with American dollars. And if you want to get American dollars, you got to get them from the United States. Which means that the entire world is invested in the strength of the American dollar. There are several countries that um that their dollar like their currency is effectively tied to the American dollar. Um, and so the United States kept its position of privilege and power because it was at the center of this global trading network that they had set up after World War II because they were basically the one capitalist country that survived the war. Um, now with the United States trying to play with uh being isolationist again, they are actively walking away from this role. like the trade deficit thing is because the United States uh like buys these things like Americans buy from other countries um you know private firms like private companies and stuff like that because it is a way for them to make profits like trade deficits don't necessarily mean that one country is ripping off another but what this means is that the United States is in a uh is in a precarious situation because enjoying the being the center of global trade meant that a lot of the world was heavily invested in making sure that your economy stayed afloat. So that meant that if you went into a massive deficit like say invading Iraq in 2003, you could put it on your credit card because you know that there is going to be financial entities that will give you as much money as you want because you know for a fact that they will that they basically will fund anything because if your country defaults and goes under, the world economy collapses. And uh and the thing is that this tariff situation ha will exacerbate a growing trend that's been happening around the world which is that the BRICS nations have been setting up an alternative way to manage global uh trade and economics that is outside of using the US dollar. uh they've already dealt with a bunch of things like there's some talk about Brazil and uh

and other South American countries making a currency that would be for trading between each other. There has been some talk with uh with Beijing and having a sort of like uh you know trade currency there and that is like a thing that's just going to happen. Um and so like the uh so what's going to happen is that the US putting this you know um putting these trade barriers on top of the countries is going to mean that uh like while it will probably in the United States in a very very long term uh result in more domestic manufacturing mostly because they'll be forced to like for example Uh there's probably some car companies are going to be forced to leave Canada because uh the tariffs will mean that it's unprofitable to make cars in Canada and sell them in the United States. Um so they'll pull out and they'll pay the extra money. They they'll either have to pay the extra money because the reason why uh cars are made in Canada and not the United States is because you don't have to pay for health insurance for uh Canadian car work auto manufacturers. So, what'll happen is that either these auto manufacturers will have to eat the costs of paying for health insurance for an entire new fleet of factory workers here in America or not here but over in America. um which is uh always been a problem because there's nothing that uh in the United States there is a heavy disincentive to having good factory work by the fact that any decent place to work that in manufacturing is going to have to provide health insurance for their employees and health insurance is an extremely expensive thing for businesses to purchase and uh countries that have public health care services don't have that expense. So, it's always even if can even if like cuz I think like the uh Ontario's because a lot of the cars are made like near where I live and like Ontario's minimum wage is like $17 an hour and it's getting higher. Um but the thing is even the higher minimum wage is offset by the fact that the US like that you don't have to pay for [ __ ] health insurance. Um it's such a huge uh like boost for like you know factory workers. It's also like, you know, the reason why we have u more like why we're able to manage like small farms instead of big like sort of factory farms and stuff like that. The whole thing. But anyways, um what this means, these trade barriers don't mean what American what the you know what the sort of white house thinks it's going to mean. The mean that every country is going to be poorer paying like rent to America for the privilege of being uh part of their trade empire. What's going to happen is that the whole world is going to make alternative arrangements for uh for trade. Uh Prime Minister Mark Carney is already saying that he is willing to sort of uh if America is not going to step up to the plate to be the leader of sort of the neoliberal sort of liberal world, then he will. And there's already talk of starting a Mexico, Europe, Canada free trade agreement. There's already talk of starting a Chinese Canadian free trade agreement. There's already uh talks of um some of the contracts for oil that Japan and Korea had with the United States uh turning those over to Canada. Um and like you know like the the economy in like you know the in the last like 30 some years has never been in a situation where it is more ready to transition away from uh dependence on the United States. And so I think that a and as a result of that, all of those loans, all of that like investment that the United States depends on uh you know like the the sort of spending that America can do on its like humongous military and its uh you know like really huge subsidies on things like oil and food and stuff like that and low taxes. um that kind of spending is no longer going to be because America pays a pretty hefty price for the fact that it doesn't have a lot of public services. That would make things a lot cheaper, that they don't have taxes on the rich, that they uh like the uh the military is like, you know, an absurdly expensive behemoth. These are all very expensive things that the US pays and can kind of afford because the entire world is like dependent on keeping the US economy alive. If the U if they're not dependent on keeping the US economy alive and through a lot of economic hardship, it seems like a lot of the world is doing its best to try

and figure out a way for us to not be dependent on the United States anymore. then they're going to no longer have people who are as willing uh to buy American bonds because it's no longer a sound investment because America is no longer the indispensable country. And that means a lot of things. It means that like credit rating agencies are no longer going to be able to call them like really safe uh you know really safe investments which means that interest rates on those bonds will go up which means that America is going to have to because if people are going to buy bonds and they're going to uh from a less reliable country then they better be reli they better be like you know higher return which means that the amount of the budget that the United States pay because like one of the sort of key economic indicators for the US to watch is going to be something called debt to GDP ratio, which is like what percentage of the money that the United States brings in uh is going to just go to paying uh interest on these loans. And it's a well-known phenomenon that when that ratio gets to a certain point, that's when countries start having to default on loans and all sorts of really bad things happen. You know, that's what happened in Greece, right? like um and now like the US doesn't really have like the sort of world economy to uh to hold it up anymore or at least it won't in the near-term future and that's going to have you know ramifications going to collapse everything and uh the United States is no longer going to be able to afford to do a lot of the expensive luxuries it has like low taxes uh not paying for like things that save money like a health care system like a healthare system is a net uh it saves countries money. Um, and they're not going to be able to have like, uh, you know, CEOs suck money out of the system by making the health care system privatized and, you know, for profit. And either America is going to ideologically stick really close with it and uh, collapse basically as a result or um, it'll be it'll cave in. And so I'm like thinking that right now Trump is either going to piss off somebody who's too powerful who's then going to tap on his shoulder and he's gonna find a way to change his mind on all these tariffs or he's going to stick to his guns and it will be one of the most disastrous events in world history and it'll probably be I mean it would probably be something close to the death of the United States as a at least as a superpower if not entirely because There are a lot of states in the US that uh function more like functioning countries and if they didn't have the if the federal government was more of a liability than an asset then there would be no point in hanging on to it. Like I could see California, which you know is uh on its own one of the most powerful world economies. I could see that if the federal government doesn't really seem to be like much of a uh a benefit for it anymore, they may just go their own way. Um, there are a few states in the United States that are like serious money makers that make most of the money that the rest of the country then siphons off of. They're all like, you know, urban democratic uh like dem like you know blueleaning um liberal sort of states and uh that means that like the ones that could afford to go there on their own will probably consider doing so which would mean New York, California um I'm trying to remember some of the other states that are like better off but um but the ones that are going to really be hurting are like the south like the American and south like all the deep red states are all like they they will not uh do like the essential things you need to balance your economy like raise taxes or even enforce taxes uh and you know maintain basic services. So they are going to be on their own and things will be really bad. And that sucks because like there's a lot of people in the south who are just like you know normal good people that are going to get [ __ ] over by the fact that uh the US has spent uh the last you know 70 80 years not investing in basic things that it needs to keep uh a normal country running because they relied on being like part of a central trade uh the center of a massive trade empire. It's going to be shitty. terrible for everybody because, you know, uh, a lot of countries, Canada included, have, you know, built their entire economies dependent on the idea that the US was going to be, you know, it's like if you had a whole lot of uh, a whole lot invested in a company and that company goes bankrupt, you're out a lot of money. And the Canadian economy, like for example, like our oil supply, like our oil exports are a massive part of

