And then I said, Pee Pee Poopoo. I thought you said, Poopie Poopie.  Wait a second, who's this guy? Pee Pee Poopoo! 21! Big Chungus! I thought I had them back. I thought I had them back. Hey there friends, how's it going? My name is Kevin, and thank you for being among us, for more among us. And yes, I know I have a problem that I might be addicted to this game. Stop it. Get some help. And you know what? That's adding to a whole list of problems, including this one, where I hurt myself every day. Alright, well today, my name is going to be Skip. So then when I do something suspicious, they'll say, Vote Skip. It's a perfect plan. There's no way this could go wrong. Oh, Chadly, feeling a bit Chadly today myself. I'll join that one. Hey fellow chads, on my honeymoon, so be nice please. The wifey is watching and the relationship is fragile. I'm the honeymoon. We're like two hours into the relationship and I'm like, oh god, she might leave me. Start. Start. My wife says start. Who's your wife? What does he want me to say? My cousin. Why is everyone leaving? Have I made people uncomfortable again? Oh, small lobby. I'm going to make friends with Pink. Come on Pink. I'm going to stop treating friends like cats. Think someone is trying to divide us. Vote divide. There's a guy who is actually just divided. There we go. Me and Pink are sticking together. There's no way they're going to stop us. We refuse to be divided. It's 2v2 and it's one of them for sure. Oh my god, tell on him. I told him it was them, but they wouldn't believe me. Look, because where is it? Where's my proof? It's gone. Okay. No, here it is. I saw someone in reactor with the body on the map. The other person was in Nav. And Blue said he was not in Nav. I saw the mystery and they wouldn't listen. He's not freaking helping though. He's just accusing people constantly. Oh no, Pink, don't swear. Be better than... Oh no. Oh no. No, that's not how you make friends, Pink. I said too much with my wife. I asked if you could stop swearing. Sorry, Lawls. Lawls, it's okay. She's trying to leave me unless I stand up for her.  No blue. My wife knew it was you. Staring to believe this whole concoction I've made now. Where's my wife? Everyone left just like my wife did. She took the kids. Yes, imposter in the new lobby. Oh my God. I'm so fast. I must be skipping. Sabotage communications. Okay, this, this is where it gets real. Come on, Middle Shake. Bring all the boys to the comms.  Brown.  I wanna see, can I get away with this? I don't know why Purple is not backing me up. He was with me. We could double down on this. Skip. Yes. I like that his name is all S as well. So it's like, skip. Bye-bye. The poor dude just got thrown under the bus. And that's a victory for Skip and Babusso. Just ask the host, Dan. Can you enforce no swearing in this lobby? Wife is watching on honeymoon. He left. Why? Why does everyone have an issue with this? Fine, new game. Please just accept me and my wife. Guys, can you please not kill me? My wife is watching and I'm trying to impress it. I am dead. My wife said you did okay. Okay, thank you. This is such a weird conversation I'm having. I don't think this green guy understands the game because he's trying to talk with them. He's like, add electrical. Any clue? Really black? I'm with pink. No. He's still talking away as a ghost and no one. Everyone left. Purple is sus. No, I said on honeymoon, guys. So please don't vote me. No, on honeymoon. Why am I talking about brackets? On honeymoon. One bracket. Vote brown. My wife said please. Oh my God, they didn't vote him off after all that. I even said that the relationship was rocky and they still didn't do it. Emergency meeting. Guys, my wife will leave unless we vote brown. Please. We have kids, little imposters of our own. No, please don't vote me. My wife is here on honeymoon. I always got to specify on honeymoon for no reason. A three-way tie with a boat, huh? No one turned on the oxygen again. We all died. My wife said, sorry, brown. It wasn't them. What is visual tax? Should I turn it off? It's when your wife actually loves you. Right. But I don't know what that feels like. Question mark. He left. Why are they all just leaving me alone? Yes, imposter. Just me and Mothboy. I think green vented. Okay, let's go with that. Oh, no. The guy we were trying to throw under the bus just left the game rather than try to defend himself. I said to Yellow, you seem like a great guy. He's like, as do you. Thanks, Yellow. Wife just left me. Smiley face. He said, cool.  That's awesome. Yellow. Who do I vote yellow? He's making the decision for me. Skip. Yes.  I don't even want to kill anyone. I just want to go back to the voting screen. Yellow, innocent. So is white. This is orange. Did you see him? Oh, no. My buddy said I'm voting orange. She was the other imposter. All right. I got to stick with my body. Otherwise I'll be suspicious. Oh, my God. I missed a deciding vote. I thought it was going to be unanimous. All right. Well, who voted for the others? Right? It was Brown, right? Brown. Only Brown didn't vote for him. Come on. Vote for Brown. Oh, my God. This yellow person is never going to be able to trust in his life ever again. After all this, he's gone. It's price to price. He wasn't an imposter. All right. Let's just deactivate the O2 now. He's going to be so upset. He trusted me so much. Oh, my God. Their minds must be blown. That was such a confusing game. Like even for the imposter. Mothboy must be very confused as well. He's like, I knew it. As if he knew it. As if the whole game he was saying, oh, he's innocent. Don't vote Skip. Well, he was actually saying vote Skip, but not me Skip. And now he left. The lobbies are so broken today. You just can't play a second game. No one can join in after the first game. It's really strange, but it makes it really hard to make friends in one game. Oh, my God. I'm the imposter again. I don't care about friends anymore. I just want to be imposter. Oh, no. My guy's getting caught immediately. They're calling him out. Okay. He's done for. I'm just going to vote for him. Everyone's going to vote for him. I don't know why he's trying to still convince everyone has voted. There's no point anymore. Okay. There goes my friend. Bye-bye. Every single person voted for him. So many people are dead. Why is he calling an emergency meeting? He couldn't have seen me. Did he? Yellow is kind of sus. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, he is sus actually. The McChicken. I don't think he's even chicken. That's got to convince him. If it's not me, then it's probably Orange. Orange is dead. What is he saying? That was like black. You are good though. It's not him. He's being accused. And he's like, oh, you're good at what you do. He's being falsely accused.  I'm so confused about what the hell is going on. All right. I got to kill two of them. That's one dead. Oh, no. I'm black. You just got yellow killed. And I just...  Wait, what? How did he... I'm really confused. I didn't even get to vote and... What? I'm kind of so confused. Okay. Imposter. Risky strategy. But I'm going to try and just get people voted instead of killing them. There's just FYI, my wife is watching. So no swearing please. Oh no, it's not working. This thing kicked white. I was kicked. That strategy didn't work at all. Okay, here it goes. Skip, skip, skip, skip to Maloo.  I'm a rhyming murderer. It's kind of my thing.  I'm just going to throw him under the boss as well. He's left the game, so I'm just going to go all in. And they're like, he left.  Let me laugh out loud, by the way. I'm laughing about it, you know? Why am I getting such hard games? My people keep dying or leaving immediately. This is going to be so difficult. All right, just wait until someone comes in and then I... Oh, emergency meeting. What? All right, he's saying purple, then me, then red. I'm just questioning him just to see if it ends. Oh, why purple? He has absolutely no reason. He's just purple, then me.  He's like, just purple, then me. Okay, I can use this. He was going so hard on purple. I can say maybe it was purple. Okay, that's one down. Okay, and he's been found. Purple, I'm sure. How is that made big? Yes. Come on. Green was saying him and green was innocent. Yes. So the seeds of doubt.  Bye-bye. It leaves three of us. Honestly, I think red would suspect brown more than me. Okay, set off reactor and now I just wait. And they'll come to me.  I'll decapitate you. My button. Yes. My button. Another solo victory. God, all of my partners leave me. Just like my wife. Even though I was just left.  I'm done. God, that was fun. I enjoyed that. I got a lot of imposter games today. The only thing is that the lobbies are so bugged. I still don't know how I got insta killed when I was the imposter earlier. And every time the lobby, like one game ends, the lobby just dies. No one can join. So I can't make any friends. Might be for the best. All my friends just leave me in the end. I can hear Johnny Cash is hurt playing in the back of my head right now. What have I become? But yeah, I hope you enjoyed the video. I love playing Among Us. If I'm going to make more videos on it, I might try and come up with like a bit of a theme. Like I might try and play as imposter, but not kill. Like just try and manipulate them or something like that. I love to think about it because I really, really enjoy playing the game. But I don't want to bore you guys just by playing it over and over again. So let me know if you want to see more. I hope you enjoyed. If you did, then you can check out my other content. I post every single day. So if you want to subscribe, please do. I also stream over on Twitch and the link for that is in the description. But yeah, that's about it. That's my ramble. Hope you enjoyed. Appreciate you. And hope to see you next time. Bye for now.


