On January 24, 1971, a Swiss-German university professor managed to raise money from the European Commission to fund his new idea— he wanted to start a business conference that would become a major global brand.
He secured the funding and held the first conference the following month in the tiny Swiss town of Davos; it was a smashing success— more than 400 executives attended. The following year, the President of Luxembourg was a featured speaker.
And for decades since, attending the annual conference at Davos has become a rite of passage among the world’s business and political elite.
The professor turned conference organizer, of course, is Klaus Schwab. And the organization he started is now known as the World Economic Forum (which is meeting right now for its 2023 event).
The WEF has turned into an overzealous, supranational, undemocratic organization with a dangerous amount of power; Schwab openly brags about the influence he has with world leaders.
For example, in 2017 Klaus Schwab spoke about all the world leaders who had previously been involved with the World Economic Forum through its Young Global Leaders program.
He named Russian President Vladimir Putin, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as examples to explain, “what we are very proud of… is that we penetrate the cabinets” of governments around the world.
Schwab said that half of Trudeau’s cabinet were Young Global Leaders of the WEF.
And Trudeau is a great example of the type of world the WEF wants to create; one where the government can, for example, form “public-private partnerships” to freeze your bank accounts for protesting against being required to take a vaccine in order to earn a living.
And yes, representatives of the big banks and pharmaceutical companies are present in Davos this week.
The WEF’s goals aren’t a theory. Schwab wrote a book about it. You can read exactly what his worldview is, and see how it has made its way into legislation and national policy.
Just four months after Covid was declared a pandemic, Schwab published a book called Covid-19: The Great Reset, arguing that the pandemic presented a “unique window of opportunity” for global elites to reshape “the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons.”
The WEF was instrumental in promoting Covid lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and censorship of “misinformation.”
In 2021 in a now deleted Tweet, the WEF wrote, “Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world.”
Months before the outbreak of Covid, it hosted a “Global Pandemic Exercise” to simulate “an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus.”
One recommendation the conference put out was for governments “to partner with traditional and social media companies” to “combat mis- and disinformation” to ensure “that false messages are suppressed.”
Naturally, an unelected group of global elites would have the final word on what constituted disinformation and needed to be suppressed.
The WEF also sees combating climate change as the perfect crisis to exploit to push through its anti-capitalist agenda.
For example, in a recent article, the WEF argued for “uneconomic growth” in order to prevent climate change. It linked GDP growth to the number of natural disasters that occur, and even the likelihood of war.
Their lesson: humanity is better off if people are poorer.
Well, most people. Certainly not the very important elites flying in on private jets to Davos, Switzerland this week for the WEF’s annual conference.
They pretend to extol the virtues of representative democracy. But you’ll find absolutely none of that in the room. Instead it is a bunch of people who think they know better, and everyone else should live according to their will and dictates.
For example, a close partner in Schwab’s “public-private partnerships” to promote “stakeholder capitalism” is Larry Fink, who is also in Davos this week, and sits on the WEF board of trustees.
Fink is the CEO of BlackRock, a firm which controls $10 trillion worth of global corporations.
Their vision is “woke” corporations working in tandem with governments to “force behaviors” for what they decide is the greater good.
What might that look like? Well, the WEF has seriously suggested we’ll have to get used to eating bugs and weeds.
And last year, the WEF published an article called, “Psychologists say a good life doesn’t have to be happy, or even meaningful.”
“Living through war or a natural disaster might make it hard to feel as though you’re living a particularly happy or purposeful life, but you can still come out of the experience with psychological richness.”
So don’t worry, the WEF says, if you experience hardships such as “infertility, chronic illness, [and] unemployment.”
A 2016 article published by the WEF declares “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”
When it comes to personal choices, the author writes, “I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.”
These ideas are comically stupid, and the organization has lost credibility.
Most notably, Florida governor Ron DeSantis AND climate she-ro Greta Thunberg BOTH criticized the WEF as an irrelevant, destructive organization. Those two are about as far apart politically as it gets. And yet they agree that the WEF needs to shut up.
This is the topic of our podcast today.
We start off talking about (unsurprisingly) a historical example of a small group of non-government elites having major influence in government policy.
This is nothing new; in fact it’s quite common for arrogant, narcissistic ‘experts’ to force their ideas on to a society.
The WEF is only the latest modern incarnation. And even though it has lost much of its credibility, it’s important to remember there are always going to be ‘experts’ out there who want to tell you how to live your life.
This is ultimately what ‘freedom’ means. The word by itself almost sounds corny or cheesy. But ultimately we’re talking about your right to make your own decisions and control your own life.
If you don’t care about your freedom, you can’t expect anyone else to care about it. More appropriately, you can probably expect others (like the WEF) to try and take it away.
And that’s why it makes so much sense to have a simple, sensible Plan B. Because there are just too many of those lunatics out there.
Today, we're going to go back in time to the year 1618, to a place called the Hotel Pisani in the city of Paris. Now, if you know Paris very well, you probably know the Louvre. You might know the plastic carousel. This is basically where the Hotel Pisani was located, very close to the Louvre, where the Louvre is today. So this is prime real estate.
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But the Hotel Pisani wasn't a hotel, at least in the way that we it wasn't a Four Seasons or a JW. Marriott or something thing like that. As we think of it. Back then, the French word hotel, or hotel as they would say in French, actually referred to just really big stately mansions, grand houses that were large enough to entertain a multitude of guests. That was actually fairly unusual because most French homes, a sort of typical mazone.
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It's like what we would consider a town home today, a very small patio home, almost a condo, a place that you couldn't have huge parties and lots and lots of lavish lots of guests. If you were able to do that, that was considered a really, really big home. That was considered a really big deal. And they called that hotel or hotel from the Latin word hospitalis, which meant pertaining to guests, just like the term hospitality. And so this is what a hotel was.
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A hotel was just the name of a really big home. And the Hotel Pisani was owned by a guy, a French nobleman, an aristocrat named extremely French, named the Marquis de Remboyer, and his wife, a lady named Catherine Devivon. Now, Catherine was a very interesting historical figure. She was 30 years old at the time, in 1688. So she grew up in the late 15 hundreds in Rome is actually where she was born and kind of raised as a kid as the daughter of France's ambassador to the Vatican City.
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So she was French, but she was the daughter of the French ambassador to the Vatican City. And if you think about being the ambassador to the Vatican City, french ambassador to the Vatican City, that's got to be one of the cushiest jobs of all time, because it's not like anybody's going to have some diplomatic crisis with the Vatican City. It's all pomp and prestige and parades and parties and all these nice things. And think about it. At the time, Italy was the most refined society in Europe.
