Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowStuff They Don't Want You To Know

CLASSIC: STDWYTK Live: Secrets of The Federal Reserve

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Published Feb 20, 2024, 5:10 PM

From the secret signs of homeless communities to Toynbee tiles, the world of advertisement and even the US dollar, the world is chock-full of hidden signs, languages and symbols. Recently, the guys hit the road, traveling across the northeast and exploring these secret images on their first live tour. Tune in to learn more about the strange world of hobo code, the weird images on US currency and the murky origins of the Federal Reserve.

So true story.

Perhaps not a story the Jedi will tell you, Fellow conspiracy realist. Back in the day, we went on a tour across the northeast part of the United States, and we decided what better to talk about than the conspiracy surrounding the Federal Reserve. That's our classic episode this week.

Oh yeah, we're talking about the creature from Jekyl Island to do.

Love it shout out nineteen thirteen.

This is also, if I recall correctly, this is also the time we were very taken with Hobo code and then we were also, oh I found we found that toybee tile here in Atlanta. Yeah, we just we squeezed that into.

This is really great.

And I honestly can't remember which city this recording is from, or like when whichever one this is from. We had such a great time touring around the northeast of these good United States talking about the system that kind of controls the money here in a weird way. Uh, we can't wait for you to hear this. We had a great time.

Hello, hello, hello, welcome.

Oh my gosh, you guys, we did it. We came to our hometown and a crowd showed up to see us live.

How are you doing.

Yeah, it's Sunday.

It is all right. We had to check earlier. We have no idea what day it is. At this point, it's been a bit of a blur.

It's been a bit of a it's been a bit of a blur. But we want to thank you so much for coming out. Is astonishing to us to record in our hometown live now this is this is the last show of our tour and we saved it for you for Atlanta. I like your hat, by the way. And we went We went to a bunch of places, really, Yeah.

We did.

My favorite highlight of the tour was having a lobster role at a dive bar in Boston, because that's the thing. They're just lousy with lobsters there and at Yeah, and then yesterday I almost died. I choked on a bone from a fish at a tire restaurant and had a panic attack. But these guys got me through it. And now here I am to be with you fine people.

Yeah.

We played a show in Arlington at this old theater and it was beautiful because all of the seats were like old office chairs that have been just discarded by someone. But they just purchased them all or found them on the side of the road and just filled the entire theater with them.

And then there were remnants, like there were weird piles of them just in the corners.

Yeah, and there were weird tables.

It looked like we were going to do a meeting for the United Nations.

Yeah, yeah, it was.

It's like one of those like the Buckhead Theater, I forget, not the Bucket theater.

It's one of the old like the Pisa or something, one.

Of the newer movie theaters that actually has food there too, so you're sitting in these seats and ordering food.

It was just an odd experience.

Was it was.

It as odd as the one in Boston where there was a kid's parkour class going on outside of our.

Which was great.

It was fantastic. Those kids have moves. We tried to hang with.

Them, Yeah, they weren't having it.

Literally just ch opened the door to the dressing room and there's just like these little tiny midget people just zooming bye, like like tires and like you know, bars and stuff.

It was pretty wild.

But they did actually say parkour while they were j Yeah.

But now we're in a place called Terminal West, which rules do you do?

You?

Guys ever come out here to see shows like music, awesome live shows.

We're on that stage right now.

Oh boy, uh oh, and we're supposed to do a show. That's why we're.

Here, right, Okay, let's let's get started. Yeah, yeah, welcome back to the show.

My name is Matt, my name is not and they called me Ben. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.

We're joined also by our super producer, Paul, Paul Mission Control Decad. Hey, were you still please let us embarrass you. This guy makes our show. This guy makes our show happen.

He we continually cajole him to get on microphone with us. I know, I know, I know, but but.

Then he's surrounded by a lot of other house stuff works.

Oh I see you them, I see some celebrities in the crowd. Can I get your autograph later? Guys, I don't want to make it weird, but you.

Know, okay, I made it all right?