Welcome in the OG podcast. I'm your host Scott Bernstein. We have Dan Moldea, the godfather of true crime reporting, a mentor of mine.  Everybody knows Dan's legacy when it comes to Jimmy Hoffa, but I think an equally important legacy that Dan has, and I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk about his book from 1989 called Interference. And it is the Bible when it comes to illegal activity, illegal gambling, the mafia and the NFL. Dan, thank you so much for joining me to discuss your legendary book that everybody that's watching this or listening to this needs to go by because it is an amazing read that I don't know if a lot of people still know about the book here in the 2020s. But an amazing book and thank you for joining us, Dan. My pleasure, Scott. Good to see you. There was a show on PBS that premiered. It was called Frontline. And it was a great documentary series, which has still runs and is still respected as one every award in broadcast journalism and deservedly so. But their premier show on I think it was January 17, 1983 was called An Unauthorized History of the NFL. And there were several friends of mine who were involved in this production. And the show detailed allegations of mafia influence in professional football, including fixed games. And they got very specific about people who were involved, made suggestions as to there was there was the unnamed defensive back, the unnamed quarterback and the unnamed head coach, which turned out to be the coach was Hank Stramm and from the Kansas City Chiefs and the quarterback was Lenny Dawson. And so the show got ripped, the show got ripped apart by the NFL. And the sports media came down on them like a ton of bricks. And so the my friends who were working with the show came to me and they said, here is $200,000 worth of research that we've done. We can't take this any further. We're giving it to you to write a book about this. And so I started doing my research. There was there was a lot of stuff that went in between it was very difficult to sell the book I had to stop and start. And then I wrote a book in the meantime called Dark Victory, Ronald Reagan, MCA in the mob about the mafia in Hollywood. And then and then I when I was finished that then I came back with with interference how organized crime influences professional football. And what I what I what I claim in the book is that no fewer than at that time, 26 pass and present NFL team owners had documented ties to either the illegal gambling community and or the organized crime syndicate that no fewer than 70 NFL games have been fixed that no fewer than 50 legitimate investigations of corruption in the NFL had been either suppressed or just flat out killing because of a sweetheart relationship between NFL security, which you know is the internal police force within the league, which has made up a lot of a lot of ex federal law enforcement. Exactly. And with a lot of with a lot of it's a it's internal police force within the league. And then I also alleged that that the that the proliferation of gambling would cause more organized crime activity because at that time they were starting a sports lottery in Oregon, I think, and they had already had a failed one in Delaware. And I said, you know, when you have legalized gambling, it's going to cause a proliferation of illegal gambling. We're seeing that right now in big, big, big picture of that. And then finally, I thought that the sports media had become an adjunct to the to the First Amendment because the assistance by the sports media to print and broadcast the betting line to hire these odds makers and handicappers for the purposes of predicting the outcomes of games where game was still ill gambling was still illegal like 48 states. And so I went I really went after this. I went I went and my story was basically a history of the NFL security. And I interviewed everyone who was still alive, who was head of the NFL security. And I went through the whole process of going back to Sammy Baudet, where there was a where he was he was recorded secretly recorded by the Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington, where they were talking about gambling on games. And there was one guy who was even talking about Fixie games, and they were talking to bookmakers and everything else. So I went through this whole process. So I went to a guy named Vince Prasati. And Vince Prasati was the he was the he was in the Michigan State Attorney General's office. And I've viewed Vince is one of the finest people I ever do. I loved it. The biggest, the biggest most important mob buster in Michigan history, Vince Prasate was the Elliot Ness of Detroit in the way that Elliot Ness went after Capone. Prasate went after it lasted longer than Elliot Ness. He went after the Detroit guys for 50 years and had a lot of major, major take downs. Well said, well said. Exactly. So I went to Vince and he said, Listen, if you're going to write a book about the about the NFL, you're going to have to get the game fixed. You're going to have to get it again. I said, Yeah, you know, I'm looking for it. He says, Well, there was a guy named Don Dawson. He was a bookmaker here in Michigan. And you know, he was fixing games. We knew it could approve it, but we knew it. So I said, Well, what do you know about him? And he introduced me to a guy named Herbert Hinchman, who was the who was the chief investigator for the Internal Revenue Services, OIC, the Office of Investigative Services. And I knew a guy named Carl Schoffler, who was the head of the Intelligence Division for the Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington. And I was introduced to a guy named Leo Halper, who was a who was an IRS OIC guy as well, and had run an operation called Operation Layoff. And it was about they were investigating eight fixed games that were fixed, allegedly by two referees. Anyway, I I focused on Don Dawson. And I had and I was being told not only by my vits in Michigan Attorney General's Office, but I was being told by my sources in the FBI and in the strike force that Don Dawson was fixing games. And so I went to Don Dawson, I found them. And I had eight interviews with him. And on the sixth or seventh interview on tape, he admitted to me that he had personally participated in the fixing of no fewer than 30. They was 36, 32 games. It was 32 games. And so I went with this. And there's a long history with with with with the with interference, where I was an unwelcomed person who came into the situation. And my problem was not so much with the mafia. It was. And it wasn't even so much with the NFL. I wanted to fight the NFL. I was looking forward to it. I was coming out with things and they had no comeback or they weren't showing up. And what I wanted was that fight with them. And then what ended up happening was my fight ends up with the sports media. There was a and at the New York Times, I'm a I'm a creation of the New York Times. The New York Times invented me as an author on June 29, 1978, where they wrote this beautiful story about me. And that was what created me as an author from from my book, The Hoffa Wars in 1978. And so this sports writer who's been covering the NFL longer than he'd been married to his wife, a guy who is a respect to sports writer at the New York Times. He writes this review of my book that claims that I said things I never said and claims that I didn't say were right there in black and white in the book. And so I called him up and I said, Hey, you know, I want to retraction on this. And he says, Yeah, you know, I can't do that. The reviews written in there. So I lawyer to had a we went in and tried to get corrections. No, they refused to have corrections. So I'm a freelance writer. I'm an independent guy for 50 years. I'm an independent writer, fiercely independent, but I have no institutional backing. And so I asked him to publish my letter through my lawyer, I asked him to publish my letter to the end of defending myself. They say no.  So here I'm an investigative journalist, a beneficiary of all these First Amendment privileges that we have. And here I am challenging this right to be wrong that the media has. And so I, I then, you know, deal with his lawsuit that goes on longer than World War Two, where I have it one in February 1974, and then the US Court of Appeals takes it away from me in May 1970, may 1970, a few months later in 1974. So what happened was is that we had, we had, we were wondering what was going on. And we had the FBI. There was a book that came out. And it was called Alien Inc. The FBI's War on Freedom of Expression. And it was about how there was a book review section within the FBI. And it had been created by J. Edgar Hoover. And the, and what Hoover would do was this book review section was that he would use this, this, this covert operation to sabotage authors and their published works when they disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view of America. And so according to Alien Inc, which was written by a woman named Natalie Robbins, who was the wife of Christopher Lehmann Hopp, the chief book critic at the New York Times. The Natalie said that after Hoover died, there were 15 books that were reviewed between 1972 and 1989. The last book reviewed by this FBI book review section, this sabotage outfit was Interference, How Organized Crime Influences, Professional Football by Daniel Day.  