the Canadian economy. And our oil infrastructure is entirely designed to maximize exporting crude out of Canada and sending it down to Texas to be refined and then shipped out in the Gulf of Mexico. So, like if Canada is going to like if these tariffs are going to come in and like America is not going to be able to buy our oil anymore, we have to find new markets for it. But that means building like, you know, uh probably like a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean in order to sell it to the Chinese. Um because we're not going to we're definitely not going to do a Green New Deal or anything like that. That would be preposterous. We have to keep selling oil forever or else Alberta will have a [ __ ] hissy fit. So instead, we're going to have to completely reroute the way that our economy functions in like brass tax. Like our automotive industry is going to implode because both Canada and the US have an entire automotive industry that is based on manufacturing on both sides of the border. Things going back and forth many times. And now with the trade barriers, that whole like that highly integrated uh economy between the two countries is uh is fundamentally broken. Which means that every every car company, every like you know business that relies on uh the interconnectedness of our economies is going to need to figure out how is either going to go bankrupt or have to figure out a new way to do things and that's going to be hard. That's going to result like you know those kinds of shocks to the system are what cause you know mass unemployment. That's what caused recessions as like everything kind of realigns. So, uh I think that was the answer to does Trump have some kind of secret strategy behind the chaos. The answer is no. Uh you should be treating Donald Trump's running of the country something akin to a two-year-old with a machine gun. Uh it makes it no less dangerous, but there is it's hard to predict what's going to happen. Um yeah, at this point I can't even at this point the people around him can't control him or they're just insane. Nobody can call him out without being fired or worse. Yeah. The thing is that the because of that the people who are close to him who are enabling him are um they're actually not invested in any they don't believe in these things like the sort of like Silicon Valley people actively want the US to collapse because they have they want to set up their sort of principalities and stuff. Will the US survive three and a half more years of this? Um I don't know. I kind of at the beginning of his administration, I thought that this was all kind of like shock and awe tactics and that, you know, at some point the sort of like, you know, list of things that they planned on doing were going to run out. But it does seem like it's going to keep going. I don't actually know. The problem is that the US is kind of in uncharted waters at this point. But I do think that if he pisses off the wrong people, um you might be able to see some like real movement and some things that happen that um that you probably haven't been seen in American history before. Um the billionaires craving love, respect, and adoration is still something that shocks me every time I see it. Yeah. Hey, it's Angela Collier. Hello. Very good YouTube channel. You should check that out, everybody. Angela Collier, a phys the a physicist YouTuber um who is very talented and very entertaining and I highly recommend um question Becka the trade war. Will Canada join the EU? So this is a thing that has been floated. There's a recent poll that came out like this is about a month ago now that showed that like if Canadians Canadians pled a plurality of them want to join the European Union and there's some ways to say that you can claim it like the fact that um because of a treaty I believe signed in 2021 that officially okay this is like a story within a story but um for the longest time there was a there was some disputed territory between Denmark and Canada. Uh specifically one uninhabited island that's sort of off the coast of Greenland. Um it led to the the land dispute because you know Arctic land was not really considered valuable at all. It led to uh what was called like I think the whiskey war or something like that is the nickname of it, which is that this island that both Denmark and Canada had claimed to, they would what they would do is that anytime a Danish patrol or a

Canadian patrol passed that island, um if the island, they would uh they would put down a Canadian flag and then they would leave behind a bottle of whiskey. And anytime a Danish naval patrol went by that island, they would go to the island, take down the Canadian flag, take the bottle of whiskey, put up a Danish flag, and leave a bottle of schnaps. And then if the when the Canadians come back, they would just do the the inverse. And that was sort of like a thing that the Canadians and the Danish would do to, you know, fight over this uh disputed uninhabited island in the Arctic for ages. But in I think 2021 they actually sat down and like said okay we'll split the island 50/50. But that mean that is a big deal because that means that now Canada has a land border with a European Union nation. Unfortunately I think that there is actually some kind of rule about what countries are qualified to join the European Union and they do have to be in Europe. Um, so I think that it might I think that from what I what I've researched on this, if Canada to get Canada to join the European Union, the European Union would have to either uh massively change some of its rules about what countries can and cannot join or um or they would have to make one hell of an exception. uh neither of the European Union is not exactly a country that or uh not exactly a organization that is into uh making exceptions to the rules. So for now I don't see much of a I don't see a path forward on that. I think what we're more likely to see is that we will enter into a free trade agreement with Europe and if uh if America blows up NATO probably some kind of like NATO successor between Europe and Canada. Um, but the European Union is highly economically integrated and to do to make that change, Canada would have to have um there would be massive changes to our regulatory system and our legal system that would have to happen in order to be compliant with the European Union. And it would be I think it would be more difficult for Canada to make those changes than we think. So, it probably involves some constitutional changes. And Canada has a notoriously hard time changing our constitution. Um, the last time it happened, we almost lost a province. All right. You suggesting Donald Trump is a mirror universe version of Teddy Roosevelt? I mean, he's uh I think it's just that um you know, despotic evil presidents plus time turn them into heroes. I think that Teddy Roosevelt if you had if he was president in modern day would be, you know, very much like Trump and we would hate him for it. But because he was president like, you know, 130 years ago, we we let it slide. Um yeah, they always ironic that socialists can explain how capitalism and modern finance works at actual raw capitalists. Yeah. Um, it turns out that, um, understanding how capitalism functions is one of the first steps to realizing that it doesn't work. It's like how to a lot of former Christians, one of the first things that led them on the path to not being Christians anymore was like actually reading the Bible. It's like, wait a minute, what? So, yeah. Um, I am currently very slowly uh reading Capital Volume One. Um, actually wait, no, I put it on pause. I'm right now I'm reading a different book. But, um, but I will get to it eventually. I read part of it and I'm gonna pick it up. But uh but Capital is a book that I am uh I'm reading and so like I really want to have a good understanding of it because honestly and I know this is kind of go to say in modern day but I think that like the more that I read about classical Marxism the more I'm like convinced like the more that like I know that uh people are you know against like class reductionism and stuff like that but I'm like the more that I read about class the more I read about like Marxism and like how historical like material materialism and political