Well, well yes, Paul mission Control decand uh, we're finally back. And we were on the road for a while and we had these bizarre adventures, roaming through New England, roaming through through historic places. Every city we have been to, including Atlanta, has has a few things in common. Right, There's a there's a bunch of graffiti everywhere. Oddly enough, there's a regional Federal Reserve Bank, which in every city we went to, in every single one. And when we were thinking about our show, we we started we started brainstorming, and we were we were thinking about hidden things, signs, symbols, secret languages, and we were wondering how they came to be and why and what they mean, and more so, why do some of the world's most powerful, influential institutions use secret signs, codes, signals, languages every year, every month, every week, every day.

Ben, are you talking about the shadowy organization that operates out of that five sided buildings over near Arlington, Virginia where we were. That has absolutely nothing to do with pentagrams.

I mean, I mean there are a lot of buildings.

With five sides.

I hear it has a subway and a Best Buy. So you know, it's true. The branding is part of it as well.

Right, right, It's true.

Well, you know, Matt, the Pentagon is arguably involved Okay, but that comes later, I think, right, I will wait, do we want to call it foreshadowing?

Yes, okay, we'll call it foreshadowing.

So we're hoping that you join us today as we dive into the strange stories of these signs, languages, signals, and symbols that allegedly influence us everywhere we go.

And the institutions are one of them anyway, that just loves them.

Yes, yes, absolutely so. Okay, So this is a modern city. Atlanta is a pretty big city, and every time you walk through any modern city in the US or abroad, we are inundated with literally millions of images of mess right, and they're non consensual. You don't wake up in the morning and agree to see twelve thousand billboards.

You just have to go do something.

And we had a time a while back, Matt, you and I years ago had a fool's errand where we said, you know what, we're gonna wake up tomorrow. We're going to count every single advertisement that we see during the day.

We really did it, and we got to about two hundred or so. I think both of us maxed out around that range two hundred three hundred range.

I gave up at eleven thirty five am.

Yeah, it was rough, and it's just crazy.

And a lot of its logos that are kind of unassuming that you just notice on the side or on somebody's shirt or a hat, sir, awesome shirt, And it could just be as simple as a letter or something like that, or like if it's a logo, you look at something like we all know this the FedEx logo that has that secret arrow in there, or the Amazon logo that also has a not so secret arrow.

It's got a smile that starts at where starts at like a yeah, and it goes to Z.

Lets you know you can get everything online right. All you need is a tiny little symbol that lets you know exactly what something is and you don't have to communicate with words beyond.

That, and the smile just lets you know that everything's cool. Amazon is a completely innocious organization that just means the best for you, and one that story goods and servicesn't be able to buy your laundry detergent with the push of a button. It's a fantastic company. I'm a fan.

We're getting those drones for you, says Jeff Bezos. But but this, this is weird because it goes beyond advertisements. There is a great deal of money and time spent to create logos that you know, FedEx has letters in it, right, Amazon also has letters in it. But the parts of our brain that are being engaged when we see these logos are non verbal things. They're not they're not the language part of our brain, you know. What they are instead are imagistic, symbolic things.

We're meant to connect with you, like on almost emotional, kind of prioritial level.

Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely your primal level. And we thought, how far does this go?

Right? Yeah?

Right, We've all seen mad Men or read the Wikipedia entries about it, I'm sure so.

So.

We know that advertising is historically huge industry, but the idea of secret symbols, secret signs, secret languages goes far beyond advertising. It predates it. We wanted to find an example for you, and we wanted to start with something that used to be alarmingly cartoonishly common. It's something you may not have heard of in the modern day. The name sounds a bit silly, but here we go. It's Hobo code. Hobo code.

There you go.

You got to enunciate it because we had a couple of shows when people didn't know what we were saying.

Yeah, so here's the thing.

The it does sound kind of like it could be like the name of like some kind of prog band's concept album.

Or yeah, so kind of like concept EP or something mobo code.