They said, and I talked to a guy named Milt Aldrich. Milt Aldrich was the guy who ran the book review section. And he was a guy who supervised the investigation of me. And so I filed an FOIA for my file. And I get it. And the FBI was, they were coming, they were, they were coming after me on all kinds of fronts. And they were heavily promoting the review in the New York Times, this, this, the smear review in the New York Times. And they were also promoting an even worse review in the Washington Post by an FBI student named Sandy Smith, who was a reporter for Time Magazine and was viewed as an FBI agent. He was described as an FBI student in many, many publications. And so as a consequence of that, I tried to complain. But, you know, that was to no avail. I'm a small guy. And the head of NFL security was a guy named Warren Welch. And Warren Welch retired. And, and here's NFL security, which as you know, is a plumb position. Everybody wants this job, you know, you, and, and who does the NFL pick as the next head of NFL security? You please warn. Milt Aldrich, the guy who runs the investigation of me. Now, Warren Welch and I, and, and one of the biggest odds maker in the country was a guy named Michael Roxy Roxborough, who I liked. I got to know him and he was a terrific guy. And I got to know Warren Welch too. And, you know, I felt badly that the three of us were on nightline together because I'm no gentleman in these situations. And I go for the throat when I, when I don't like you. And these guys I liked. And so just as I like and respect you. And so I, on nightline, I said, you know, the day is going to come when you're going to see the NFL completely embraced sports gambling. And they're going to be offering it right in the stadiums where you can go and you can make a bet on your favorite team or whatever game going on simultaneously in the league. And as a result of the 2018 boneheaded Supreme Court decision, essentially supercharging legalized sports gambling, which to me is going to lead to the complete destruction of college sports and professional sports. We are left with this situation where illegal gambling is going to be flourishing because what happens? It is, it is flourishing like it's never happened before. You go, what happens? You go to these, you know, these, these, these online sites or you go to the brick and mortar places or the apps or the apps that you make your best. And what do you pay? What's what's your, what's your commission?  You learn how to use the point spread. Most people don't even know how to define the point spread. The point spread is a number that's created by an odds maker for the purpose of determining how much, what point has to be, what point has to be put up in order for money to be evenly distributed by the favors and the underdogs. That's what the point spread is. It's a device for bookmakers to balance their books. The word layoff.  The layoff is when, when a bookmaker has an imbalance in his book, he's got too much money on the underdog or too much money on the favorite.  And so, and plus, he's going to give you credit, which the state's not going to do these can't, and plus these, these, these online operations and these, they keep meticulous records. Let me illegal bookmaker. He's not gonna, you're not paying taxes on that. And let me also just say that it might, in a lot of situations, it might look like you're not betting with the mafia. You're betting on an app or on a website that's in Costa Rica or, you know, in the Bahamas. What people don't know is just like any business, you're going to die if you don't evolve. And the mafia has evolved to the point now where yes, they have the street bookies that you can go to in person and place a bet and get, but they also have these offshore websites and apps that they're partnered up with. And you're not literally making the bet through them. They're driving you to a site for you to make the bet, but they're still getting money and they're so exerting influence over the company.  These guys aren't eighth grade. These guys are well educated, high tech, online, offshore.  It's not the Detroit mafia. It's the Detroit partnership. Yeah, these guys are businessmen, college educated businessmen. Yes, Jack Tocco, he what he's got degrees, Anthony Zarelli had degrees. All of the second generation Detroit mob leadership, all graduated college with business degrees. Some of them were one specifically Mike Polizzi, big Mike Polizzi who had been the conciliary and unofficial CFO had a accounting degree from Syracuse. Vince Maley, who we mentioned in another broadcast that you and I did together, Kapo, eventually underboss, he had a business degree from Notre Dame. I mean, these were very, they weren't going to community colleges. These guys are going to major colleges and getting business degrees and coming back and using them to push forward their, their fathers and their uncles. These guys are, they're not knuckle-draggers. They are Wharton MBAs and Harvard MBAs and these guys are well educated. And once again, they've got high tech online offshore. And these guys have gotten smart. To me, I hear people say, Oh, the mafia is dead. I said, I don't think so. I don't think these guys look different. Just look horrible. Just looks different. Dan, can we just for a second? Get a little anecdotal. And since, you know, I'm from Detroit and I'm recording this from Detroit, I want to get into some of the stuff you reported in Interference, that I don't think the majority of Detroiters have any idea. And particularly, I want to talk about Bobby Lane, who before Jared Goff and Matt Stafford kind of redefined the quarterback position here with the Lions, we went a long time without a high quality quarterback. And they called it the Curse of Bobby Lane. Bobby Lane was the Lions franchise quarterback, the greatest quarterback Lions ever had until probably more recently. The Texas guy came from Highland Park, Texas, won NFL Championships, was beloved, you know, adopted son of the city of Detroit. And he was traded to Pittsburgh, kind of unexpectedly, shockingly, he was very upset when he got traded. That's why when he was at the train station, he said, made a comment about they're not going to win without me. And that was what the kind of person meant about.  And they're manipulating point spreads. Well, again, that's this person, this person is working with the Detroit Police Department, and he they had wiretaps, and they had surveillance reports. And they were banging on the doors of NFL players and NFL coaches, Alex Karris. I, I spent a lot of time interviewing Alex Karris, a real gentleman. I like the guy very much funny stories. But, you know, he admitted what he did. Yeah. But he but he also says, you know, the NFL is turning its collar around on this stuff, because the NFL is is a beneficiary of all this gambling that's going on. Because if you got a bet down in the game, you're going to be watching the car commercials and the the the smoking commercials, and you are which is what they were at the time.  And so I had all those I had all those intelligence reports and surveillance reports of wiretaps. And so yeah, I use all of that in in in interference. Well, you know, here in Detroit, you had a situation and I'm sure this was not unique to Detroit at that time period in the 50s and the 60s. Detroit was actually I think Detroit was unique in that law enforcement actually did something. I think law enforcement community was very aggressive in trying to stop this. I give kudos to the Detroit law enforcement. Right. But what I'm saying isn't what that's not what I'm saying. That is unique. Yes. Well, what isn't unique, I'm guessing, is that in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and even before that, the Detroit gangsters, rubbed elbows, socialized, were very friendly with the professional athletes in the city. And dates back to prohibition. But in the 50s and 60s and early 70s, Don Dice, they call them Donnie Dice. Donnie Dice Dawson was the biggest bookmaker in the city, Detroit, one of the biggest bookmakers in America. For people that know Detroit, let's say, Detroit mod history, the last 50 years, he was Alan health before Alan health. Alan health kind of took over as being the biggest bookie in the area from Don Dawson. And Don Dawson owned a very popular restaurant called the Fox and Hound, which was I don't think I knew that Don Dawson owned the Fox and House. Don Dawson owned the Fox and Hound, which was less than a mile from Lions practice facility, which was at Cranbrook, which is a private school and museum and a big piece of land in Bloomfield Hills. And less than a mile from Cranbrook was the Fox and Hound. This was before, you know, NFL teams had multi billion dollar, multi million dollar practice facilities, in addition to their, you know, headquarters and complexes. So back then, the Lions played at Tiger Stadium, and they would practice every day at Cranbrook. And after their practices, a lot of the Lions would get in the car, drive two minutes to the Fox and Hound, which was a very fancy restaurant, but had a bar, which was a little less fancy. And I was there. Yeah, it existed up until about 10 years ago. It was a standing until about 10, 15 years ago. Now it's called Bills, but the restaurant celebrates the history of the Fox and Hound. And that's what Don Dawson would would headquarter his activities. He lived nearby in Birmingham. And you had the Jackalones, the Corrado brothers, the Likavolis, the all the all the marquee stars of the Detroit mafia would buddy up with the Detroit Lions, specifically. And and I'm again, a piggyback enough of Dan, he talks about in interference, how they would have it was called a party bus, the Jackaloney brothers, the party would would would would rent these big at that time, what would be like a luxury bus, and they would outfit it with gambling tables, like casino tables, and they'd bring girls and they'd have liquor.  And on the way home from those games, a lot of times, certain members of the Lions would join them. They wouldn't go to the game in the party bus. But once the their job was done, and they'd either won or lost, they they jumped in the party bus and gamble and partake in the women in the booze. And this is one of the reasons that Alts Karris, the all all pro linemen got suspended for a season. Another reason was that he was the owner of a bar that had a Detroit mob sports gambling operation being run out of it called the Lindell AC that he was refusing to sell for his cell. But Karris would point out to that, you know, there was the gambling going on.  