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I mean, remember, Italy is really what led Europe out of the Dark Ages. Hundreds of years before that, in the 11th century, it was the Italian city states. It was Venice, and then Florence and Pisa and Siena and these places that led Europe out of the Dark Ages. They embraced intellectual freedom. They embraced economic freedom.
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They rejected the feudal system. They built strong economies with sound currencies. They patronized art and culture and music, literature. I mean, even to this day, if you study music, a lot of musical terminology is Italian. Opera is still sung in Italian.
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Most of the great artists that, you know, people study their Italian. I mean, the the literature, all these things. I mean, Italy, we know this today. People that study, you know, European art, history and so forth, I mean, Italy is a huge factor in that. Imagine what it would have been like 500 years ago, right?
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Imagine what it would have been like in the 1005 hundreds growing up, and all these people are still there. It's contemporary scene. It was a big deal. And so, because of all this Italian nobles, aristocrats, the well to do, the merchants, wealthy business people, they maintained very, very high standards, high standards of fashion, high standards of etiquette, high standards of intellectual energy. They were incredibly sophisticated.
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They had a keen interest in patronized art. They had a keen interest in science. They had a keen interest in literature. These people were extremely sophisticated. They had the ability to intelligently discuss anything, had real conversations.
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And this is the environment in Rome, where Catherine's, growing up in the late 15 hundreds as the daughter of the French ambassador to the Vatican City. Now she gets older. She gets married off to this French nobleman, the Marquis de Rambour, and she goes back, she gets shipped back off to France, and now she's in Paris, and as the wife of the Marquis, she's in these all these high society parties and things like that. But the French, by comparison, were very, very they were not Italians. They were crude.
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The French were boring. They were unsophisticated. Catherine, having grown up in Italy around this again, this tremendous intellectual energy and refined culture, I mean, it was really quite a peak. Must have been an incredible experience for a kid. And rather than just sort of roll her eyes and go, oh, my God, these people are so boring, this takes us back to 1618.
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She does something very entrepreneurial. She said, I'm going to do something about this. And so now she's 30 years old. At 1618. She goes to her husband, and she says, I want to completely redesign our house.
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And he says, okay, yeah, that's fine. So she did it with her own hand. She made a lot of drawings, and she set aside a room, a particular room that was extremely lavish and luxurious, and it was very famous. A lot of descriptions about the walls of blue velvet and panels bordered with silver and gold and all these things. I mean, really, really nice.
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You can imagine in your mind this just this very stately kind of French room with gold and velvet all over the walls. Very, very nice place. And then started hosting parties. And her parties were unlike the parties that she would usually go to with all these sort of boring aristocrats that couldn't talk about anything but the weather, basically just idle chit chat that was super boring. Instead, she invited this very wide range of people.
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And when I'm talking wide range, she would invite generals and she would invite bishops, and she would invite poets and scholars and writers and thinkers and scientists and everybody that she could find that seemed like, this is an intelligent person. This person brings something to the table from an intellectual basis, that's really what it was all about. It was who's got the brains to actually be interesting and can talk about something. And people would show up and they would read their works, perform their plays, or even, again, she had bishops and cardinals. People would show up and deliver sermons and things like that because all ideas were on the table.
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But Katherine became kind of an etiquette coach because, remember, she grew up in Rome. She grew up in this place that was the pinnacle of high society and civilization. So she helped. Her French guests said, no, no, this is how we should be with each other. Let's dress a little bit better, let's address each other with a little bit more courtesy and dignity, but let's debate each other's ideas, but do so politely and let's have good manners and meaningful conversation.
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This is a no chitchat room. And eventually, her guest did develop a much higher level. Sophistication and rule number one in Catherine De Vivon's sitting room was you have to check your ego at the door. Nobody's allowed to come in here and say, I'm the best, I'm the baddest, I'm the coolest. You're not allowed to do that.
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If you are that way, then you can't come in and everybody's got to treat each other basically as equals. And we all engage politely and with dignity and respect, but do so at a very high intellectual standard. And all this took place basically in this room that she designed, this sitting room that she designed in her home. Now, the French word for sitting room, especially back then, is called the salon. And so people would gather in Catherine's salon and that word stuck and the concept stuck.
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The concept actually grew over time. More and more, this concept of meeting in salons popped up all over Paris. And, you know, time went by, and I'm talking decades, not just months or years, but decades went by. An entire generation of people passed through Catherine de Vivon's salon and other salons that have been set up in Paris. And this idea of exchanging ideas and building up refining sophistication, I mean, people were literally being trained almost like an athletic competition to just be better socially and intellectually.
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It's an interesting concept. And at the time when Catherine started this in 1618, france was obviously a major kingdom, but it wasn't the dominant power. Decades later, France was clearly the dominant superpower in Europe. And now it's after the 30 Years War, which ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. It's actually a series of treaties in 1648, coinciding with the rain at the start of the reign of Louis XIV, it really left no doubt at that point that France was the leading military power, political power, and economic power.
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And as time continues to pass, it becomes clear that, again, france is not just a military, political, and economic power, but also Europe's leading cultural power. And Louis XIV left no doubt about that. This is a guy at the height of his power. He was in his sort of from his mid 40s through his 60s, this guy. He was the absolute monarch.
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He spent whatever he wanted to spend on, anything he wanted to spend it on. It was luxury, luxury, luxury, splendor, splendor, splendor, fancy, fancy, fancy art, architecture, palaces, monuments, everything. And it was an absurd amount of royal spending. I mean, really an absurd amount of royal spending. But it was one of the things that really turned France into this cultural superpower.
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In addition to being the dominant military and political and economic superpowers, really became this cultural superpower. And that lasted even through his heir. Louis XIV reigned. He was one of the longest reigning monarchs in history. He outlived his son.
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He outlived his son's son, actually, the heir. The guy who became king after him became Louis the 15th was actually Louis the 14th great grandson. And so Louis the 15th also ruled for a very, very long time. So basically, over a period of well over a century, you basically only had these two guys governing Louis the 14th and then Louis the 15th. Louis the 15th continued that it was just spending, sometimes for the sake of spending on every possible thing under the sun.
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And France was really just an incredible place to be. People came from all over Europe, all over the world. There was an Italian playwright who traveled to France, to Paris in particular. Now we're in the 17 hundreds, a guy named Carlo Goldoni. He was the very famous Italian playwright back then.
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And Goldoni said in 1762, when he traveled to Paris, he said there was, quote, nothing comparable to it in the universe. France had the best paved streets, the best shops, the nicest palaces, the most ornate churches, the most delicious cuisine, and the tastiest cafes, the highest fashion, the highest standards of even hygiene. I mean, you got to remember the time period that we're in right now where just even normal hygiene, different cultures, have a lot different standards, and the French took their hygiene to an extremely high level with their bathing and their their perfumes and so forth. I mean, there's a reason why all these things are French. French cosmetics actually became a really, really big deal during this period, during the 17 hundreds in particular, that actually became such a rage that years later, there was one woman who was very famous for her cosmetics.