Yeah, but no, it's not.

It's actually an entire kind of cryptographic language, and it surround the world of the hobo, which you may know today as being a bit of a pejorative or something you might say to your you know, significant other if they're not dressed well or something like that.

It's weird.

It's an anachronistic, Like some of us are here with our significant others. If you're ever in a fight with them and you call them a hobo, then they're.

Just like out of the argument. They don't understand what's going on.

Why would you say that?

Yeah, They're like, what year is it? Tim?

I apologize if anyone here is named Tim. But the idea of this goes back to a part of American history that we don't often talk about outside of maybe middle school, high school, the Great Depression, The world of the hobo itinerant workers without homes who had to leave their communities due to the fact that there were no means of sustainable employment. This world is often romanticized nowadays.

Right you got you got the guy with the bendle, then the stick with the bag and like the crumpled hat, maybe a pipe or something, trusty dog riding the rails.

Not a care in the world.

Only kind of a lot of cares in the world, because the world, as it turns out, was a terrifying, terrifying place.

Yes, and they find themselves in that position, not of any real action that they took. Perhaps it's something that was kind of forced on them. If you don't have a home, then this is this is kind of what.

You do, and it's a it's a brutal and demanding existence. And the problem with this is we don't know too much about this community because it was largely an oral tradition. These people weren't buying wings of museums, they weren't financing some sort of scholarship program. You can find some interviews, you can find a couple of books by some intrepid journalists, and you can hear some i'll say it, creepy songs that stayed in the American song book.

They they might actually know rock Handy mount.

Oh yeah, yeah, no one up north does.

Nobody knows this song?

Are people in this audience, No, rock Candy Mountain, Rock Candy Mountains.

Oh yeah, tell them.

Okay, So there's uh the song, the version of it you hear has one verse xcised from from what will typically play on auto you know, blue bluegrass kind of stations. Yes, the last verse is it turns out the entire song is a message from a hobo to a young runaway child, and the last verse is the child saying, I am not going to let you take what you call it, no hobo hobo heaven.

Yeah yeah, that's what the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But now now you're making it makes it sound like hobo's were like evil or something.

That's not true.

No, they were just they were just people, which is but this is this is the story of an evil hobo.

But yeah, so, but the idea is.

Really that the Big Rock Candy Mountain is sort of like the thing you have to look forward to in this you know, hard fought life is basically the afterlife, because that's about the best you're gonna get. But in the meantime, Before this happens, there were some pretty powerful symbols that were created to help communicate conditions in this community that was known as the Brotherhood of Yeah, the Brotherhood of the Frate right exactly, Yeah, exactly.

So you can google Big Rock, Candy Mountain full lyrics just by the way, we're not gonna recite them. But this, this message, the system of symbols existed for five hundred thousand people in the early nineteen hundreds and had spiked to seven hundred thousand by nineteen eleven. By the Great Depression, the number exploded and we reached we reached something called peak hobo.

That's the official term, that's the scientific term.

And while these people were on the rails, living on the fringes of a society that did not want them around, they devised a system that that we would not recognize to communicate with one another. And this this system, this system.

Was meant to.

Warn other travelers, other people in this brotherhood that you mentioned about the conditions of the town they would find, or about the things that would be beneficial, or to be a system of warnings, right, And it didn't use words.

Yeah, that's this is highly important because a lot of this population was either illiterate or they were speaking different languages, so there wasn't a whole lot of common from a language perspective. So it like, did you call it hoboglyphs already? No, but that is like hieroglyphics in a way, because it is. It's it's you've you've likened it before to the IKEA, Yeah.

The IKEA instruction manual.

Right, we've all bought disappppointing furniture, like we know what that is. You know there there are no words. Those say manuals are printed and distributed across the globe because everyone can get that that awkward humanoid figure in their awkward buddy.

Yeah you don't.

You don't need words for it, right, That's the whole point of.

This, and that is the one indisputable concrete remnant of this community, this thing called hobo code. Let's do you guys want to do some examples? Yeah, what hobo code?