Right, which was which was incentive for them to kind of play around with point spreads. And I know I'm not sure if I got this from your book, Dan, or if I got it from somewhere else. But I know that there are stories that when Bobby Lane got treated, I'm sure my book, yeah, they replaced him a quarterback, I think with milk plum plump from Detroit and you try to wab up at the Cleveland Browns, right? Right. And milk plum wasn't on the same wavelength with his linemen that Bobby Lane was. And they wanted to get milk involved in some of this manipulation of the point spread and they'll told them to get lost. And these guys were upset about it. They didn't like Bobby Lane's replacement, because he wouldn't allow them to to bet on the games and fix the point spreads. It was it was a different world. I mean, it's it's you have a situation where back then, when the honest Detroit law enforcement establishment was really trying to root out the corruption in the city with regard to professional athletes and mafia guys. And the NFL basically saying you can't associate and they change their rules and they have put on these things on the in all the locker rooms where you can associate with gambling. We've gone from that when Alice Karris and Paul Horning were suspended for the gambling activity, we've gone from that to the Las Vegas Raiders who are who are right there in Vegas, who played last night and who you can't associate with them is when these guys go to the grocery store, they're they're associated with gamblers. That was just that's my say it's slippery slope, man. It's going to be so much gambling going on and NFL security, which has always been a a cover up operation, which is what it's going to be going into overtime on this because NFL security's job isn't to root out corruption and expose it to the public. Their job is to tamp down what's known about a scandal and to protect the multi billion dollar investments in the NFL team owners. Dan, real quickly, tell people we mentioned earlier, Len Dawson and Don Dawson and Hank Stram. This was the I think it was the 1970 Super Bowl the cheese versus the Packers. I question both Len Dawson, Lenny Dawson, even Hank Stram about that and Len Dawson and Don Dawson were not related just happened and they found Don Dawson's phone number on a piece of paper and Lenny Dawson's jacket pocket or something. They knew each other. They both admit they knew each other. Don Dawson was got very specific of me about certain players. But not about Len Dawson. And like I said, I spent a lot of time talking to Len Dawson and Len Dawson, who was accused the Kansas City Chiefs had more games go off the boards. In other words, a natural money showing up in the betting behavior on a particular game where they would be actually taken off the boards and no more money would be accepted on it because there was because it was suspicious activity.  God rest his soul. But he insists he took two polygraph tests, which cleared him of any long doing. But it was Len Dawson that they're referring to on the front line show along with Hank, Hank Stram, and another player I forget who it was a defensive bat. Yeah.  But I can't help but say that I like the guy. I liked him. He was a decent guy. He comes from I come from Akron, Ohio. He comes from Alliance, Ohio, which is nearby. And right in the middle is Kent State where I went to a graduate school.  But Lenny Dawson has two polygraph tests. And I'm one of those people that thinks that polygraph shouldn't put you on the hook. But I think it should take you off the hook if you're passing. And I'm, I'm in my 40s, I would say, I don't, I would say most people my age, their point of reference for Len Dawson wasn't as the quarterback for the chiefs, but was as the, for me, it was as the host of NFL today, which used to be, that was inside the NFL, which was on HBO him and Nick Bonacati. I didn't, I remember it took me like, as a kid, my dad told me like, four or five years after I'd been watching that show, feeling, you know, those two guys you're watching, they used to be really good football players. I just thought they were broadcasters. Yeah, he was, yeah, I tell you, there's a, there was another guy too. Who was the guy, the great Detroit pitcher? Danny McClain? Danny McClain. I was on, I was during my book tour for interference. My book on pro football in the mob. I had, I Danny McClain asked me to be on a show. Yeah. So while I was in Detroit, I went, he had his little organ there, his little key, he would play and stuff. And I love Danny McClain. I thought he was just such a character and Danny is a, he's a real lightning ride around here because Is he still around? Yeah, so you have Danny, if you're there, I loved you. I thought you were interesting. But so Danny is obviously he's a legend here. He took us to the 68 World Series last pitcher to win 30 games. You can't deny the greatness. But the after baseball thing here in Michigan, he had to go to jail for stealing pension funds, which kind of bankrupted an entire city. I think he went back to jail for some other stuff that was in I don't think I knew about that. He was involved. Yeah. And then he was involved with the Goddies in the Gambino's involved with the jackalones. He was involved with Oh yeah. So he was right. He's got some checkered past. But as a as a athlete, he's beloved in Detroit. People will always remember what he did on that 68 title. Well, that's why I said he's kind of a lightning rod. On one on one hand, people revere him as an athlete. But then on the other hand, he's had all these problems since since he left the pro sports world and went into the media and other things. You just get people have really strong opinions around him over here. But the last thing I'll say and I want to get your take on it. I don't know if you've ever heard this. We talked about this, I believe in a previous episode recently. But Danny McClain missed a big chunk of the 1967 pennant race. This was the year before we won. And we finished one game out. One game behind the Boston Red Sox in 67 and and McClain missed I think three weeks of the pennant race. And he claims that he stubbed his toe, walking down a flight of stairs or something. But most people believe that he was not paying the jackalones on his bets, and that on a Labor Day excursion out on the Detroit River, he ran into Billy Jackaloni, who said to him, because Danny McClain was a little chunky, and he was from Chicago. And Billy Jackaloni allegedly said to him, I don't know how to do things in Chicago, fat boy. But in this city, we pay our debts. And then he took his boot, and he stomped on Danny McClain's toe and broke it. Does that fit with the Billy Jackaloni that you know? Or new? This is this a guy who's driving Hoffa to his fate. Yes, right. But this is just funny. And Billy and Tony Jackaloni, they were the guys that were, you know, like all these guys, big sports fans. And I know in Detroit, there's been a ton of dovetailing between the professional sports teams, not just with the Lions, the Tigers, dating back all the way to the purple gang, who had a lot of ends with Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Tigers, Hank Greenberg, Jack Adams, who was the head coach of the Red Wings, they used to go up to the prisons and hold charity softball games and charity hockey games because the purples would bring them there. And then Hank Greenberg was Hank Greenberg was very close like one of my heroes. They're not saying that he was shaving points or doing anything illegal. He was just very close with the Bernstein brothers, who were the head of the purple gang. They're my my cousins, my dad's or my grandpa's first cousins, or sorry, my great grandpa's first cousins would be my grandpa's third. So when you walk into a room at Thanksgiving, does the relative shut up? They say that these are not we gotta we gotta we gotta stay quiet.  And I just was so oblivious until I got interested in my mid 20s. And I was in law school. But I grew up around guys like Lenny Schultz and Alan health and Billy Jackaloney. And they were just my grandpa's friends. I didn't really it didn't move the needle with me that they were these kind of infamous where the tragedy the tragedy is now once again, that with the proliferation of of legal gambling, there's going to be the proliferation of illegal gambling and legalized gambling is going to cause the complete total destruction of college and professional sports. And that's that's that's the safe aspect you can make right now that this is going to be a disaster. In fact, it already is in many households, where I have friends going back to college days and everything else you believe that they were real experts on sports and they were they were people who knew names of our statistics, everything else who went out and started gambling betting, and they ended up getting their asses kicked. Yeah, and they owed money to people who were very bad news. And they ended up having to borrow money from their parents and everything started to get themselves out of a real jam and a jam where they could have gotten hurt very badly. And so that I think is going to be happening a lot right now. And I think that the there's going to be a law enforcement disaster that's going to come along with this as well. Well, thank you, Dan, so much for coming on. You were the man for, you know, he doesn't his reputation precedes him wherever he goes. Dan is the goat, greatest of all time, when it comes to Hoffa and when it just as a true crime journalist, like I said, his versatility is unmatched and it inspired me to not, you know, I don't consider myself just a mob reporter, I want to write about anything that's related to organized crime or true crime, politics, entertainment, sports, you know, traditional OC stuff, but Dan really kind of wrote the blueprint for how you do that as a true crime writer. And again, I'm trying to thank you, Dan, and we will see you next time on the OG.