economy work, the more I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, racism is just how we like racism persists and continues because it successfully divides the working class. uh so that we don't focus on the perpetuators of these things and that you know if we just got rid of the economic forces that kept uh you know driving people to see the world through like a racial conflict i. e. like you know capitalist and like the sort of idea of like everybody competing for scarce resources then yeah we would be in we would racism would uh would sort of lack the fuel it needs to continue. Um, and that many times like a lot of liberals who only see the world through these like you know like kind of like uh things like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and such they acknowledge that they exist. But if you were to ask like a liberal like what causes racism? What is like what perpetuates racism? Why does racism exist? What incentives keep this idea perpetuating in our society? they typically will come down to some kind of like wishy-washy psychological answer or they won't have an answer. And it's because like they don't realize that it's you know that racism and sexism and homophobia are perpetuated because of like you know incentives and political structures and economic structures and stuff like that. because we could we develop a sort of uh an ideology a series of norms and thoughts about what is right or wrong in order to justify the unequal distribution of resources that currently exist. And you know we live in a world where men have more political and economic power than women and so people who enjoy those kinds of privileges i. e. like men uh use like develop an ideology, a set of norms and beliefs to justify the hierarchy the way it is. And that I think that's true of racism. homophobia, transphobia, and that if you get rid of the mechanisms that perpetuate that, like if there isn't a thing that keeps one class of people uh economically better off than another or more powerful than another, you very quickly will I don't I wouldn't say that these things would go away. They're still like, you know, there's still parts that are heavily great in our culture. But on the long term without the sort of fuel to keep it going, it will um over generations it will at least um it'll reduce quite a bit. America is so entrenched in media just forgot he's not American andor in America. Yeah, I'm uh I'm just kind of loopy because I'm very tired. It's been a very long day. Um I didn't know your minimum wage was that high. Yeah. Um c Canada's I don't know if we have a federal minimum wage because the thing is like every time that people think about um Canada compared to the United States, Canada's a much more decentralized country. Like this is a thing that I think I've mentioned many times on this stream and it's a thing that Americans probably like it's if there's like one thing that like Americans don't get about Canada that is like one of the biggest misunderstandings it's this because America is a even though it's like you know fairly decentralized compared to like a European country um the US is a much more centralized country than Canada is in Canada. Canada is a confederacy. It's not a republic. or it's not a federation or whatever you want to call it. So, Canada being a confederacy means that uh all of the provinces function more or less as autonomous self-governing entities that are then sort of uh part of the Canadian Confederacy. And the Canadian Confederacy takes care of like interprovincial trade. It diplomacy and things like the military and indigenous affairs. And this is why you end up with things like premieres of provinces doing their own foreign trips. And it's why like I won't show you, but like I don't have a Canadian health card. I have a Ontario health card that like the health care system is the Ontario health care system that my like and so like a lot of those things that in America like would be federal things are Ontario

things. Uh and that means that like every province has very different laws, very different politics, very different uh norms. They even have their own political parties. Like uh you might think that Canada has like just uh you know liberals and conservatives and New Democrats everywhere or and Greens, but like every province has its own sort of politics and that means its own political parties. uh some of the sort of well-known parties have like versions of themselves in uh in provincial politics but some don't like the NDP you know the New Democratic party are like sort of centrist uh social democratic party um there is like in Quebec at the provincial level there isn't a there isn't an NDP um there isn't a conservative party there's a Liberal party and then there is like you know the pouty Quebec and then which doesn't have an equivalent at the federal level then there is the current ruling party of Quebec which is the coal Quebec or the you know the coalition for Quebec and that is that party doesn't exist at the federal level. Um Saskatchewan is run by the Saskatchewan party. The Alberta UCP or the United Conservative Party, which was a merging of the Progressive Conservatives and the Wild Rose Party. Um, neither of which exist at the federal level. Uh, Ontario is run by the Progressive Conservative Party, a party that hasn't existed at the federal level since like 2003. Um, so like it's uh Canadian politics in that way is a lot more complicated than in the United States because like every province has its whole is like almost its own little country in a lot of ways. Um, do you think that chaos might cause a more left-leaning government in the US? I wouldn't put it past you guys. Uh, America is always full of surprises. Uh, I think though that for that to happen, things are going to have to get a lot worse in America. Like I think that things are kind of crazy right now. But like I don't think people will realize that like when the things that are being signed like the bills and executive orders going into action now, like a few months down the line when those things really start to bite, the US standard of living is going to go down drastically. I mean, America is getting close to having like child like children dying of preventable childhood diseases again. Uh like the deregulation that has happened on like safety and stuff like that. Like America is not too far from going to a time where like you have to kind of gamble to find out which of your children is going to make it to adulthood. that like you don't realize that if you might if you eat the wrong food or if like you know you get unlucky when you eat food, you might end up with food poisoning that will kill you because there's no regulation on food anymore. Or like any like number of these things like that are the reason why all of these regulations are put in place is going to come and bite you in the ass. And these were the kinds of things that made people turn to FDR in the first place that led to, you know, the New Deal and everything like that. And who knows, maybe a few years of like, you know, living in sort of Victorian times will make people really, you know, strive for something different. Who knows? Um the issue for the US is that both Canada and Mexico can more quickly reintegrate their economy with another partner like China. At that point there's no point in coming back to selling to the US. Yeah. Um, Canada has already said like on the like because right now Canada's having a federal election and uh the prime minister, the person who's like at this point almost guaranteed to win the election has already said that um like the partnership the economic and and military partnership that Canada and the US had which were the like you know the closest alliance and the closest partnership between two countries that's ever existed is over. And now Canada is going to have to completely change the way that it uh is now completely changing the its role in the world and changing its alliances and uh and um and partners. And that means that Canada