Isle's So, let's say you're going into a new town and you're looking for food as you may want to do, as we all usually want to do, and there somebody has come along and found a good free food source from some building or some group of people that lives in an area. So you'll you'd note this to anyone else who comes after you by making a tea. Except it's not just any t it's like a box and then another box.

It looks similar to tetris the good pieces, you know, the law, Yeah.

Important ones, you know. But that's kind of cool. So if you if you note that somewhere in your town, perhaps this means there's a good source of free food there.

Well.

There was even like a variation of it where I believe it had a cross up on the side, which implied that if you talk religion or like kind of act like you're in to Jesus, that they will give you free food.

So that's another important little tip.

We have another one that would warn people about the state of like natural resources, like a water supply that may have been like tainted.

So that would be a squiggly line with.

Like another line on top and another line on the bottom, and that'll let them know to like avoid this well because it will make you intensely ill.

Right, good stuff to know.

Yeah, need food, need water. I'm going to give you some warnings just so you know.

And the people who lived in these communities would have no idea what these symbols were. I mean a capital T. You would just be like, wow, that guy's name must be Tim. Again, I hope no one here his name Tim.

And they also like, it's not like it was alarmingly large or like printed in some super central place. It would be in a place that these folks would maybe know where to look for them.

Yeah, and kind of temporary with like chalk or coal or something that was readily available.

And there was a darker side to this as well, because in many cases, perhaps a preponderance of cases, these symbols were meant to warn to warn other travelers of danger. There would be something that looks like a square, but it's turned on a corner, so it's sort of a diamond and it has one line going up, and that meant be out of this town by sundown, be ready to defend yourself. There's no way someone could guess that, right, I mean no.

And that's the thing too about this language and the way it evolves. It was experiential, so you know, these folks would have to have these experiences enough to the point where it would spread and they would know to look for these symbols because it wouldn't just happen overnight, because some of them you could kind of ikia and figure out, oh, I think this is what this means. But ones like this, we're a little bit more shrouded and kind of mystery.

And law enforcement plays a big role. Series of interlocking circles mean handcuffs or law enforcement will put you in a chain gang. I like the point that you bring up here, Nol, because although the term hobo code is very fun to say, try it at home, the reality of this is that this was a language built on tragedy and suffering and blood. And it sounds like a neat historical footnote. But here's the thing. These secret messages exist today. People are still alive.

Thousands and thousands.

Of people are riding the rails, are living on the fringes of society and using new iterations of this code to communicate.

So Atlanta's got a pretty decent train hopping community. If you've ever been to a little Five Points like that, you see the folks with like the dogs, with the bandanas and stuff. I mean, that's sort of that's like a modern hobo.

I'm not kidding.

And I grew up with kids like that that would hop trains and made a whole way of life around it, and they kind of carry on some of these traditions.

Yeah, So does this mean that the world of secret symbols and languages is relegated to people who are maybe burnouts or on the lamb or living on the fringes of society. Have we solved it?

Is it? Yes?

We have?

Okay, and that concludes the show. So really, guys, thank you coming, thank you, thank you.

It's disappointing.

Oh are we gonna keep going?

Yeah?

Yeah we should, We probably should. But it's true, it's not that simple. Secret symbols also exist in the world of art, right, yes, we we explored things in the past, like the toinbee tiles. What are those about?

There are these weird linonelym art pieces that get pushed into the ground in asphalt on streets in mostly Philadelphia and New York and other places like that, And it says toynbe Idea in movie two thousand and one resurrect dead on Jupiter.

Cool, right, really cool.

There's a couple other flavors of them, as well as as the teg But I mean that this is the main idea that toinby idea.

Yes, I mean it's we don't know, we don't know who makes them, it's it's in English, it's using in the alphabet. Well, does it mean that toy Bee felt like he was plagiarized by Stanley Kubrick in two thousand and one Space Odyssey?

Was there resurrecting of dead on Jupiter and Space?