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She was known as the Madame de Monaco, and she was so famous for her cosmetics and her penchant to constantly be putting makeup on herself off that, even years later. She was actually one of the people that got sent to the guillotine during the french revolution. And even on the way to the guillotine, she was seen roughing her cheeks to make sure that she had her makeup on properly, even though she was about to get her head cut off. So that's what a big deal all this stuff was. If you go back to the, you know, the mid 17 hundreds, france was the place to be, especially from a cultural perspective.
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This was a full blown what's known as the age of enlightenment, and paris was the capital. And throughout all this, this concept of the salon, this became really an institution. The salon the salons were huge in shaping the intellectual culture. And we can see this even there's a lot of data about this, that, for example, the market for the market size for books, just the book trade, book fairs, people buying and selling books and book shops and all these things, it was four times french was paris in particular. It was a large in the world, four times the size of london.
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Right? And london was also, at the time, a very intellectual place. The book trade in paris was four times the size of that in london. So it was a pretty big deal. And you have, of course, some of the biggest names in the history of philosophy.
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In particular, you've got helvetius and montescue and diderot, and so many of these people who were collectively kind of known as the philosophs and the king among all the philosophs, I don't mean king louis xi. I mean the king of the philosophs. Really. The guy that sort of stood head and shoulders of all the rest was voltaire. Now, this voltaire was the nom de plume.
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A guy's name was francois marie RWE, but most people just knew him as voltaire. Even today, most people probably heard the name voltaire. But you got to appreciate that at the time, in the 17 hundreds, voltaire was the most famous person alive. He was the most famous person in the world. Everybody knew voltaire.
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You got to think about voltaire in the same way. If you you take, you know, more famous. You take michael jordan, barack obama, and the rock and put them all together, they're not as famous as voltaire was in the 17 hundreds. I mean, and this is a guy everybody knew voltaire. Most people loved him.
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Definitely. Some people hated him. Really, really hated him. And one of the things that was so interesting about him is that voltaire, I mean, he had a tremendous amount of intellectual courage. He wasn't afraid of anyone.
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He wasn't afraid of getting canceled. He did get canceled, actually, for a while, to the point that it wasn't just canceled like today. People get canceled on twitter. And don't get me wrong, that sucks to be canceled, be canceled by Google and canceled by YouTube. This is a guy that had to flee France, had to run for his life.
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He was exiled from Paris. He had to he had to go and live in London for a while. He moved to Berlin, Switzerland. He was finally able later on in life to go back to France because he was critical of institutions, critical of the church, critical of the of of the, of royalty and the aristocracy and of the government and so forth. And for a while they actually tried to exile this guy.
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So it was a really big deal. But he was not afraid. He spent his whole life he was this very rail thin, just skin and bones, but quite famously, everybody thought always he was going to die every day. But he lived to a very, very old age, and he's just again, skin and bones, but had such tremendous intellectual courage in the way that a lot of people you could think of as, for example, Martin Luther. Who?
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Was the guy that basically started the entire Reformation when took on the Catholic Church or later on Martin Luther King, people that really took on huge institutions that had tremendous amount of courage. But you combine that with the wit and humor of somebody like Mark Twain with a celebrity of Leonardo DiCaprio, basically, that's what you have with Voltaire. So this is a very, very interesting and unique human being. He loved he loved the individual, he hated the collective. He had a very strong distaste for government.
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He didn't like politicians. I mean, he's a very interesting guy, but because of his fame and notoriety, he could get an audience with anyone. He was close, very close. Very, very close. Pen pals, basically, with Frederick the Great of Prussia.
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He was a mentor to Catherine the Great of Russia. He had been personally decorated by King George the first of Britain. I mean, the list just goes on and on and on. This was a guy that just had all the accolades, the connections, the access, the influence, and he really helped open the door for the other philosophs, these people who again, they crowded the Salons with all their ideas and so forth, to have access to the halls of power. Now, the idea of the Salon had come a really long way since Katherine de Vivon in 1618.
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The Salons had grown dramatically and there was this big movement of intellectuals. Again, remember, this is the Age of Enlightenment. So you had people in science and philosophy and people debating everything politics, economics, ethics and morality. The fundamental premise, though, because now, in the early days, in the early 16 hundreds, it was a little bit more controversial to have an idea that was outside the mainstream. Voltaire was one of the people that really paved the way it said, no, I'm going to say whatever I want.
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I don't give a shit what anybody else thinks. If you don't agree with me, that's your problem, not my problem. And he really paved the way for a much greater level of intellectual freedom. And a lot of people wrote Voltaire's Coattails and said, okay, well, I'm going to start saying stuff too. And so these intellectuals are out there and they were either criticizing the government, said, no, I've got a better way.
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In the Age of Enlightenment, as it became to be known, that was sort of their fundamental premise. These people in the Salons, all these intellectuals, everybody's got an idea about what's the ideal society, what's the ideal life, how we should all live our lives, how we should structure our society, how we should structure our economy. And of course, this is the Age of Enlightenment. When you think about the Age of Light, of the fundamental premises that they're enlightened, when you think about it, that's why they literally call it the Age of Enlightenment, because these intellectuals, they're enlightened intellectuals. And, and so these are people, we are enlightened and we have these great ideas about how everybody should live.
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Now these, you know, quote unquote enlightened intellectuals. You know, again, it's you get to a point where this is a huge departure from the early days in the Salon of Catherine de Vivone in 1618. Now, by the mid to late 17 hundreds. Now this, there's, there's a healthy dose of arrogance that has been injected with these, these intellectuals, you know, that think that they've got it all figured out and they were, you know, fairly diverse, intellectually at least. But they did congregate in various schools of thought.
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You actually had, among these enlightened intellectuals, you actually had a large group of communists, people like Morelli and linguist, who advocated for total government control of the economy, strict quotas for a number of people to control who should be working and which industry and which thing, and how much people should be consuming. One of the things that they advocated for this is actually a real thing from these enlightened intellectuals. They said all children should be taken from their parents at the age of six and raised by the state. They decided that all products should be collected in public storehouses and distributed to citizens based on their needs. Everybody should work on a farm between the ages of 21 and 25 and all these things, this is the ideal society, this is how everybody should live their lives and so forth.
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And they're enlightened. And if you don't agree with them, then you're just not enlightened. You don't have the mind of an enlightened person. At the same time, there's another group of people who call themselves the Physiocrats. Physiocrats were sort of proto economists, right?