Welcome back to Radio Rothbard and I'm joined as always by Ryan Macon who is paying through the pain with the cold right now so it's just FYI so I'm not going to do perhaps a little bit more talking than the normal but it's also a very interesting time in the calendar I know you have on it is World Economic Forum Week and I felt this was a good opportunity to talk about something that I've talked a little bit about on Twitter it's a topic that I found interesting over the last year or so and there's been renewed interest in a variety of different channels in the works of James Burnham and in particular the idea of the managerial revolution and I think that the World Economic Forum in particular while I think there is something to be said about how we perhaps overstate the importance of Davos as a physical place and you know Carl Schwab and his like really creepy you know space outfits and John Kerry talking about how the people there might be extraterrestrials and all sort of stuff well I think it's easy to perhaps overstate the importance of that individual room in this individual event you know you can do all sorts of evil things without getting together I do think they kind of are a perfect embodiment of larger concerns about global corporate power about the view of kind of decaying direct private property entrepreneurs guiding society that increasingly it seems that the political agendas are less dictated by democratically elected officials for all the problems that we know of democracy and more about a rooted bureaucratic class and this is why you've had people interested in the work of James Burnham because you know he was writing during World War II about a new economic system that was going to replace capitalism that had failed and he was wrong right this is this is Burden was wrong about this but that capitalism had failed we were never going to get back to full employment we're gonna have endless homelessness unless we adapted that socialism doesn't work you know as a former Marxist himself you know socialism has its own problems and therefore all advanced systems are going to adapt this form of third way politics this this economic managerialism that you know was very in vogue in Germany and and Italy and in FDRs America and that this is a way forward and that ultimately all these other forms on the side are going to kind of decay into the oblivion what's interesting is that reading Burnham's book a lot of his predictions are absolutely wrong and his absolute I think his disinterest in economics and instead his very great interest in political power and this sort of Machiavellian project as as you know this was criticisms that Burnham has received from George Orwell from our own Justin Romando and a very interesting article about Burnham's thought Murray Rothbard had a review of Sam Francis's beautiful losers that touches upon Burnham's failings as well with his connection with Francis and what I think is interesting and completely missed in this contemporary discussion of this Burnham notion of managerialism which I think is true now more than when he was writing is of course the financialization of the economy and so all of this is sort of a wind up into the way that modern central banking a common theme on this show Ryan you have a great article out this week about you know the the laughable notion that the Federal Reserve is a bank by many you know real measure of it that is a purely political institution and of course again I think one of the most important lessons that I would love to see continue to trickle out into other circles is the degree to which financialization which you've written right I think one of my favorite articles on this topic in the past as well financialization is what has created modern managerialism that has empowered the steep state class and that if we do not strike at the root of modern central banking and finance then the Davos crowd and everything they represent wins and so if that wind up there Ryan take it away well there's so much there that we could talk about oh good my voice sounds nice and low thanks to this cold so we'll just continue on this for this week I just wish it would stay this way for the the future but the last but yes talking about Burnham I mean yeah the I would highly recommend Justin Raimondo's chapter on Burnham from reclaiming the American right one of Raimondo's best books and yeah not overly sympathetic toward Burnham at all just takes out what what good insights the guy had but I think you could learn a lot of the same information by just reading information about state building and the history of the state which has come out in the last 50 years or so probably you could learn a lot from say Martin Van Kreveld and his rise and decline of the state this talks about how managerial institutions the bureaucracy basically took over our notions of what government should be in the last couple of hundred years so that's like the larger historical context there but I think it's the way I had suggested this episode to you a little bit was in in the in line with the idea of here we've got the central banks they're pumping out money there since the 1980s when financialization took on a whole new dimension and became much much larger and much more dominating in the economy central banks become the key financial institution especially in the last 20 years and so what you see over and over again our Wall Street hacks and media and basically everyone talking about how what's gonna happen in the economy well it just depends on what the Fed does next well that's not normal in a in an actual economy that has you know markets and such then what happens next in the economy depends a little bit if not mostly on what's going on in terms of production and income and wages and efficiency not just how much money will the Fed pump out next month but that's where we are now and so the way I saw the episode to you was hey let's talk about how we're gonna hear all about how all this capitalism in the world is ruining the economy and how there's just too much capitalism right now and how when the economy fails we're gonna hear about how capitalism screwed us over when we could just look out there and we can see right now that the Fed has bought up about 23% of all mortgage loans so you got almost a quarter of the entire mortgage market in the Fed portfolio that's that's not what a market is that's not a functioning market central banks have come to so dominate everything that it's just the latest reminder of how you've got these technocratic organizations run by these Davos type people which is absolutely who's running the Fed and you've got as we're seeing a Davos all of these organizations quote unquote private organizations in league with these government officials there's so little separation between the so-called capitalist elite and the government elite it's not the 17th century when the entrepreneurs and the capitalist were this hated group that was on the outside and the people who ran everything were the nobility and the monarchs and then the capitalist were fighting to get some independence and representation and they were separate from the ruling class everything's very very different now and of course then there's no real market functioning in any of these economies right now where the central bank has completely taken over so yeah when we're looking out there and we're seeing what's what's going on right now the the age we're living in is the third way age as you're talking about right it's what a lot of the critics well it's it's what we could call neoliberalism now when a lot of critics of neoliberalism whine about neoliberal neoliberalism what they really mean is all liberalism they mean anything that's like markets so they equate neoliberalism with libertarianism even though they also include Hillary Clinton among the neoliberals I mean the word is so broad is to have no meaning but when people who hate neoliberalism from the left talk about neoliberalism they're just talking about hey there's too much capitalism but the reality is that if you think of neoliberalism as this thing that's occurred since World War two where we can't let laissez-faire happen we've got to regulate it we got to have big welfare states which is the reality because it's not real liberalism then that's where we are you can talk about how capitalism failed so has every other ideology except neoliberalism right monarchism failed conservatism failed classical liberalism failed communism failed where are we now everything every regime wants its own brand of this third rail or not third rail third type of market organization and that's this whole highly interventionist state it's the intervention Mises talked about because he always made a distinguish they always distinguish between communism socialism and then just interventionism which he didn't like either of course and pointed out that it just gradually leads more and more to socialism but that's where we are everywhere if you look at the global elites that's what they all want they want something that's not communism so that they can continue to be in control of their own little pieces of it but they certainly don't want laissez-faire because that would mean real competition and real freedom and that's unacceptable to this elite as well so that's where we are that's the ascendant ideology that's the world we live in and so I'm getting a little sick of hearing about how capitalism and laissez-faire is out there running rampant destroying everything and of course the problem is is that the the figureheads that we see as being the great titans of our modern age right are the business biggest benefactors of it and it's becomes a very depressing dynamic where you know Jamie Diamond who is by all means you know not not exactly one of our our favorite people for a variety of reasons but like it's it's him standing up to some brain-dead congresswoman from I think Minnesota Minnesota I believe railing against how you know their sort of energy policies and their desire to force banks to not invest within energy projects is going to you know create hell on earth I think it's might have been his literal words there it's been a while since I've seen the clip and it's like if Jamie Diamond is as good of a is the best spokesperson we have out there you know trying to push back and get some of this stuff then that's a really bad sign right I mean Elon Musk even with all of his quirky you know recent stuff and his Twitter accusation his Twitter acquire meant and you know that the Twitter files on sort of stuff and here's a man who has built his entire career largely based off of benefiting from government subsidies and itself I think this is one if we look at the auto industry it perhaps I think is a very concrete example of how this form of managerialism truly works because they've built into the market so many incentives promoting a particular market in electric vehicles they did by subsidizing Tesla they've done it by hurting with with regulations on emissions and things like that you've had it happen both from Washington bureaucracy as well as even your far more progressive policies from a state like California that carries with it a tremendous amount of economic weight and so the dynamic to which profit and loss guides the way that you know it guides a steers a market your steers what is produced they have done a wonderful job of so manipulating the factors that go into that profit and loss dynamic and you are a winner if you're a consumer buying electric vehicle you are a loser if you buy a vehicle that's not even getting into the taxes on gasoline and all of the the energy dynamic there and the way that you know we have made it harder to create gas processing facilities that you diminish our America's ability to you know fully utilize its own oil reserves and etc etc you know there's so many fingers so much weight skewed on both sides of this equation that it has created a signal for so many other car companies to rush into the specific market this particular specific ideas following Elon Musk and I do like that fact I tell you what a CEO you know has this comment and I had there are they're avoiding that marketplace because they think that there's nothing wise there I don't know maybe they're Japanese really are smarter than the West and their ability to figure that out but so again if Elon is the punky you know guy is trying to stand for the right thing we don't have those sort of Titans of industry that are willing to speak out with a confident voice to highlight what is going on I mean back in the day you know some of the biggest benefactors for Louis von Mises for Leonard Reed you know for the libertarian aspect of the old right in particular were general motors right it was major manufacturing and all that in the way that they've been able to the regime has been able to so co-op this class with perhaps the occasional you know the