Really really not in the inta theatrical release. But then there are other works of art like the Codex Seraphinais or the Yeah Yeah, they're purposely created to have some sort of inscrutable language, and they are known to be works of fiction. So does that mean then that the world of Secret Signs and Symbols is relegated to relatively cerebral works of art or the fringes of mainstream culture.

I'm gonna say no this time because I feel like that's probably a better answer.

Yeah, we can move on, we can move forward to the next thing that they're relegated to. Yeah.

Yeah, So the world of Secret Symbols actually goes much much, much, much much deeper. In fact, as we all came to Terminal West tonight, we may well have carried some of the world's most famous agglomerations of secret symbols with us in our pockets, in our wallets, and our purses, in our fanny packs. I hear those are making a comeback.

I'm a fan of the fanny pack.

I mean it's a utilitarian yet stylish accessory. And I have no problem with the fanny pack. You can wear it on the side, it on the back, wear it on the front.

What so, according to numerous critics, the most powerful secret symbols.

Anti fanny pack? Man, what's your problem? Because we already we already got you a present?

Are you gonna?

Are you serious?

It's a Gucci bag.

It's okay, I would wear, I would wear, but.

It will just please really really good. Yeah, please exercise. Oh my gosh, you got okay when we get the fanny pack. But uh, but it does go much deeper because these secret symbols, the people who argue are are the most powerful in our world today, are on something we and you and your fellow Americans carry with you every single moment theoretically, and it's a weird thing. It's a really dirty thing. About forty percent of it carries traces of fecal matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true, but as we are recording this right now, statistically speaking, people are literally murdering one another for a chance.

To touch it.

Just you wait, right, eighty percent of it carries traces of cocaine. These are both conservative estimates, by the way, despite the fact that possession of this drug carries very harsh consequences conspiracy realists, we are talking about by far, the most ubiquitous medium for hidden symbols in the Western world. It is the US dollar. Feel free to take one out after you heard the statistics about shit, and if you have it, check the designs as well.

Story it smells. You don't have to. Oh my god, dude, did you not hear the stats? Ready?

Ago?

Are you're not paying a.

Sixty doesn't contain?

Okay, well, I mean it's better than that I heard was like one hundred and twenty percent cocaine.

That checks out? You do, do you? But I'm gonna yeah.

So if you've if you've seen the back of one dollar bill, If you have, your odds are pretty good as far as not touching poop on balance, If you want to hold this with us, uh, if you've ever seen the back of this bill, one thing will immediately stick out. It's engraved with a gigantic stone pyramid, similar to what you would see in Egypt. There's a desert, the whole nine. That's weird.

Oh that's so regular and just a giant pyramid. It's fine, it's fine.

Yeah.

Pyramids are like a classic move architecturally speaking, right, dude, yes, but there's something different about this pyramid.

Right.

Instead of a normal capstone, there's a floating capstone suspended in mid air with this all seen eye just sort of staring out at you, kind of like the uh, the Eye of Souron and Lord of the Rings. Yeah, mystical shit. Yeah, I mean it's weird. It's not quite on brand with the US. It really does stare right right at you and like.

It follows you when you move around the room, which is weird considering how small it is.

Right right, and this symbol, this symbol has several names. One of the most popular names comes from Christian mythology. It's called the Eye of Providence. And usually when we are looking into early Christian mythology and folklore, we defer to Matt. So Matt, okay, not to put you on the spot, but to put you on the spot in front of a bunch of people. What's the eye of Providence?

Oh well, in this case, we're talking about the symbol of a triangle. Right, triangle has three angles to it, three sides. M What could that mean? It's probably the three aspects of God? Right, father son, you can say it with me? Holy Spirit?

Why does Holy Spirit get too? They said, people do that. It's goods. There's this.

One of the first known appearances of this comes in a painting called The Supper of Emmaeus, created by a guy named Caravaggio for the Carthusians in like.

Fifteen twenty five. But it's not super blatant.