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Economics didn't really exist yet at that time. Most economists were just philosophers. They were people that thought about the economy, but they were really just philosophers. And these sort of proto economists who call themselves the Physiocrats physio from the from the word for the Greek word for nature and kratos for rule. Physiocrat.
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Physiocratos let nature rule. Right? In a way it's sort of a nod to the idea of sort of the motto of capitalism which is les fair which is another French term which is basically just leave us alone, let us do it. Les a fair. That concept of les fair actually goes back the physiocrats didn't invent that.
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That goes back to actually an encounter in the late 16 hundreds where the story is that I think in the 1660s there was a minister of government who went to a prominent French businessman and he basically said well, what can the government do for you? And the French businessman replied nucle, let us do it. Don't do anything. We'll handle it. Just do nothing will handle it.
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And that's sort of the motto of capitalism. And the Physiocrats kind of had that idea physiocratos let nature rule. They had a number of ideas basically to let just keep the government out of the economy. But they had this very peculiar idea that all government revenue should be derived from exactly one source and that one source was a very high tax on land. The physiocrats believed that land was sort of all wealth and all economic activity was derived from the land, whatever it is you were doing.
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If you were in agriculture then you were growing from the land. If you were manufacturing then you were getting your raw materials from the land. If you were trading something then you were getting your goods from somebody that manufactured something that was grown from the land. And so they said that everything starts from the land. Now to me that premise is patently false because if you're a lawyer or a doctor or somebody in some service industry it doesn't really start with the land.
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It's a service industry. So to me the entire premise is wrong. But that was their idea was that government revenue should come from this very high land tax and then nothing else and then stay out of it. But they were very adamant about this, that they were right. They had no data to back it up.
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They just assumed that they were right because they were enlightened and nobody else was. And this is actually quite interesting because at a certain point David Hume from the UK came down. Hume is again one of the most renowned philosophers in history. David Hume thought that he actually wrote about them that these physicists were, quote the most chimeral and arrogant set of men to be found. And so this really gives you a sense of the people that congregated in these salons.
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They really thought that they were hot shit. They had all the great ideas, they had all the keys to life. They knew exactly how everybody else should live and we should all just listen to them because they're enlightened. And how do we know they're enlightened? Because they say they are.
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And it wasn't just sitting in the salons at that point. By the mid 17 hundreds, these people did have substantial access to rulers and royals. There was a guy, one physiocratic guy named Kazneh. At one point, he had an audience with Louis XVI, the king of France. And the king of France said, what would you do if you were king?
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And Kaznay says nothing. And basically was an advocate for the government should get out of the way. Now, obviously, I quite like that idea that the government should do as little as possible and just stay out of the way. And it actually worked. And in Louis the 15th, he slashed taxes, he slashed tolls and tariffs, et cetera.
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They tried this with an experiment on grain, and this actually happened on September 17, 1754. Louis XV said, all right, we're not going to have any more tolls on the transit of weed. We're not going to have any more specific tariffs on whether they eventually got to this with exports and grain commerce and so forth following this meeting with this physiocrat. And so you have this essentially closed society of experts that gets together. They have these formal and informal meetings, and they're salons, and they're intellectuals who have a very high opinion of themselves.
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They get together and they're formal meetings and their salons that have access to the corridors of power that go to governments to say, here's this idea that you should try. And then the government goes and tries it and does it. This is nothing new, right? These people are not in government, and yet they have tremendous influence over government, but this is nothing new. We've seen many examples of this throughout history, people that existed outside of government.
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They met formally, informally, but they have tremendous access to the halls of power to advance a very specific agenda. We've seen this so many times among various clans of bankers, the Fughers, the Demetaches, et cetera, the Rothschilds, over and over and over again. The philosophy are just another example. These people that met in their salons had a very high opinion of themselves, said, we're the ones who are enlightened. We're coming up with ideas of how everybody else should live their lives.
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And ultimately, over time, it kind of became an echo chamber, right? It was just sort of the same guy, people with very similar ideas about how everybody else should live their lives. And of course, they're right, because they're enlightened, and you're just a peasant, so you should listen to us. Now, some of these ideas are actually quite good. They came up I mean, they have a lot of the ideas of Rousseau who were advocates for individual freedom and so forth.
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And some of these are obviously very good ideas. But even good ideas do not justify an autocracy of experts that are force feeding basically their PhD dissertations down everyone's throat. There are supposed to be systems in place and representative democracies and all these things that keep those things in check. And yet we still have, even to this day, despite how we praise our own democratic institutions and republican democracy, we actually still have several of these today. We've got think tanks and all these different societies, many of which have tremendous influence over government, their entire institutions, let's be honest, I hate to say mainstream media is a buzzword, but media does have this is a formal institution.
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These guys actually do meet, create, they copy each other's agendas. There's a reason why, when you look at the news, most top stories are almost always the same. They have an incredible amount of influence over government. But the one I want to talk about today, obviously, is the World Economic Forum, the WEF. I think these guys are really kind of towards the top of this food chain the WEF is meeting right now.
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They're having their annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. Very posh kind of place, but in a way sort of like the Salons of Catherine Devivon. It started basically as a conference. I mean, this goes back now decades to the 1970s, and it just started as a conference. This Swiss guy is kind of an economist and engineer, just, okay, we're going to start having a conference and start inviting people.
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And it took a while. It really took a while, but eventually it became a very prestigious thing attended by the big bosses and heads of state, et cetera. And it got to the point where by the early 2000s, being invited and going to Davos on your private jet was the ultimate symbol that you'd really made it. You were the boss of bosses, that you were on CNBC giving a speech at Davos or Gladhanding with some world leader flying in on your jet landing in Davos. That was the ultimate symbol of success.
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But over the last, let's say, ten to 15 years, it's really become quite a bit more. The World Economic Forum is quite a bit more. It's become an institution in and of itself. And I say this like, I'm not a conspiracy guy. This is not some conspiracy theory.
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I don't trade in that stuff. I trade in actual facts and reality and data. This is not some wild conspiracy theory. To talk about this, the guy that founded this, the guy that runs the WF, Klaus Schwab, brags about it. He brags about his influence with government.
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He brags about how half of Justin Trudeau's cabinet in Canada are alumni of the World Economic Forum Young Leaders program, and brags about how many world leaders came out of the Young Leaders Program, the World Economic Forum. He brags about how much access he has. He brags about how he can ring up anyone he wants an influence policy. This is all on YouTube again. This isn't some conspiracy.