could really could go anywhere. Um because I think that with Trump being reelected in this way that I think that the Canadians have realized that like America isn't really a country that you can rely on anymore. Like you know maybe a Democrat takes over in another election in the future. But if that happens we know that like America is always just going to be like four years away from electing another [ __ ] crazy person and putting us through this all over again. So Canada would probably you know has a vested interest in uh realigning our economic uh you know inputs and outputs to work with a partner who is much more reliable like the eur I think that at the moment uh Canada would like to think that it could be the European Union but uh it'll probably end up having to be China and that is going to result in Canada having to eat a lot of crow in order to survive because we have been as America's lackey antagonizing the Chinese for years, including like, you know, the fact that we have put a 100% tariff right now on Chinese electric cars. Um, and we're going to have to kind of just accept that that is just not like we're not like if we're going to have a future in the world, we're going to have to get over our like, you know, hatred of the Chinese. All right. Has anything happened to like a St. Lawrence Se? I imagine it would probably run some places since it's co run all that. I have no idea honestly. Uh the issue for the yeah um Veraf Fakus had an interesting take on Trump's reordering of the US economy. I don't know who that is. Uh I just hope that my country is not dumb enough to put a Trump friend uh for president this year and hopefully our leaders will be able to build alliance with their countries. I don't know what your country is, but I hope that's true of everybody. Um, Greenland is not in the EU while Denmark is. Yeah. Is Cyprus in Europe enough? I don't know that. Yeah. You see, if Canada becomes a US state, would that make the king of England the governor of the US? Oh man, I don't even know what would happen to our relationship with the [ __ ] British Commonwealth at that point. All right. We have the same thing at the third party state level that isn't Democratic and Republican level. Okay. Nice Trosky glasses. Yeah. These are new glasses and like I don't know if I had them the last stream, but uh I love them. so much. I am in love with these glasses. I uh I got them a few weeks ago, maybe like a month or two ago, and when I was trying on frames, this was like an absolute like it just sparked joy and I was like, "Yeah, this is the next set of glasses I'm getting. " And we tried on a bunch of different pairs, but uh but I kind of went through it. Uh did you get my chats earlier? They had a number of questions pertaining to politics and the taist. Um I didn't Oh, there you go. There like all the That's like Yeah, you sent some chats before the stream started. Um why do people say fascist uh fascist architecture is traditionalist? I don't know. I find it bland and undrawn. Hungary is okay. I don't know. I don't know how to I don't know what to say. I have no I don't have architecture takes. I'm sorry. Thank you for the a Aussie bucks though. Um FDR didn't have to deal with [ __ ] like the Daily Wire and Fox News controlling the narrative 247, though. I mean, he had to deal with a completely deregulated uh press. Like the news the news in the news in America back then was pretty crazy. But yeah, it wasn't like being like blasted into boomer brains every single hour of every day. That's for sure.

All right, I somehow caught up with chat. That's wild. I don't usually do that. I usually end up reading the chat right up until the stream is over. I only got halfway through this time. Ha. Unless it's like not refreshed or something, but looks like it's up to date. But yeah, the U the the sort of uh what do they call what are they calling it? Liberation day. Uh it's going to be an abs like it's one of those things where it's like this feels too crazy to be a actual thing that the world is uh that the US is doing. But I feel like the last like couple months has um the last couple months has just been made up of like you know um the US doing a bunch of things that we wouldn't think that the US would do because they wouldn't be that stupid but then they are. So like a lot of things that the US is doing is going to be really painful for the world but it's going to be even more painful for them. Um, and now the world is in some ways I think we're getting our just desserts, you know, like America, like the world was far too dependent on what has to be like the most racist insane country that has ever existed. And because they had lots of money, we uh we we hitched our wagon to them and did a lot of terrible things in the name of them because we thought that our like we thought that we would be immune to their wrath if we just kept doing what they wanted. And we realized that, you know, there was no like all they needed they needed all they need was time before they would turn on their allies. And so here we are all over again. And so I think that like Canada and the West and like you know the NATO allies and everything like that really need to realize that we shouldn't have put all of our eggs in that America basket. I live in LA and want to move my spouse to Canada for obvious reasons. Where do you suggest that a workingclass people who are a friend of Joe Hill? Friend of Joe Hill and I kind of work in now in Canadian immigration and I will say that like immigrating to Canada is hard. It's very hard. Um, immigrating to Canada gets a lot easier if you are a, you know, welloff professional who is getting a job where your employer is willing to put down the money to sponsor your immigration. Um, it's way easier to go to university in Canada and then sort of turn that student visa into a work visa and then permanent residency. But um just kind of moving to Canada is not very easy. Um to get a visa or permanent residency here, you have to kind of have a pretty not only just a job, but like a good job. I was just literally having um I have a business partner here. I do a little I'm doing a little freelance gig right now um for the next couple months. that's sort of we're making a video for like a nonprofit and uh this friend of mine like the sort of person I'm partnering with for this contract he's uh on a student visa from Thailand and he we were literally talking today about how his uh his visa expires in 3 months and he works for a cost he works for the Costco in town. He works for Costco. I think there's actually two Costos in London, but um the Costco can't give him a work visa. So, in he has to figure out in three months how to get a job that will actually let him apply for a work visa or he has to go back to Thailand. And um but he really wants to. But the thing is he's self-employed. He's a freelancer. And you can't sponsor immigration as a freelancer. Um things that you can move to uh like um the things that make it easier to move to Canada though are like if you are willing to there's some ways to immigrate to

Canada that are easier that are that uh depend upon you would be willing to uh like working in critical um like critical sectors of the economy and being uh willing like being willing to uh exile yourself to very rural places. Um like for example, if you are a healthare worker who is willing to work in the middle of nowhere, there's probably a path for you to become a permanent resident but or at least get a work visa that you can then, you know, turn into a permanent residency. But um but that's uh that's pretty that's you know that's tough like right now. Um unless you're like a university professor or you work in healthcare construction um it'll be it's a pretty uphill battle. I know. I like I I'm I've had several Americans who have reached out to me about the uh the possibilities of immigrating to Canada and they don't realize it. It's pretty tough. I think at one point you said something about Greenland being uninhabited, but there are 50,000 people there who many of whom are Inuit living in Greenland. Yeah, I was I wasn't referring to Greenland. Uh there is another island that is um it's between Greenland like it's off the coast of Greenland and uh and it's like where Denmark's like sort of territorial waters and Canadian territorial waters sort of overlap but it's like it's not Greenland. It's literally like a tiny uninhabited island. Let me see if I can find it. Um, the name of it. It's called Hans Island. Um, yeah, look up uh the look up the whiskey war or Hans Island. You'll see it is like literally a tiny uninhabited rock. How far to the right do you expect Carney to tack if he wins? It looks like he might pull off a starmer/Biden by going by his silence on trans issues and support for AI. My hot take at the moment is that we need to safe up our third country because America is no longer a safe country. That would be a smart move. Whether it's a move we will do because the thing is that um taking America away as being a safe third country uh will result in Canada taking a lot more refugees and right now everybody in power in Canada seems very invested in taking fewer immigrants overall. Uh we're cutting back on immigration quite a bit. Um but um I don't know where I expect Carney to show up. Carney is weird. Like he's so like for anyone who doesn't know, Mark Carney is the person who is going to be prime minister basically. Um unless something really [ __ ] weird happens, he's not only like going to win the election. He's going to have like a humongous majority that the liberals haven't had in like years. Um and the uh the thing is that Mark Carney has a lot of stren like so he hasn't been in politics before. Um he's been uh you know he's coming to uh to our politics from being a like banker like part of the central bank of Britain during Brexit. And he also has been like a banker in um I think he was in like a like one of the like banker like a big banker in Canada. Um freaking um Stephen Harper tried to tap him to be in his cabinet or something like that. Um, Carney is um gosh, what is he like? He's going to be prime minister in a very weird time for our country. Um, what that results in is really anyone's guess. The thing is that Canada has been a lap dog of the United States for