occasional example right and I know John Mackie from Whole Foods goes around to the students for Liberty events and you know that's great right fine you know the Koch brothers you know historically played that role in their own sort of ways you know plenty of criticism there I'm from certain people but you know fine they they made a big part of their industrial mission promoting you know free markets and the name Louis von Mises whatever fine but that that class is dying off and very much in that process and so that leaves you who defends capitalism if the biggest economic benefactors that represent industry are all completely co-opted by this economy that the this this financialized managerial revolution has created and I think that is creating a lot of the angst and the frustration that you're seeing kind of percolate politically on the right that they're taking a a more business skeptic and perhaps more appropriately corporate skeptic viewpoint I think often they are right on this but the problem is is that if you're not grounding these critiques back into an appreciation of sound economic theory right if your only focus is you know Bernaw Machiavellian politics then you are missing a massive piece of this equation because ultimately you know if you own the libs and and you succeed you still have to figure out how to create and produce stuff so that your society doesn't decay and destroy itself and and that that is the aspect here where you know how do you promote the importance of industry if all of the great figureheads of industry are completely co-opted and like that that's that I think is something that makes that world economic forum sort of dynamic so so scary to people because again you know once upon a time not that long ago you know owning owning a computer you know was was really cool and the internet embodied everything great about society and all this all this age of advancement and now you know Bill Gates is viewed as a as you know I think rightfully so like I'm not defending Bill Gates but you know now if Bill Gates has become you know one of the comic book villains of the modern age you know I can understand why kind of forces you to rethink everything yeah I mean who are these great saviors of freedom people at Twitter people at Facebook I mean come on these people not only yeah sometimes they were strong armed by the FBI but they willingly assisted the regime with spying on people censoring people silencing people they pushed back a little bit but come on these these people they all grew up in the same sorts of places a lot of the time if they all went to Ivy League together they all think alike the only people who are really out there who are defending freedom are generally the outsiders and it's it's because once you've reached the apex of industry normally most sectors of the industry not all there are some areas that don't benefit heavily from government subsidy and intervention the closer you get to financial sector stuff real estate banking Wall Street the more government intervention there's going to be because states for 500 years have figured out that one of the first industries you take over is the financial sector so they've been meddling in that for centuries so anytime you hear a banker talk about the bankers right there they're happy to accept boat loads of government subsidies they're subsidized to the tune of trillions of dollars now through the interest paid on reserves by the central bank heavily subsidized by the taxpayers not to mention the fact that they benefit first from a lot of the newly created money and net let's never forget tarp and those low interest loans they got that the bankers ridiculously well we paid all the tarp money back yeah you would have gone out of business without the tarp money you should have been bankrupted and liquidated the only reason you still have a job Mr. CEO is because you got that taxpayer subsidized loan and then so of course they're living off the sweat of the taxpayer these bankers and then they every time there's some regulation they don't like they turn around and whine about how you know we need to protect free market economics I mean give me a break they don't care anything about that they're just trying to protect their own particular shop and if if they can build their their portfolio through government favors so be it and that's of course the electrical automobile thing being an entrepreneur now is figuring out ways to get government money it's figure out ways to screw the taxpayer that's what entrepreneurship is among this this elite of people who are involved in electric cars in the financial sector for the most part yeah there are always people on the outside there are people who are trying to create new products and compete who are not favored by the regime and those are the people you probably have to look to and I think maybe that's why 20 years ago 25 years ago we looked at people like Jeff Bezos and we looked at people like Bill Gates and we thought hey these are scrappy little entrepreneur types there they're doing something different maybe the future will be all these entrepreneurs controlling the internet and they're gonna be these laissez faire types and it's gonna be great what people forget is that the regime has boatloads of money and it could easily co-opt the brightest people the smartest people and and get them to work for the regime and do what the regime says so you're only the only way out of that is you need people who are extremely suspicious of the regime in large numbers and that's certainly not the case at the moment you would need to change things so that you you had something going on like in the 19th century where you had more of a mass movement of where people hated the regime but that was because they learned to hate those institutions like the monarchists like the people who were involved in mercantilism right but that's where we're back to we're back to a sort of mercantilism mercantilism whatever you want to call it where the state has figured out to co-opt whatever markets exist to turn these people into servants of the larger regime and then to use them to actually empower the regime it's not a new strategy it was perfected really in the 17th and 18th century but it's certainly back the 19th century had a great run for some more laissez-faire the mercantilists came roaring back they seized control of that and so when you see the world economic forum meeting it's just the it's just the mercantilist 2023 all getting together to figure out how they can work together to empower the regime and themselves and so yeah we can't just when these conservatives they trash industry they trash the markets they don't really understand that they're not really trashing markets they're trashing people have been co-opted by the regime they're usually they don't have much interest in how markets work or how capital works so they can't even really tell the difference between a new entrepreneur who builds up a large successful business and someone who's living off subsidies from the government that's very hard for them to understand a lot of the time and so they don't make that important distinction there's the productive class and there's the parasite class and the conservatives don't make that distinction properly there's just industry and then there's people who want to live like farmers on the open land like it's the 13th century or something of this romantic view of how everybody should be living when the reality of the distinction that matters from classical liberal exploitation theory which the markets Marxist then ripped off and created this idea that people are exploited by the capitalist the reality is the exploitation is simply one of people allied with the regime who use regulation of taxes to rip off the productive classes so those are the two classes you need to worry about productive and parasite and some people involved in industry or parasites some are not everyone involved in government's parasite and they're in league with a lot of the people involved in quote-unquote private business and so that's what you need to be on the lookout for that's the difference between a good entrepreneur and a bad entrepreneur and you know as far as I can tell and some some libertarian some classical liberal the only people are really properly making that distinction right now but that's what we have to look out for because you cannot just look out and say oh this person's their head of a private business they must be some lover of capitalism so many private businesses heck they're only client a lot of the time is the government think of these construction firms that build roads or government owned sewage treatment plants right they don't have a single private sector customer think of that horrible company that makes like voting machines right which was just now suing for being being defamed right they're basically a government agency and then all these private weapons firms or Eric Prince with his a mercenary firm we're supposed to act like these people are princes of capitalism they've never made an honest buck in decades because they're all living off taxpayer funds so we do need to have a more sophisticated view of what the markets are and just how much of it's also being financialized by central banks that is by the regime and that you need to just be more discerning and what's what's laissez-faire what's not who are the good guys who are the bad guys because the way it is right now people are getting it very very wrong and of course I think it doesn't help on this and it's gonna sound like a almost a left-wing criticism here and I think doesn't know me well enough but that's not the case but you do have a dynamic there where if you look at the list like the 25 richest Americans you notice a lot of similar last names right you there's a lot of those that are the the biggest benefactors of these large corporate enterprises that were not the people that founded them so you you have there's there's another aspect here where again this ties into another aspect of this which is the takeover of the late institutions where you know the the sons and grandsons or granddaughters of these these great titans you know have that they're in a position to enjoy the the fruits of their you know what they've inherited and yet can then utilize that in all sorts of you know ways that go completely against all the values that their superior predecessors had I know Curtis Yarvin likes to highlight you know the complete decay of the Ford family and how you go from Henry Ford to the Ford Foundation and everything that they finance my wife and I have been enjoying we were watching a series food that made America which highlights all of these great sort of industrial age food Titans and you know how they solve these problems of people moving from like small-town farms to these these very tightly condensed cities and all of the problem-solving the innovation that you had to come about to like feed all these sort of things and it is worth noting that back in the day like you did have the sons or in one case of the post family the daughter was very innovative from their own right and help you know build what was already a successful company to something even you know far greater than what they inherited so this is an I think a historical you know a historical absolute that the set next generation must be worse than that came before but but that's another dynamic here and when you combine that with the financial incentives in particular that post 2008 era where those that are in financial markets benefit so much more than those without it you know how many new you know how many people that have the talent in the mentality to have succeeded in becoming one of those great Titans of disrupting an industry creating that that that creative destruction that I always have to be careful throwing around you know Schumpeter references and Austrian podcasts I know but you know how many people that might have otherwise been able to have that ability in other eras have had a far harder deck stacked against them because of just the incredible power of you know the extent to which modern financial policy has rewarded those previously wealthy and so skewed the markets and ways to drive completely political outcomes and of course this this is what leads to broader concerns right when we think about the manipulation of you know food of health outcomes of you know the way that housing policy and now you have banks you know saying that they're not going to make mortgages and there's Wells Fargo or someone I mean pretty major player in the market saying that they're not that they're going to make mortgage decisions based purely off of skin color and things like that I mean you have some of the most profound important sort of needs that society has that is now being filtered through a purely ideological ends that can then result in very material environments