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It's literally the guy who founded the program, who still runs. It is all over the internet himself in his own voice there saying like I've got this and I've got that, and I know this guy and I can do that guy, and this guy is our alumni and that guy's, our alumni and really their reach and their influence and their ideas and the WF as an institution really became obvious during COVID during the pandemic. This guy seized on this. These are the guys who the guy literally wrote a book called The Great Reset, and he spelled out his view. Again, not a conspiracy theory.
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He wrote it all in the book. Actually. I don't want to encourage anybody to buy his book, but in a way, if you can find it, it makes sense to at least browse and see. He spells out his view about how we should all live, how economies should function, how governments should function, who should be in charge. Obviously, this whole point, it's the expert ruling class, and we all listen to the experts and the expert ruling class because they're never wrong and they're the smart ones, they're the enlightened ones, and we're just dumb peasants, and so they should be able to tell us how to live our lives.
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And some of this is really extreme stuff, guys. I mean, he's talking about and again, not a conspiracy theory. This is Claus Schwab, in his own words, pushing for brain implants and transhumanism and individual carbon footprint trackers that everything we do gets uploaded to the cloud, where everybody can see, we can track. Every time you do anything, you take a flight, you get in your car, you do whatever. It's like, oh, well, you're adding that's your carbon footprint, your carbon footprint is increasing.
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And so this should be tracked and everybody should be able to see your individual carbon footprint to decide whether or not you're a good human being or a bad human being. This is all WEF stuff. And they actually put this stuff out there. They show up to their own conferences and say, well, this is what we're working on, this is what we think it should be. They say things like, you know, we wouldn't have any of these problems if the world's population was the size of where it was 500 years ago, which is, by the way, like 90% reduction in world population.
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That's what they say would solve the problems. This is what they actually say. They don't even try and hide it. This isn't some closed door session with filled with cigar smoke and evil villains twirling their mustaches. This is stuff they put in the light of day.
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They broadcast it live on the Internet to anybody that actually wants to see this. They publish this in writing and say, this is what we think makes sense. And again, ultimately, their view is an autocracy by the expert class, where Schwab himself is king of kings and we're just all dumb peasants and they're enlightened and if you don't see it, then obviously you just don't have the mind of an enlightened person. And again, they literally publish this stuff they wrote during the pandemic early on. You probably remember all the articles and videos and tweets about how great the Lockdowns were and you know, it's so beneficial for the environment and all these things and that we should all eat bugs and weeds and that we'll own nothing and be happy.
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And they have this just fanaticism for everything, environmental justice and social justice and all these things that they've essentially rebooted capitalism, right? They've taken this system that is responsible for creating more multiples more wealth and prosperity in the last, let's say 250 years than in the previous 5000 years combined. But they've figured out a better way. They can do it better, they've got a better idea of what it should be and they use this far reaching influence they have to actually drive that agenda. And they've been actually fairly successful.
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And it's not just governments because they have a ridiculous amount of access and influence in media, banking, business, entertainment. I mean it's got to the point as a business you can't just make a product, you can't just innovate and create a nice product and sell a great product to enthusiastic consumers anymore. Oh no. You have to take a stand on Twitter about legislation that you haven't even read and don't know anything about. You have to express fake outrage about things.
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You got to go and say, oh we're going to hire all pensexual eskimos for our board of directors and train employees. We're going to stand down. We're going to train employees to speak a bunch of woke newspeak. We got to teach them the newspeak language about what you can and cannot say. You can't say manhole cover anymore because that's insensitive.
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So we got to change all of our language of vocabulary. Businesses are actually adopting these things. They actually call it now stakeholder capitalism because it's not about, well we're not going to run the business for the sake of the owners anymore. Forget about the owners. Who cares about the owners of the business?
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We got to do it for the Twitter mob. That's who we got to run this business for. It's the same with entertainment. God help you if you turn on an NBA game without having just all this stuff thrust in your face. You turn on a Disney movie, you turn on whatever, it's just all these things thrust in your face.
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This is very, very far reaching influence to shape a lot of things in culture. And I kind of view this as sort of the anti philosophy. At least a lot of the Philosophs generally had reasonable ideas. Some of them were totally stupid. A lot of communists come out of the Philosoph movement, come out of these salons in France and the 1007 hundreds.
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But again, just because I think somebody's idea is reasonable doesn't mean that I think it should be force fed to an entire society. It's supposed to be a system through which great ideas trickle down and meritable ideas are actually met and adopted because they're actually debated vigorously and whether it's a representative system and people adopt. You don't just have one guy who's not been elected by a grand total of zero people, who goes, this is how the world should be, and just jams that down everybody's throat across the world. That's not a system. That's completely and totally ridiculous.
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Honestly, it's criminal. And you look at these things, the WF again, this is all just silly stuff. They're eating weeds and bugs, owning nothing, never going anywhere, tracking everybody's, individual carbon footprint being tracked, everybody getting brain implants, all this stuff. And they debate all this stuff, even it's like right now, one of the big things in this one is supposed to be whether or not people should be able to use gas stoves anymore. And so they because it's damaging the environment.
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And they all fly to Davos. There's over 1000 private jets. 1040. I saw it last council. They all fly to Davos in their private jets to decide whether or not everybody, all the peasants are allowed to use stoves, gas burning stoves and heavens anymore.
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All these things are just such stupid ideas. And it's so obviously, it's so hypocritical. There's so much corruption. And again, they just keep churning out horrible, stupid ideas. Again, this is why I consider them the anti philosophy, because they still have the same access and power.
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At least the philosophy had pretty reasonable ideas. On the balance, these guys, I mean, these are the ones that think that this progressive prosecutor movement is a great idea. Catch and release, decriminalization. You know, it's all these things that we've seen over and over again. They've done this and they've, they've gone.
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You know, this idea in San Francisco, oh, let's decriminalize shoplifting. Oh, what a surprise. Shoplifting went through the roof. Now people are closing their stores because shoplifting has been decriminalized. Who could have possibly seen that coming?
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Who could have possibly thought there would be negative consequences to decriminalizing shoplifting? In a place where the crime rates are already high? They come up with these. They love their lockdowns, they love health passports, stakeholder capitalism, all these anti competitive, anticapitalist policies and legislation. And some of the recent examples of all this, I got to actually talk about a couple of these.
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One was again, also very recently, this is the city of Washington DC. Which is one of the most dangerous cities in the world. You look at violent crime, murder rates, all the stuff. Washington DC. Ironically, obviously the capital of the United States of America, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, basically.
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The Council in Washington, DC. They get together and they decide they pass this overhaul to their criminal code. And it's all this ridiculous stuff sentence reduction, divert disposition, basically probation, taking major crimes and now shifting them to minor crimes and making them eligible for sentence reduction and making them eligible for probation. But just to give you an idea of some of the some of the really silly things that they put in this criminal code, they've got one provision, for example, where they redefine burglary. So you got third degree, second degree, and first degree burglary.