probably 70 plus years now. And uh Mark Carney also has a background in running like a massive um sort of private equity firm company uh in Europe that had a lot of dealings with like commercial real estate and stuff. His resume is very concerning. Um, and yeah, he's been like silent on a lot of things, but also it's an election. People do people's like I think that Carney's like real sort of like governing mode has probably not fully come out yet because he like became party leader like three weeks ago and or he became prime minister has been in an election for most of that. So, I think after the 28th, we'll see what he's really into. Some parts of Carney's like, in some ways, Carney is definitely going to be like one of the most right-wing prime ministers of the Liberal Party's ever had. Like, he is going to change our fiscal policy in some really [ __ ] sick ways. Um, like capital gains tax. Uh he's going to probably like in the name of our like you know like national security he's going to result it he's probably going to you know build more oil pipelines specifically like to the Pacific coast. He's going to and he's going and like you know we're going to get all sorts of shock therapy. They're going to privatize a bunch of [ __ ] They're going to make a bunch of stuff. They're going to do a bunch of austerity in the name of like fighting the trade war. Um maybe. I don't know for sure because Carney hasn't been a leader before and what you say what he says on the campaign is different from what you know is probably going to be different from what he does because he is a liberal at the end of the day. So what will Mark Carney as prime minister be like? No clue. Uh I don't have high hopes. Um, I don't I don't see like I don't see him uh from my read on him, his like silence on some social issues isn't so much him like being a secret reactionary because I don't think that that is a thing that really works well in Canadian politics anyway. I think it's just that he doesn't he knows that in this election that um social issues are going to be seen as distractions and that uh all you can really talk about right now in this election is the trade war and the in the economy and Carney is selling himself as a prime minister who is really good at economy and is going to navigate Canada through a very difficult time. That's that's how he's selling himself in this election and it's working very well for him. Um, and what happens when he's actually prime minister and actually settled in, we have to see. We have to see who his cabinet ends up being. We have to see like cuz like I don't know if he's going to keep the cabinet that he made that was just like sort of to exist while, you know, while the election's happening. We don't know what he'll be like in parliament. Um, so what things what is his policy priorities? Like I think that he's probably going to be if anything very foreign policy focused and that for the most part a lot of um he's going to be ve much more in uh much more focused on like the thing about Trudeau is that he did a lot of programs that you know the federal government arguably shouldn't have had a role in even if it was a good idea like the uh the daycare system the $10 a day daycare that um I like am immensely grateful for uh that you know the NDP pressured him to do. But either way um that is not really like a thing that the Liberal Party of the federal level should really have done because that's like kind of outside of his jurisdiction uh because the provinces take care of things like that. And so what Trudeau did is he like individually negotiated with each province to get them to put in a program with the promise of like federal dollars to help. Um but I don't think Carney is going to do as much of that. I think Carney is going to focus on decreasing Canadian interprovincial trade barriers, which a lot of them are really kind of pointless anyway. Um, he's definitely a huge supporter of supply um, what's it called? Uh, supply management, which I think that's a good thing. Uh, most right-wing prime ministers uh, usually are pretty eager

to sell out uh, Canada's uh, you know, industries to the United States where they're like, you know, giant mega corpse can uh, can like steamroll our like local economy. Uh he seems to be and I mean like the whole like egg price thing has been pretty damning for um like has been a pretty strong case for why Canada should keep its supply management uh like in agriculture. But he even said that like he was just he's in Quebec right now and he even said in a French interview that like supply management is like a super important thing about Canada which I'm not against. So, okay, that's fine. Let's go with Let's go for it. Um, I don't know. To answer your question about like what Mark Carney is going to be like, I think that we really don't know. I don't think anybody knows. I think that um Canada is going to have some really weird and unprecedented stuff happen over the next couple years. And what our future looks like could be very strange. I do think that Carney is not super ideological. I think that he seems less like of a dogmatic free market guy. Uh like he's not like a Chicago school person. Um but I don't think that means that he's like, you know, a golden boy either. I think he's going to be very much in the line of like European Davos style uh finance and stuff which is typically more cautious but I don't um I don't see him as like a hardcore like privatizer or like you know massive tax cuts for the rich type of guy yet. But who knows? Um I'm not sure why a basically empty country continues to have harder and harder immigration policy. Uh so the misanthrop I'll explain. Um it's not so much that we had Okay, so here's the thing about Canada's uh immigration recent immigration history. Um there's been a couple of things happening in Canada that have been weird. So one of the things that happened is that during the pandemic uh there was this uh this neoliberal belief because what happened was is that uh a lot of industries were struggling to find workers. So um there was this I and Canada was going through inflation and there's this neoliberal belief of something called an inflation spiral which is that if there is a labor shortage that'll result in higher wages which will result in inflation even higher wages more inflation and that it will just run away. This doesn't actually happen in reality, but it's a thing that uh neoliberals use to uh scare themselves into thinking that uh we need to economically depress the people as much as we can. So the way that um Canada did that is that they uh they did two things. They drastically increase the rate of temporary foreign workers and the amount of industries that they can go into. Um, if you're American, you might not know what that means, but temporary foreign workers are basically like uh it's it's one of the things that like human rights groups condemn Canada for, but we take people from countries who come to Canada for like seasons and stuff like that to do stuff like agricultural work. They don't get citizenship. They don't get visas. They are often in pretty terrible conditions and they do like farm work, construction work, random things like that. And the federal government expanded the places that can use temporary foreign workers because um they wanted more workers so that the labor shortage would go away so that wages would go back down so there wouldn't be inflation. That was the idea that they were going for. The other one was that uh they greatly expanded the amount of student visas they gave out. Um and the thing in Canada is that in the last like 20 years or so uh the easiest path to immigrate to Canada would be through a student visa. You would go to a Canadian university, do your degree, and then once your degree was done, you would get a job because we would have we had this uh visa that you can get where you can get a work visa after your student visa expires. If you get a job within a few like I think within like whatever the length of your program is in years, if you can get a job by the time that time