that can fundamentally alter the way that people think going forward that can have incredible consequences to family structure and production down the road on this kind of you know that kind of touches into you know the consequences of how you know in debt millennials in generation Z has been pertinent in particular from the student loan scam and the way that helps fuel people you're not getting married or having kids later and later in life which can influence political views of individuals you know it is it's a very very scary time and again the important thing is that for those that have appropriately realized you know what time it is to use a popular phrase the the issue here is not you know the the the victories of libertarian economics and you know the right worshiping at the altar of the market it is entirely that the managerial revolution that Burnham was in in his case celebrating has come true through financial markets and then unless we deal with that dynamic then you know any facade any attempt to fight it without taking that to into account is is you're not hitting the actual problem there yeah and you can see just how much they depend on all of that of course it's never a surprise to see a company like Wells Fargo doing exactly what the regime would like to see they're always in lockstep with the regime in terms of whatever the latest political fat is and why wouldn't they be when you've got not only the fed buying up nearly a quarter of all mortgage back securities and thus buy through that taking worthless mortgage loans and propping them up by just holding them on the books forever and not selling them and buying them with newly printed money which you pay for in terms of inflation so that's a just a basically a indirect subsidy to the whole banking sector right there the whole real estate sector and so you wouldn't want to upset the the monster that controls that sort of thing not to mention the fact that of course big financial institutions also have sizable bond portfolios a lot of the time and the Fed has also bought up huge portions of government debt as well in order to keep interest rates low on that so that the government can just keep up with deficit spending and not have to to deal with what in a normal market would result in an inevitable rise in interest rates so it's got its fingers deeply in there and of course then banks they don't want to what they don't want to upset the apple cart and so it's all of these cultural issues culture war stuff is actually being funded indirectly by the regime because by buying up so much of what's important to the private sector they just have to do whatever it is that the regime wants to do and it's really no different than from the east india company or these other government corporations in the 18th century that tended to be in lockstep with the monarch right what he wanted that's what you did because that's how you got your special favors in order to carry out here in order to enrich yourselves as the people who headed up the east india company and so they're just two sides of the same coin and that's what's going on now you should view these companies in the same way that an american revolutionary would have viewed a government a monarch backed corporate entity in 1775 it's the same sort of relationship their extensions of the crown if you will jp morgan is and that's the amount of moral legitimacy you should give them in terms of respecting them and in terms of seeing them as something distinct from the regime the only way out of that then is to starve the beast you got to stop buying into this idea that the government should be able to print all the money it needs that deficit spending is no big deal because all they're doing is financing your oppression by propping up all these companies that can then just do whatever it is the government wants in terms of enacting social policy cutting you off if if you say something that the company doesn't like in social media all of that would be impossible really without just these constant subsidies coming out of the federal government because companies would have to actually compete for customers to treat their customers right they would have razor thin profit margins it would be much more competitive and it would be much more open to new entrepreneurs coming into the marketplace to serve underserved groups but as it is everything's just fine because we fully financialized the economy what does that mean i mean we keep throwing that term around what it means is that the central government through a variety of mechanisms and there is an article that we'll link to in the description on this where they have essentially shifted the balance away from physically productive firms so by offering risk free essentially financial investments and by making it more so that moving money around that lending money that buying up government debt or other types of debt is more lucrative thanks to central bank intervention regulation then putting that same money and investing it into say an automobile factory or a pharmaceutical factory or something that builds things or say a trucking company that's good for logistics any of those things that that work in the physical world that move around things that build real things that employ large numbers of people those have all become relatively less profitable because thanks to the central bank where all the real action is where all the real money is is in the financial sector because they'll bail you out they'll ensure that risk is low by buying up assets to increase its value and anytime that the financial sector looks like it's in trouble here comes the central bank writing to the rescue other parts of the economy they might just be let go out of business they might be forced to actually exist in a competitive marketplace whereas we all know that the more deeply embedded you are in the financial sector the more likely you are to get special favors and so that just shows how screwed up the economy is because now building things is relatively less profitable what is profitable is just parking billionaires parking their money in certain places that are likely to get bailouts and of course that's simplifying due to a significant extent but that's essentially what has been going on for the last thirty five forty years and that's what we mean by financialization i do have a a note from legal that when you say that these companies are like we should view them the same way the revolutionaries feud uh british corporations we are not advocating people breaking into ports and throwing bug burgers into the sea just you just want to make very clear burgers yes um but uh i think we need a a little bit of a end on an uplifting note and because this is this is a lot of a doom and gloom on where we are now but this is what makes this current environment so interesting um where you're we're now dealing with james bullard um you know one of the members of the fed earlier today um said that he looks at uh he's viewing interest rates in 2023 going up you know well beyond five percent um you know continuing the the gradual increase in rates um you know going against the pivot narrative out there um he has been right in the past but you know any fed official has you go back long enough and they they will be wrong um i i am interested in this dynamic what we talked earlier at the start of the episode the degree to which past fed policy has fueled all of these problems and yet there there does seem to be something of a tension between what the fed is doing and what the rest of the world wants the fed to do um and at tom the long go um who is who's always interesting or always at a very interesting pundit out there um gold guns and goats i believe his blog um but he does a lot of very interesting stuff on on financial and geopolitics and things like that his sort of framing of current events right now is that there's very much a tension between let's call it the new york crowd and the davos crowd and that um that going forward like that that the euro and the ecb you know is is is not very happy in particular with what the fed is doing and that other economic powers out there be them central banks dealing with the real cost of rising interest rates and the the government that they have subsidized um they do not have quite the same strength that america has for a variety of reasons and that ultimately we might see more of a break between after after um you know a decade plus of relatively you know hand in hand central bank policy and the consequences there of other countries if pal continues to increase rates um and i i know we have and i think continue to be skeptical of again what we're not trying to to certainly paint you know lawyer j pal as some sort of great heroic figure but if if they really do prioritize lowering interest rates to the degree that they have voiced in the past and have so far followed through with policy it'll be interesting to see how that breaks away with some of the fact you know some of the folks that attend davos in the world economic forum because ultimately this very financialized politicized economy needs the fuel of artificial low interest rates to help make up for the real profit and loss consequences of making products that people don't want until they are perhaps engineered to want that that's a larger process that is a longer process right there um so that's that's that's a dynamic that looking forward you know does a pivot from what has been a long gross um hedonistic monetary uh financial framework does a the potential of a sustained new era we'll see if that happens but does what what impact does that have on the problems that we are discussing right now well i think that everybody loves the fed of course when the fed's inflating right hey everything's great the fed it's keeping the the the money spigot going it's great the fed is a perfect genius organization run by brilliant people we love them there's nothing wrong with them that's what wall street always says when the fed is inflating that's what other governments always say when the fed is inflating but as we have tried to emphasize here at the mesis institute and we'll get we got to keep doing it more because people still aren't figuring it out especially wall street the problem is the boom not the bust because the problems were all being created when the fed was just inflating everything because that's what was causing all this money to flow into bs enterprises that like like uh all of these marketing employees legions of marketing employees at twitter who couldn't ever manage to create an actually profitable company beyond a couple of quarters these people what they were making money to do nothing and that was only uh made possible by all the inflation so people feel great when the money supplies being inflated by the central bank but suddenly they're all criticizing the central bank when it takes a hawkish turn and of course i use that in relative terms i mean i wouldn't describe the fed as hawkish per se but relatively so obviously compared to the days of janet yellen and now everyone's complaining about the fed uh but what's important to keep in mind is that the fed uh i think in particular j powell i think he's smart enough to recognize that inflation can actually get out of hand and that they don't know enough to know what could happen if they just let things fly and so i think he's trying to err on the side of caution now why would he everybody everybody wants him to spend more money well wouldn't that make him popular well if there's any rule in politics that you might be able to point to historically it's that high inflation leads to political instability and the the job of regimes is to avoid political instability they hate instability we hear about how bad instability is all the time in a variety of contexts whether in this country or other countries and that you need to avoid that and i think that's what j powell understands and what the smarter people within the regime understand and that's why they at least in the minority probably are pushing rising interest rates because they want to actually kill the inflation dragon not because they love the american people not because they think inflation is bad based on some sort of economic theory but because they recognize that it leads to political instability and so that's that's bad news for all the other central banks that are deeply wedded to easy fed money or for other governments that depend a lot on fed inflation and and invest american investment in their own in foreign worthless bonds and that sort of thing that's enabled by easy money in america because the fed is able to essentially export its own monetary inflation because other central banks ride on that phenomenon so everybody's real mad about it also they don't like a strong dollar you know quote unquote strong just relatively strong compared to these other currencies we saw it