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So third degree is the lowest level of burglary. So they say, well, if somebody breaks into your home and start stealing a bunch of stuff, but you're asleep at night in your bed and you don't actually see them steal it, well, that's only third degree burglary. It's not second degree burglary unless you actually wake up in your home because somebody broke in. So if you're still asleep and you sleep through the whole incident, then it's only third degree burglary doesn't rise to the incident of second degree. And it's like, what does that have to do with anything?
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Whether somebody's asleep or not, somebody still broke into your home. Like, what does one thing have to do with the other? It is so outrageously stupid. But my favorite example of this is actually just from a couple of days ago. The Federal Trade Commission you've never heard of this in the United States is a very powerful US.
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Federal agency. Obviously, this is headed by somebody who has no executive experience whatsoever, nothing new. This has been an administration that basically they don't care if somebody knows what they're doing. They don't care about somebody's competence. They don't care about somebody's experience or whether or not they have the ability to actually run an agency.
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What do you think about running an agency? Jeez? Wouldn't you actually want somebody who has some experience running an agency? Is this really you want some, like, rookie to come in? The first time they've ever run anything is going to be this very powerful government agency?
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But no, of course not. No, we got to take somebody they basically just took some woke activist who in the WEF model, has all these ridiculous ideas and gave her an incredible amount of power to disrupt American business. That's what the FTC is able to do. And so a couple of days ago, on Wednesday, January 18, 2023, if you listen to this in the future, we'll see how this plays out. But the FTC proposed a rule to ban non compete clauses.
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Now, I got to explain to you how this works, because this actually tells you so much, I think, about the United States, how this actually works. What do you mean by rules, a rule? What does that mean? Well, the idea is that Congress passes legislation. All these Congressmen and Congress people get together and they pass legislation, and in the legislation, they authorize certain things.
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They say, okay, well, the Federal Trade Commission is allowed to do X, Y and Z. But what happens is that these executive agencies, they look at that, they take some obscure passage because you look at legislation that's like 600 pages, and they go and they find like ten words in that 600 pages, they do a very creative read of that language. And they go, oh, well, this this phrase right here authorizes me to do whatever crazy stuff. And we've seen that over and over again. The CDC did this.
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The CDC is, oh, this law that was passed 50 years ago, in the 1970s, because this couple of words in this language that says that I have the authority to take over the entire housing market. And you're like what? No, you don't. There's nothing in the law that says that you can take over the housing market. But this is what the CDC tried to do.
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If you remember this, in 2021, the head of the CDC said, oh, I'm common, I'm taking control of the entire US. Housing market. Then they had to go and get sued, and the Supreme Court had to come in and say, no, you can't do that. That's not what the law says. Supreme Court has said over and over again that Congress should speak clearly about what an executive agency has the authority to do.
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But of course, Congress generally fails to do that. They don't speak very clearly in their legislation, and the agencies take plenty of creative license. All these federal agencies, they go and they read some obscure passage of a law that was passed decades ago, and they said, oh, because of this phrase, I can do this, right? And so when they do that, they go, okay, this is my authority to do whatever. And then they go and they publish something and they say, we're going to create a rule.
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We're going to create a rule. And the rule, because it has this interpretation they have of the legislation, the rules they create basically have the same weight and effect as the law. It totally bypasses congress. And I like, Congress says, this is what you can do. These agencies just create their own rules, and the rules have the same weight and effect as the law.
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And again, CDC taking over the housing market, nationwide, vaccine mandates, all these things were basically the same process where some executive agency or even up to the President of the United States said, oh, this legislation was passed, therefore I can do this. No, actually you can't. But they often take lawsuits. People have to go and sue the government in order to get the Supreme Court to come and say, no, you can't do that. And so now what's happened is the FTC has said, oh, well, there's this law that was passed a long time ago, and because of this, like, little tiny phrase in this law, I have the authority to do this.
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And so this new rule that they're creating is saying, we think non competes are bad, and so we want to ban them. And it's actually crazy when you think about it. Non competes are actually a very normal thing in business. You got a company that hires an employee, then obviously they're going to invest quite a lot in the employee to train the employee, get the employee up to speed, give the employee access to all kinds of things in the business. And it's only fair that the company said, look, we're going to invest a lot in you.
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And so in exchange for that, if you want to quit, you can quit. But you can't take that investment that we're making in you and go and shop it to the highest bidder in the labor market. That's not really fair for us. And so let's both of us give up something. We will give up the investment in you, and you give up the ability to go out and shop yourself around to our competitors using what you learned from us.
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That's the whole point of a non compete. It's two willing counterparties. A willing employee signs it, a willing employer signs it. Both of them agree to give something up. That's how deals are made.
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And you've got two willing counterparties signing a non compete. But according to the FTC, this is hurting the economy. It's crazy because these are the same people who, months ago, last year, really, when gas prices really started going up, the FTC said, they came out and said, oh, the reason that gas prices are going up is because of greed, right? And they decided and this is you know, the President of the United States was doubling down on this, and he was giving these ridiculous speeches saying, oh, the reason the gas price is going up is because these big companies are buying up small mom and pop gas stations. There's no more mom and pop gas stations.
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That's why gaspers. Go, oh, okay. So the last line of defense in rising gas prices was Joe and Rita's corner gas station on the side of the highway. That's what was keeping inflation at bay. And now these guys are getting bought up and now that gas price is going it's completely ridiculous.
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They have no concept of how their own policies are completely destroying the economy and the energy market and so forth. They have absolutely no idea. And so now, once again, they decided, they actually put this in their rule and they've given speeches about it. They said the economy is weakening because of non compete clauses. Non compete clauses.
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Clearly, the US. Economy is not weakening. It has nothing to do with terrible bureaucracy, has nothing to do with energy killing legislation or all their anti competitive rulemaking, or their constant threats against critical industries, especially the energy industry. Massive deficit spending, all their monetary policy, the inflation they've created, the complete and total incompetence at governing has nothing to do with it. They've cracked the code.
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They've cracked the code. The reason why the US economy is slowing down is because of non compete clauses. They nailed it. They nailed it and now they're going to create a rule. They're going to create a rule even though they don't have the authority to do so.
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They believe they have the authority. They read this obscure passage in some legislation and said oh because of this we have the authority. So now we're going to basically just get rid of non competes which when you think about it, there's so many non competes that already exist. And so that what are you doing? You're just undoing contracts.
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You have a contract that exists and this single executive agency saying oh those contracts don't exist anymore. What happened to the rule of law? You can't do that. If the contract is going to be voided at least it has to go to court. I mean, who do these people think they are?