runs out, you can get a work visa right after your student visa. and after you've gotten your work visa, you can eventually uh apply for permanent residency. Um, and so like a lot of uh like that was for the most part like one of the most reliable ways that people could immigrate to Canada. The problem though is that this was be this was exploitative. Um because universities that were having their budgets cut over and over again by provinces were desperate to find money. And the thing is that foreign students don't get the discounted tuitions that Canadians do, which meant that a lot of universities, but especially a lot of our like vocational colleges, would actively try to uh increase the amount of foreign students that they would take in. Not because they like care about these foreign students, it's just that they wanted to have a higher ratio of students coming in who paid the more expensive tuitions. Um and they would do so by exploiting like you know myths about Canada being this place of like un unre un like unlimited economic opportunity. Um and so uh a lot of people would go to Canadian colleges from you know from all over the world uh with this idea that they would go through this process to become permanent residents. uh you know, they would have hopes, they would have dreams, they'd work super [ __ ] hard to find a way to become a to become part of this country. And then they would realize that like they were kind of being just being used against the working people of Canada to artificially lower wages because it resulted in a lot of competition for stuff. But the bigger thing that all of this was done without much consideration for our infrastructure costs. So like we from 2020 to 2024 vastly increased Canad uh our immigration but we didn't uh we didn't in we didn't in kind increase our housing didn't increase our medical infrastructure didn't increase our like any of the sort of you know infrastructure that countries need to have people. So, we increased the population by like a lot, but we didn't invest in the things that you need to have a higher population, which led to a huge runaway housing bubble, uh like it led to like a huge housing crisis that we have right now. It's led to our health care systems being completely overwhelmed because we haven't put enough money into the health care system to compensate for all of the new people that we got. And so in 2024, uh, the government decided that they were going to reduce our immigration to pre2020 levels. Um, which is like easier said than done because that means that every year they are drastically cutting the amount of new people who are coming in and at the same time they are uh doing like you know like by drastically cutting back on student visas. all of the colleges that sort of had their budgets depend on these students for their money uh have had to do like massive layoffs and like um and like you know you can't just like immigration is a thing that people plan around you know uh cities factor in immigration when it comes to whether or not to build new schools when it comes to where to build housing develop ments when it comes to all those kinds of things. And so very rapidly they were like we're going to cut back massively on immigration over the next few years. Um, one of the examples of like what's like going to really [ __ ] us over is that like uh I work in something that is funded by the uh by immigration, refugees and citizenship Canada, which is sort of like our like, you know, immigration department. And part of this, you know, cutting back on immigration means a giant cutback on the size of our immigration department, which means that I think that they want to go from something like 21,000 employees down to like 9,000. Um, and that means like mass like the next like I think like three years, uh, we're going to see huge budget cuts. So, this is why I think I'm going to get laid off probably next year. Um, because this process started under Trudeau, but I think Carney will just increase it. Um, but yeah, so it's not like Canada's always been a hard country to immigrate to. Uh but the way that we increased immigration was not a way to make like to help people who want to come to Canada and make it a better place actually do so. It was a way to exploit people from the global south

with uh dangling the dream, the Canadian dream and then kind of uh leaving them out in the cold in very many ways cuz uh yeah, so that um that was a tough one to like really work through what to do, but um unfortunately Yeah, Canada is a big empty country, but uh in actuality, people who move to Canada want to move to our urban centers. Um we are having a hell of a time getting people to move to like you know the vast rural areas that uh that you know that all that empty space and doesn't have roads, doesn't have electricity, doesn't have running water. Um, and so we need to like if we wanted to, you know, grow Canada out to like a larger population, you have to invest in like things like roads, electricity, water, infrastructure, housing, and those kinds of things. One of the things though that I um that I'm actually a little bit happy that I heard Carney is planning on doing as prime minister is that he's uh essentially he didn't like say it in like straight terms, but it sounds like he essentially is planning on making something like a crown corporation that uh sort of would function like Canada's uh public housing initiatives in the 70s and is planning on spending a lot of money and building a lot of housing that is not designed to be for profit uh in the next few years which could which I mean or at least it's being made by a crown corporation which means like uh a corporation that isn't expected to turn a profit. It's kind of like um yeah it's like Amtrak or something like that for the Americans. So who knows what that that'll end up how that'll end up going. Um, what do you think is in the grill for Taiwan now that the US is likely to go full depression plus isolation plus world rerouting away? Yeah, I don't know. Taiwan's in a weird place because Taiwan is not a recognized country. China wants to take it over. they don't want to be taken over and while like you know if the US didn't back them up they wouldn't really have much they could say about it but Taiwan is also like one of the world's largest computer chip manufacturers and so um I don't know like the thing is like that aspect of Taiwan that they are so critical to like a very important part of the economy I don't know what the result of China's going to do about Taiwan at the moment Uh, if Trump hadn't started talking about invading Canada, do you think that your country would be doing what mine is, desperately trying to maintain good relations in the US in spite of everything? Pro I think so. I think that Yeah. I mean like a lot like the reasons why Canada is doing what it's doing like there's different extents because like the thing is that a lot of like Trudeau had already resigned when Donald Trump took power. So um so like there was going to be a big change anyway. Um and uh but our relations with the United States I think yeah would have probably been a lot more like attempting cuz even now still several of our premieres and stuff like that are trying to make things work like you know we've got our quistling premiere Danielle Smith but also like Doug Ford is trying to make deals and like these things. I think we would have seen a lot more stuff like that. And yeah, Pierre Palev's uh freaking um uh like [ __ ] tactics would probably be much more uh much more popular cuz like Donald Trump's attack on Canada has basically made like Trump style like you know mega [ __ ] really really unpalatable in Canadian politics. And the thing is that Pierre Palev like had his entire campaign built around uh complaining about Trudeau who was no longer running for prime minister and using like freaking MAGA style complaining like MAGA style social issues and stuff like that to um to rile up the base. And it's like Canadians don't give a [ __ ] about like calling things woke. Now that just sounds like you're trying to mimic American style politics in Canada and Canadians are really [ __ ] sick of American style