after volker's time when only a couple of years after volker finished uh creating a relatively strong dollar then all these other governments started whining about that and and called america to the table to hammer out the plaza accord so that the dollar would start being devalued again through the central bank because uh they didn't want a strong dollar because that then makes it harder for you to buy american goods and uh also american exporters don't like that and it makes life more expensive for certain groups so they want a weak dollar even though many people of course benefit from a strong dollar so we should of course expect to see lots of whining and complaining uh from other regimes and from wall street about a uh a relatively strong dollar and rising interest rates but the the problems that they're now encountering from a rising interest rate uh wouldn't exist if we hadn't had 20 plus years of easy money and rock bottom interest rates that then reach just ridiculously low levels and essentially negative real rates after 2008 and then that lasted for what 13 years so that should have never happened in the first place that is what made life so easy for all these wall street people it didn't actually have to be particularly productive but could just keep selling more and more and just betting that there'd be some bigger sucker to buy this stuff and that interest rates would never go up and they made boat loads of money and but now they're seeing that in a rising interest rate environment they might actually have to work for a living and they hate that idea so they hate the fed all of a sudden even though the fed was their hero for the decade before that and this is all just becomes because they lack the austrian understanding of the boom and bust relationship and so we shouldn't expect them of course to come to a good understanding anytime soon uh but i think what's important to keep in mind is that this is the the the trade-off the the choice that has to be made is we are is the fed going to buckle from the pressure on those sides from europe from wall street to then start inflating again so that we could get a second round of inflation as what happened in the 70s because that's what kept happening in the 70s was oh we tied the money supply slightly it looked like inflation was going to go down a little bit so then we went back to our old inflationary ways and then we got another larger wave of inflation powell has made multiple comments saying he doesn't want that to happen and of course you can only trust so much what these people are saying but i think that's a reasonable conclusion for him to come to and he so he may actually understand it and again he's not doing it because he's a great humanitarian he's doing it because the regime is actually afraid of high inflation levels and so it's it's a matter of thinking short term versus long term if you don't think long term you might end up with runaway galloping inflation and that leads to things like coups uh we can we can tie multiple military coups and other sorts of um actions that overthrew a regime due to inflation because it leads to major problems for people to be able to afford a living and so if i were them i'd be afraid of runaway inflation too uh so it seems that the fed uh is is for now trying to walk some sort of of road where they avoid runaway inflation but they also don't create too much of a recession which lots of we can talk about this next time so much data now says we're in recession right now i'll be shocked if a year from now we're not talking about the early 2023 late 2022 recession um but they're trying to create something that's uh that's a soft landing whatever that means but they're not going to just go back unless something changes in terms of internal pressure because they are really afraid of uh runaway inflation and the realities is revolution still happen that regimes get overthrown that people riot in the streets this stuff still happens and it happens in places where inflation uh gets away from the ability of the regime to control it and so they're right to be afraid if that's actually what's motivating them right now one particular when you add the geopolitical tensions out there saudi arabia recently mentioned that they're open to treating occurrences other than the u.s dollar i'm always skeptical when i hear these headlines and i was just like that you know hearing for years but oh well china's gonna create a gold base you on any day now don't you worry that's what's going to take down the dollar i have a degree of skepticism of that because of how bad everyone else is right you know our problems are not unique to us but particularly in that sort of environment though the dollar being the cleanest shirt in the laundry becomes even more important in a in sort of the chaos of the current global environment as well so that's definitely uh something to keep in mind but that being said i i think i'm gonna let you get out of here at ryan and get back to your uh recuperation but this has been radia rothbard can remember we will not eat the bugs we will not live in the pods and because of that we will see you next week oh good my voice sounds nice and low


Thanks very much everybody and how many of you remember when we used to get any amount of these free every single time We visited a supermarket Yeah, and I'm old enough to remember that and but I'm also old enough to remember how The impact that that had on the Irish countryside with plastic bag litter really spoiling our urban and our rural landscapes on the 4th of March 2002 a plastic bag tax of 15 cent per bag was introduced in Ireland And the impact that had literally overnight on our consumption of plastic bags was phenomenal We went from 328 bags per person per year to 21 literally overnight So we altered our behavior significantly in order to recycle our plastic bags to try and avoid that charge So not only then did it have an impact on our behavior as consumers But that tax has actually yielded over 220 million for the ex-checker since it was introduced in 2002 This is what I adore about tax, and I think it's really exciting about tax Maybe not obvious But not only is it the means that the government uses to collect all the kind of money that we need to run the country and To fund social welfare and so on but it has an incredibly Powerful impact when it comes to social and economic change so it can considerably change our behavior And that's what kind of interests me about it now That can be both positive and negative which makes tax policy making really a kind of a delicate balancing act I'm also old enough to remember when you would struggle to find tax mentioned in any newspaper And that has significantly changed in recent years with the tax avoidance activities of large multinationals hitting headlines like this One, I don't know if you can see it and Making the front pages really Tax has grabbed the attention of the public and the media particularly since the onset of the global economic crisis But with that interest has come a significant concern around ethical behavior in tax So I suppose the accurate computation of tax liabilities for individuals and companies is Involves technical skill and it'll always be essential that our students learn that technical skill That's the way I was taught tax and that's the key focus for many tax teachers still today But I don't believe that focus on technical skill alone is sufficient anymore for us to produce the kind of graduates that are needed In the tax profession today We need to transition tax teaching I believe away from that sole reliance on technical skill into a much more holistic Type of approach and that's what I try to do that in my teaching and I have various tools that I use But there are two in particular that I'd like to share with you today The first is a prediction market project which encourages students to learn about tax in the context of the economy as a whole And then I have an ethics sort of intervention that I wanted to share with you as well So to start with the prediction market If I asked one of you to guess how many sweets are in this jar You might come some bit close to an answer But if I asked 10 of you and I averaged the answer going back to our maths Colleagues were much likely to come closer to the the real figure And that's essentially the premise of a prediction market The idea is to combine the opinions of a group of people into a probability of an uncertain event occurring in the future Okay, so you could tell the probability Maybe of a team winning a game or of a project whether it's going to be delivered on time by combining the opinions of a group Of people who know about that particular Context and and that's basically what a prediction market is if you think of the game who wants to be a millionaire It's a little bit like the the option where the contestant chooses ask the audience Okay, so that sort of approach can be used and to allow large large groups of people to Forecast on uncertain future events and that's that's what I do in terms of the tax policy implications of the Irish budget with a huge amount of students up to 400 Trading on this and so what happens is the students get 5,000 euro, but it's virtual money Okay, and they use that to trade on a market, which is online So initially three questions are posted on the market So an example might be what will be the the Irish corporation tax rate after the budget and a range of options Our answers to that question are offered initially. They have equal probability of occurrence and the students take the virtual Money that they have and they invest it in the answer that they think is most likely To occur and they have to also provide a narrative justification for for their trading So the the outcomes that are listed their probability will change as the students trade on on these these answers and The market opens in in the couple of weeks before the budget happens so the students get to choose and but also to revisit their options as Information about the budget is released in the media So they can buy and sell sell contracts if you like and additional questions then are added to the market and in the lead Up to the budget. So by the end the students are trading on up to 15 tax policy questions Now the idea of having them Forecast around the budget is that the market makes them search for and analyze all of the kind of information That's released in the lead up to the Irish budget. So to do well students have to be watching the news They have to read the newspapers. They have to follow all the social media in the lead up to the budget And so that in enhances their disciplinary knowledge of tax and tax policy making within the broader economic context But not only that they also have to assess the validity of the sources of information that they're relying on Which enhances their information literacy skills? That's one I suppose turning to to the ethics Dimension I believe across all of the domains that we're teaching in there's a necessity for the students to really engage with the moral and ethical implications of their decisions and I think that's something and that that's important across across all domains and In order really to raise the standard of ethics in tax It's essential for us as educators to embrace the kind of effective methods of Enhancing our students ethical and moral reasoning and this is I suppose what this other project is about And it's an ethics intervention which involves the students discussing in an online forum various ethical dilemmas in tax and each of those discussions is prompted using a range of stimulus which is designed sort of to elicit debate and prompt prompt discussion So there's ethical vignettes that I've developed contemporary quotes video clips journal articles and so on and But the students moral reasoning levels are actually measured before and after the module so they can actually monitor their own Ethical development as them as the module progresses As well the aim with this is to prompt students to reflect on the kind of dilemmas that they might face as graduates They get to a chance really to develop their personal principles when it comes to ethics and they challenge each other so they either have to defend their position or they might come around to somebody else's perspective through sort of reasoned debate and It's that kind of debate that the literature suggests prompts Development in in ethical or moral reasoning So suppose that's just a taste of some of the tools that I use in order to try and facilitate my students learning about tax in a much more holistic way than just to focus on the technical aspects and The computational technical aspects will always remain important But I don't think there enough if we're to produce the type of graduates that will turn out I supposed to be proactive businessmen and women who think critically and who behave responsibly. Thank you