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But this is literally their thinking is that the economy is weak because of non competes. Therefore we're just going to do away with the entire rule of law in the United States and get rid of non competes. This is insanity but it's WEF thinking at its highest, right? This is the kind of stuff that comes out of these organizations, the influence they have in government. Again with this just forget about the rule of law, forget about economic growth, forget about any of these things.
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Like we're just going to do whatever we want. We're going to have this fanaticism. And again this is the kind of thing it's very pervasive at the WF and all that sort of related satellite institutions. This is an organization. Again it started as a conference.
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Now it's a virus. It's a virus of incompetence power control, corruption, narcissism and just pure fantasy. Fantasy. All these just academic fantasy. People come up with these crazy ideas and go oh I'm right.
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And again the idea that it's non competes that are hurting the US economy which is an idea that has no rational basis whatsoever, but they inject this virus into the world, into national governments and again these ideas fail over and over and over again. What a surprise. What a surprise. Oh what a surprise that you locked everybody down and now all of a sudden we've got this crazy inflation and economy is faltering. What a surprise.
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You decriminalize shoplifting. Who could have predicted what a bad idea that would have been? And now you got all these people at Davos in Switzerland at their annual meeting and they're all howling and whining and crying about the sorry state of the world which is pretty ironic but it's like well wait a minute. You're the people that came up with all these ideas and now everything is a crisis. It's actually hilarious.
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You see these guys on stage and they're crying about the climate crisis and the planet crisis but no, it's a justice crisis. But it's also a safety crisis. And I'm actually going to play you a little clip here just so you can see it for yourself. It's absolutely hilarious. I'm going to give you a little clip here right now.
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We couldn't meet at a more challenging time. We are confronted with so many crisis simultaneously. This is a planetary crisis. This is a safety crisis. But above all, it is also a justice crisis.
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And also our faith leaders, they know that this crisis is much more than physical. And sometimes we are faced with these kind of challenges. It is better to take today decisions that will eventually be not popular, but it will be essential to be able to shape the public opinion itself. And when you stop and think about it, it's pretty extraordinary that we select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives, are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet. That last voice, of course, was John Kerry.
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You might have recognized that. John Kerry US Climate Envoy former Presidential Candidate back in I think it was about 2004, former US senator I think he expresses that sentiment better. We select people. We're all touched by something and now we're in this room saving the world. I mean, the arrogance and the narcissism to come together.
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I mean, we're special people or the special abilities saving the world. Who do you think you are?
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It really is comically arrogant. And it's the kind of thing before that you had the UN Secretary General talk about, oh, we got it. We're going to do things that are unpopular. So we just got to influence public opinion. So forget about the people.
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Forget about what the people want. We're going to do it anyways because we know better and they're just a bunch of stupid peasants. Then you had this lady that was dressed up like she was auditioning for Harry Potter movie and it's just crisis, crisis, this crisis. It's that crisis. I mean, they make it so hard to take them seriously.
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And I guess that's really the good news is that nobody is taking them seriously. Not anymore. They're talking, but nobody's listening because the World Economic Forum and all these similar good idea type agencies, they've just burned through their credibility. There's an old saying most people probably heard of. The idea is that you can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.
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This is often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln. Ironically, it was actually first expressed in a similar way, not exactly word for word, but in a similar way by an early philosoph, one of the early philosophy. Before that, they got crazy egos and decided that they should be able to tell everybody how to live their lives. This is a guy in the late 1600s name was Jacques Abadi. It was later republished by Denise Diderot in 1754.
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But that's kind of the origin of it and I think it's true. I think really you can absolutely fool a lot of people for a long time, but you can't keep that up. You can't continue fooling even a majority of people indefinitely until the end of time. And we're already seeing this. We see this in a lot of the just the numbers that the historic levels of mistrust.
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Nobody trusts the media, nobody trusts the government, nobody trusts the banks, nobody trusts the big corporations and nobody trusts the WEF either. They're not fooling anyone. People are really starting to get it. They're really starting to get it. And we can see this.
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I mean, last summer in the city of San Francisco, they had a recall election because crime in San Francisco was skyrocketing. And one of the big contributors of that was this local prosecutor, one of these guys who was installed by one of the kingpins of the W. EF. George Soros, who installed this game, going around funding all these progressive prosecutors. Again, not a conspiracy theory.
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Soros is the guy, he fully admits to spending a ton of money to fund these progressive prosecutors who are the people that will refuse to prosecute a lot of crime because they think it's wrong and it's not in line with their woke doctrine. So here's this guy and crime is skyrocketing and he's not doing anything about it. And people got fed up. And this is in San Francisco. This is one of the wokeest places in the country and people threw this guy out on his ass and by a wide margin of victory they threw this guy out and they put in another prosecutor, somebody that was actually willing to prosecute crime, right?
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So these are the sorts of things we're seeing this over and over and over again. People even in the wokeest places are waking up going, no. These results, nice idea, nice thought in theory, but the results don't match. And as much as I hate to say it with full pun intended, COVID was a real shot in the arm that at first they had a lot of people convinced that the world was coming to an end and we were all going to die and all this sort of stuff. And little by little people believe that.
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And little by little even the most diehard people started to realize that they had the wool pulled over their eyes, that oh, wait a minute, a lot of things that the experts are saying isn't true. They keep moving the goalpost that, oh, two more weeks and one more this and two more that and where this? Oh, now it's three masks, two mass. And eventually everybody started realizing, wait a minute, this is just getting ridiculous. This is getting ridiculous.
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And little by little the trust and confidence and a lot of this expert advice really started to fade. People aren't fooled anymore, and that's really good news, honestly. And I think that we're going to continue to see more and more of that. That loss of credibility is so obvious. And one of the things that I think is actually hilarious about the World Economic Forum, there's so many people calling them out now saying, like, would you guys just stop already?
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Would you just shut up already? But two of the people that are saying this actually come from talking about opposite ends of the spectrum. On one hand, you've got Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and probably presidential contender coming up, saying the WEF, they just need to shut up already. I mean, they think that there are lords and masters and that we're all just medieval serfs, and they just need to stop. And on the other end of the spectrum, if you got Greta Thunberg saying the WF is dangerous and destructive, they pretend that they care about the climate and then they go and they fly in on their private jets and they do all these terrible things for the climate.
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And so they're worthless and they shouldn't be listened to. Rhonda Santos and Greta Thunberg apparently agree on at least exactly one thing, and that is the WEF is absolutely stupid and nobody should listen to them. So that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the WEF and how much credibility they're losing from all ends of the political spectrum. Now, having said all that, I think it would be silly to suppose there aren't any kind of threats to the individual freedom. Of course there are.