politics right now. So um the theory is that the West is heading towards the opposite of right libertarianism. Economic leftism and social reactionary. That's not a It definitely seems to be well it definitely seems like neoliberalism definitely seems to be dying as an ideology and what uh comes after that is uh really up in the air right now. Um yeah, I um your words were invaluable. Well, thank you, Badger. I appreciate that. I hope that like yeah that Canada's immigr like I don't know if this is in response to the talk about immigration but like Canada's immigration like we were in like a weird trap and I don't know like I don't know if what happened is the call that I would have made. I don't think so. I think that what we should have done is vastly improved our investing in infrastructure but definitely the way that we were doing immigration was not good for anybody involved. It the Canada. It was not good for the people that we were tricking into coming here. Um and then giving like absolutely no support for and it was just um it was just a ploy to lower wages um explicitly like it was done explicitly to lower wages because they didn't want what they called an inflation spiral, a madeup thing. So, um, was it a wise decision? And I think that, uh, and there it was also one of those situations that's like, well, how do you get out of this? Because you don't get out of it unless you're willing to spend a lot of money that we might not have or drastically cut back on immigration, which will have huge negative effects to the country and also will disrupt will be a huge disruption. and uh leans into sort of, you know, racist uh anti-immigrant uh sentiment. None of them are good answers, and that's because it was just a bad idea to begin with. the sort of like, you know, like uh rapid um yeah, Canada Canada's like stuff with like student visas and temporary foreign workers was like a was a really [ __ ] shitty thing we were doing. All right. So, we got about 25 more minutes. What should we talk about? If the US actually did invade Canada, would the len of the border and make it a logistics nightmare. Does the way the population is distributed mean they'd only really need to take Ontario? I think that you know the military situation is that uh taking Canada would be very easy. holding hard because yeah, Canada is uh very not only their population very highly like our population is very highly concentrated in a handful of urban areas, you know, Vancouver, Calgary, uh Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, right? Like you take those, you've conquered most of the country. Um, so you just like be and they and we all because of, you know, our longtime alliance with the Americans, we have like, you know, highways that go right from the US border to those cities. Um

but so I think that if the US actually like tried to invade Canada, they could take it over very easily. But Canada is got a couple things. One, it's huge. Two, there's a lot of places that you can retreat into. Three, uh, our military is not big, but it is good. And, uh, Canada is, uh, Canada's military strategy has always been that we don't have a lot of soldiers, but their soldiers are very well trained. And especially Canadian um, Canadians are like Canadian commandos are very uh, very good. They're very um they're very well trained. They're very they're like Canada is like legendary because of our commandos. Um in World War II, our commandos did some pretty insane [ __ ] Um so the most likely thing that would happen is that America would occupy Canada and conquer it fairly easily. But uh American but Canadian soldiers h would just disappear into the woods and then we would have we are like you know we can culturally integrate with the United States very easily and uh America and Canad and America all we would need to do is make the process of occupying Canada which would if it happened would be an extremely unpopular act uh very painful for them. And all you would need to do is basically have the Canadian troops that you know like have the same accent and look the same and you know disappear into the American sort of uh the giant you know giant border between Canada and America and then just start destroying stuff like America has electricity infrastructure that is extremely over capacity that hasn't been uh maintained in years is hundreds of years old or is like a hundred years old and hasn't been maintained in like 50 plus years and if you took it out would put entire counties in blackouts for months. Um, America has a lot of really bad infrastructure that is very easy to attack. Uh so my guess is that there would be uh Canadian sort of you know actions of like you know destroying American infrastructure, destroying like uh like things like that would very quickly turn Americans against the war because Americans are not used to having to fight on their home territory. And the second, like I think that like America is a country that literally almost had a civil war over the idea of like wearing a mask and maybe getting a vaccine that's free. Um, this is a country that like, you know, someone's going to get a gun pulled on them for a [ __ ] like Egg McMuffin. I don't like Americans can't live without same day delivery, let alone like dealing with like actual violence at home. US actually did invade can. Yeah. So, the plunging US dollar, how low does it go? A stronger Canadian dollar would be interesting. There was a time, I don't remember when it was, it was in the 2000s where the Canadian dollar actually went above the American dollar briefly and it was weird. Um and uh historically the Canadian dollar was stronger than the American dollar like throughout the 70s and stuff. Um, but the thing is that Canada had a fiscal like we have a we had a fiscal policy that was that we intentionally kept our um our currency weaker than the US so that it would be so, you know, that America would get a better deal uh buying wood from us or buying like wood and oil and stuff like that because they would benefit from the exchange rate and so that they would get our stuff, you they would get a good deal on our stuff. Uh so, you know, when you are like an export resource economy, you kind of want to do that. have a cheap uh a cheap currency. But now that the United States is no longer our, you know, ally and partner, uh it doesn't really matter as much. So, um I don't know what's going to happen. And yeah, the I got to see what the USD to CAD is like right now because I imagine it's very interesting. because it was really low a little bit ago. Yeah, in the last day it went from $141 to $142. Okay, that's not as

drastic as you'd think. But yeah, it did go from like one Canadian dollar being like 60 American cents to uh Canadian dollar being 70 American cents, which you know in aggregate is actually a pretty big deal. But yeah, um yeah, I mean the entire world is suffering economic shocks from what happened. I don't know if any of it's as bad as what's happening in the US. I haven't really been following the stock market stuff in the last like couple of days. Not because I don't want to, but because of, you know, the way my life works now. I don't have time to catch up on the news as much as I used to because I have to do freaking work all day. So, I don't get to follow what's going on as much. But, um, but yeah, like this, uh, this is bad. I don't even like um I haven't seen how like the stock market crash of the last couple days ranks with like I've been hearing comparisons to like the sort of crash that happened when the COVID pandemic first started, but um I haven't seen how it compares to like the 2008 recession or the 1929 crash. Um but that's mostly because I don't really have the time to read articles anymore. Most of the news that I get now is just um what's it called? Um like what I most of the stuff that I do these days is I uh I listen to uh CBC's World Report and I listen to Democracy Now and um that's where most of my news comes from now. Would adopting the pound sterling be a good idea in your opinion? I don't know. Why would tying our currency to like another [ __ ] like another failing country? I would want to tie our I would think that adopting the euro would be a stronger idea because the euro is a currency that's used by like [ __ ] 20 countries, not like one. I feel like um if we're at any moment right now like the UK seems to want to sickopantically suck up to the Americans that like mostly because of Brexit now they're hopelessly dependent on the US. Um, so like what if Britain and France joined the CSA? Like I don't know what you mean by that. Like the the casting something of America like uh I'm not sure what you mean by CSA. Does anyone know how the stock market crash that's in the last couple days compares with like the 2008 one? Does anyone have an answer to that one? So, I'm seeing stuff that's like it's the worst week for the US since the COVID crash, but I haven't seen it compared to like Black Monday or like any of those kinds of things. My guess if it was like, you know, 2008 bad, people would be saying that a lot more the south and the civil war. What if they join them? I don't know. Like why would they join them? What would be the purpose? motivation? Like Britain and France had no like um desire to join the Confederacy because it was just a

[ __ ] like random rebellion. Like the the Confederates themselves had a kind of uh deluded thought that the British were going to join them, but it was never actually going to happen. The British would never [ __ ] around like that. um like there's no I don't see any like reason why the um the European powers would have wanted to mess with the Confederacy at that point. Um like the US at that point was like one of the number one exporters of textiles on earth. And if like you know like backing a rebellion in a civil war would have uh like once it ended it would not have ended well for them. like they would have had to guarantee that like a side in the war that was like very obviously going to lose from day one uh like hoping that they will win. And it's like no, the side that's using musketss from the [ __ ] revolution, the American Revolution and doesn't have any railroads is definitely not the side that's going to win the war the war. like we do we put a lot more uh we like when it comes to the Civil War because it's American and so we romanticize it a lot more. We put a we give a lot more credence to the Confederacy than it actually had. The Confederacy only did as well as it did because they had one good general and the America the US army had a series of like absolute [ __ ] dullards uh running the army and so they basically just kind of like flailed until um until they put Grant in charge. But like even without even having like absolute dumbasses like General Burnsides, the Union like was still like had the upper hand in every single part of the fight. The recent film. Yeah, the A24 Civil War movie. I've heard about it and like people are like this map makes no sense. Like the Civil War makes no sense. It's like they tried to have a Civil War movie, but they didn't want to actually make any statement about America in this current moment. And so they just made up like a civil war that makes no sense. How would you explain a stock market crash to a child? Like it seems that saying that an abstract number going down could cause a lot of suffering. Um, I would just go to the general sentiment and uh and things and that is that uh like you know the way that we get stuff is that people put money into organizations that make the stuff. The idea that the idea that people the reason why people do that is because they want to make more money than they put in. If they don't think that their money will be turned into more money by putting it into stuff, they won't put it into stuff. And if they think that the money that they've already put into stuff is not going to make money, they'll pull it out. And when uh big insane things happen, people on mass make the same decision to pull their stuff out uh because it's it if they're going to lose money, then they'd rather keep it in their bank account than, you know, uh put it into new things. And so uh and that has a uh and if people don't put their money into stuff, the economy shrinks and stagnates and bad things happen because people need the economy to grow for things like jobs and stuff. The most exact impact I've seen is that it's now about to be worse than 2020. The S& P 500 is down over 10% and the Dow is down over 2,000 points. O yeah, I did see that someone said that like $2. 5 trillion got taken out of the US economy like overnight and it's like this has got to be bad. This is how you know though that all the conspiracy theories are not true because um you know Donald Trump would have definitely been assassinated at this point. Like if the CIA was an all powerful organization that assassinated presidents they don't like they would have definitely killed Trump by now. Just watch. If Donald Trump dies from

like dementia and hamburgers, like people are going to just assume that the CIA did it. It's there's going to be the conspiracies will be off the [ __ ] charts. It's like when Hitler committed suicide and the Nazis just refused to admit that he died and they there's people to this day that don't think he died in 1945. Like taking like the world's most conspiracyp-one people and then having a major event happen will drive them absolutely nuts. You're not a Kennedy truther? No. I think that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald who was a mentally disturbed individual who thought that he was furthering the communist cause by doing it. uh and uh yeah did not end up making the because the thing is that political assassinations typically have the opposite effect of what they think it will and so the only people who really end up doing it are people who want some kind of perverse attention from it and typically aren't mentally well. Um, feel like that's one that a lot of leftists buy into. Well, it's because it's uh, you know, it affirms their biases, which are the easiest uh, conspiracy theories for people to buy into are conspiracies that affirm things that you want to believe or that, you know, you believe about the world. But I would say that you can say you can believe that you know that the CIA is a [ __ ] evil organization and don't need to think that they somehow killed Kennedy with no leaks and uh for 60 years and like also just like the evidence doesn't rack up like you like real investigations into the JFK assassination paint a pretty clear picture that Lee Harvey Oswald did it. And like you know the most of the conspiracy theories are really like either circumstantial evidence or grasping at straws. How do you think Trump supporters will handle the post about the current market saying that his policies will not change, that only the weak will fail? I think that they'll just repeat those things. I don't know if I don't know what it will take for Trump's The thing is that Trump's like hardcore supporters are more like cultists than political supporters. They I don't know if it is possible for Trump to do wrong by a lot of them and even if it's like even if their lives are absolutely miserable if everything is awful uh they will still hold to the dear leader because he is their he's their not their leader he's their daddy and it'll take quite a lot to force uh the US to or force like these people to really to break. The thing is though, hardcore mega people are not a even a not that like they're not a huge part of the population. And there are a lot of people who voted for Trump who are very quickly going to turn on Trump, the second that they're like they start to feel real effects from their, you know, standard of living sharply decreasing, which is going to happen over the next few months. So

yeah, so you got about two minutes left. Uh, do we have any last thoughts as we delve into the [ __ ] weirdness that is our reality right now. Certainly is a wild one. I will say that. The other day I was watching some people talk about the idea the CIA killed Kennedy. They said by the time they killed Fred Hampton, they got sloppy. As American Louisiana, you feel especially screwed. I mean, yeah. I mean, people in the South have been getting screwed for years and years because they use the fact that y'all have a lot of people in your states who are willing to uh put up with a lot of, you know, horrible [ __ ] happening to them in the name of like Jesus or like uh or white supremacy and Unfortunately, like all of the normal people who live in the South kind of get [ __ ] over in the process, right? That's unfortunate for you. All right, I think it's about time to wrap up. So, I will say that uh this has been real. I uh you guys are great. I'm hoping that there will be by the next time I do this stream a video up or a podcast episodes out or something. I really hate uh it's been driving me insane that I can't make content as much as I would like to. And so I'm very happy to have made progress and I hope that you guys will get to see the fruits of that progress very soon. Um, have a good night. Take care of yourself and take care of each other. Boy, god are we going to need it. See you.