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There are always going to be people. There always have been and there always will be people who think just like John Kerry, we've all been touched by something. We're the select people always going to be people like that, who want to control how you live your life, how you earn a living, how you put food on the table for your kids, how you can educate your kids, even the basics of whether or not you're able to use a stove in your own house, and whether or not that's okay. And there are always going to be people like that who think it's their honorable burden to be able to tell everybody else what to do and that they and they alone can solve the problems, even though that they refuse to acknowledge that they had a hand in creating and they're just waiting for the opportunity to strike. And we saw this during COVID and all of a sudden you had this crazy emergency, and these crusaders came in and took control of everybody's lives.
[00:52:49.720]
And of course, there are things like that that happen. And that old daughter saying, you never want to waste a good crisis. One of the guys who said that was Rahm Emanuel, who ended up coming there, Chicago, and was at the time President Obama's chief of. Staff is you never want to waste a good crisis because it's a great opportunity to get your agenda passed and all these things. And of course, there are a lot of people just waiting for that opportunity.
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And so, of course, it makes sense to take steps to safeguard your freedom. I believe that if you don't care about your freedom, nobody else will. Nobody else is going to take care of it for you, right? You can occasionally count on maybe somebody in the Supreme Court dismantling some idiotic government decree, some stupid rule that gets struck down by a court or something like that. But for the most part, you've got to take care of your freedom because nobody else is either.
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And it's not just some silly idea freedom, this sort of intangible, lofty idea. It's a real thing we're talking about really. Instead of freedom, which almost sounds hokey, we're talking about just your ability to decide for yourself, to have control over the things that you do in your life. Really important, almost sacred things again, how you're able to educate your kids, how you're able to earn a living, what you're allowed to do and not do, and what you can and cannot put in your body, or what you have to do. These things.
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If nobody cares, nobody else is going to care about that more than you. And there's not going to be most people not standing up for you and your personal freedom. And so it certainly makes sense to take certain steps to safeguard that because we've had way too many closed calls and really crossed the line too many times over the last several years. One of the things that I would say is that even when it seems the whole world is moving in a certain trend, whatever, it's actually not true. The whole world does not move together in a single direction, a single trend.
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Every country is different. Cities are different states, provinces are different. People move differently at different speeds, different directions. And it's important to remember that. And this is sort of the reason why I advocate for geographical diversification.
[00:54:49.830]
It's this old concept of just not having all of your eggs in one basket. If you live in a place and everything in your life is in this one place, this one, literally, this one city in this one state, in this one country, it's where you bank. It's where you do business, it's where you generate your income. It's where everything in your entire life and livelihood, et cetera, is located. You've really put all your eggs in one basket?
[00:55:11.010]
Since different cities, states, provinces, countries don't all move in the same direction at the same pace at the same time, it's easy. It's a great idea to diversify geographically because you can go and do things in different places. And just little examples in my case, I've talked about this a lot, but this is the reason why, you know, for my first child. She was born last year. My wife and I decided we were going to have the baby in Mexico.
[00:55:36.180]
And the reason why we went to Cancun is because at the time, it was still kind of a lot of COVID hysteria all over the world. And we wanted to be at a place we wanted to give birth in a place where COVID didn't matter, where COVID wasn't going to factor in to our daily lives or the birth of our kid. And we went to Cancun and it was great. It was great. And that was an example of in a way, geographical diversification.
[00:55:58.220]
We went to a different place because not every place in the world had the same kind of hysteria and there was really very little hysteria where we were in Mexico. We saw this not too long ago, if you remember, the WEF Youth Leadership alumni alumnus Justin Trudeau, prime Minister of Canada started closing bank accounts for all these people that supported the protesters, the Freedom convoy. If you remember that, you start closing people's bank accounts if you dared be part of the convoy, if you dared give money to the convoy. They were closing people's bank accounts. Now isn't that a reason enough to say, well jeez, maybe we shouldn't have bank accounts and put all of our money, maybe we should have some emergency cash stashed away somewhere else in another place, maybe in another country, maybe outside the financial system.
[00:56:40.740]
I mean it's a huge argument, frankly, in favor of crypto, in favor of distributed ledger technology, just to be able to have some money in a place that these people can't control. It's a kind of geographical diversification, taking steps to reduce your taxes, completely legal steps to reduce your taxes. Why, if these people are so destructive, why would you voluntarily give them the maximum amount of money? It certainly makes a lot more sense to minimize that. I'll pay you what I'm supposed to pay you, but it's going to be the minimum amount that I'm supposed to pay you no more.
[00:57:14.360]
And hey, look, if you have a change of heart, you can always just send them a donation later. You can always cut them a check. The US treasury Department actually does accept donations. Ironically, if you want, the treasury department accepts donations and you can actually say, I want this specific donation to go to pay down the national debt. So if you think the debt is a problem, you can donate money to pay down the national debt and you can do that while minimizing your taxes.
[00:57:36.200]
And anything else you can choose to give specifically to the cause, to that specific cause of your choice and you're the one that's in control. So all these are just things like I said you can do to safeguard your freedom. There's so many different options. I mean really so many different options, so many different permutations. If you want to learn more about that.
[00:57:54.170]
We talk about this stuff all the time, so you can visit our [email protected]. But this is really, I think, the concept in general, the WEF and all these sort of related organizations, this is nothing new. We've seen this over and over again throughout history where you get these incredibly arrogant, incredibly narcissistic people who think they've got it all figured out and everybody else is just a stupid peasant. And they're the enlightened ones who know, and they should have the responsibility to tell us all how we should live. And they have a lot of access to government, and they can get a lot of their policies passed through.
[00:58:23.120]
Now, the WF is one of those. Today they've made a complete and total clown of themselves. Nobody takes them seriously anymore because a lot of people really are starting to wake up. But it certainly makes sense to take some of these threats seriously, because we've had too many closed calls over the years. And if you're not looking out for your freedom, you can't expect anybody else to either.
[00:58:41.100]
And we're talking about really the ability for you to make your own decisions, about how to live your own life, how to raise your kids, how to earn your own income, what to do, what you can and cannot put in your body. You should be in control over those decisions, certainly not some government. And even though the WEF has made a clown of itself, it certainly makes sense to at least use some tactics, like geographical or international diversification to enhance your ability to make your own decisions, to enhance your freedom. It really makes a lot of sense. There's very, very little downside to doing that.
[01:01:45.890]
So I think we'll go ahead and stop there. I want to really thank you again for your time and attention, and we'll speak again next week.
James Hickman (aka Simon Black) is an international investor, entrepreneur, and founder of Sovereign Man. His free daily e-letter Notes from the Field is about using the experiences from his life and travels to help you achieve more freedom, make more money, keep more of it, and protect it all from bankrupt governments.