Oh this is the one though, that contains that there's rays of light that we talked about. Oh yeah, yeah, I mentioned exactly that emanating from this this triangle, and this painting is what first featured that in Like, I think it's a reflection through a glass or something. It's pretty subtle, but it's meant to be like this divine light of Christ.

Somewhat cool, you might say, occluded. Yeah, So if you go even further back in history you will see that this wasn't always called the eye of Providence. It does have some sort of folkloric precedence. Let's say in Egypt.

Oh, yeah, you're talking about the eye of Horace.

I am a different god horse, a sky god, sky god that was represented by that eye. You've probably seen it before. It looks like it has some really killer eyeshadow going on.

Yeah, you've probably seen its, like a smoky eye. It is really nice smoke, sultry. Yeah.

I learned a lot from my wife about eyeshadow. It's important, it's important stuff. But this, this horse, this god horse is also sometimes often depicted as a falcon. Uh, you're alive, well, and you may you may notice on the other side of the bill that we're going to talk about a little later. Uh, there's a big old eagle hanging out.

Hm.

Hm.

You think he's got a name, like an official name in the parlance of this this symbolism and imagery.

What greg Gregory Gregory? Okay, Yeah, that checks out. Yeah, okay, so Gregory the Eagle, Gregory the Eagle. Let's fast forward to the United States. How did this weird symbol end up on the dollars that we're trading and apparently pooping on every day? It's weird. Sorry, it wasn't always there. The eye itself was not originally on the dollar. The pyramid and the Eye are both part of a much older thing called the Great Seal. Way back in seventeen seventy six, around July fourth Surprise, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and a few others were thinking to each other, how do we make these thirteen states look more like more legit?

Yeah?

Yeah, like how do we we want to make an impression?

You know what? We should we branding. We need branding.

We should get a stamp, you guys, like, let's stamp some stuff, you know. And so they came up with this Great Seal. It's approved on what June twentieth, seventeen eighty.

Two, correct.

And these symbols themselves are supposed to reflect the beliefs of the founding fathers, some pretty standard I would say, beliefs when you're creating a new country.

What are these beliefs?

Independence, enlightenment, Right, these are important things. But those two ideas have something in common with a lot of movements, or a big movement that was occurring around that same time.

Yeah, someone in the audience right now is like Freemasons, I know it. I know they were free. I see, Yeah, thanks for coming, Matt.

Do we have any freemasons?

Is it your grandpapa freemason?

Now there was some association with my family.

Is that all you can say?

That's all I'm gonna say.

We asked him this question every show. I'm cool though, I'm cool. Yeah, yeah, because is it like copper rules? Do you have to tell us that you're a mason if we ask them?

All? Right? Moving on, moving on.

So, the front of the seal, as you said, Matt, depicts a bald eagle holding an olive branch and one claw and and arrows in the other right, piece of war cool, I get it. Dichotomies. That's tight. But the but the reverse side, the back of the seal is what shows the pyramid and the eye. And the founding fathers said, oh, this represents strength and durability. And they're like, why is the cap still floating? That's weird And they're like, ah, it's because the pyramid's unfinished, because you guys, the nation's unfinished. And they were and Benjamin Franklin is probably like, oh, think about it, because he's totally that type.

You know what I mean. Yeah, he was kind of an actually kind of dude. He was, so actually that's like his thing.

So if you go to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, those are the people who make these coupons today. If you go to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, you'll find it's not on the official tour.

Are you taking this tour?

Yeah?

Is it? Is it cool? Yeah?

It's dope, man, Okay, I should go. Yeah, you should stally go take a date or something.

But what what question do I ask to get like the real line, not just the official party line.

Who do I talk to? And what do I say? Yeah?

Well, if you find one of the employees just sort of hanging out off the record, they're like, I don't know, subway or five guys.

Because they're underpaid and they're just willing to dish. So yeah, okay, so yeah, what do they say?

And then probably you're you're really good with strangers, they probably want to talk to and that's very kind.

That's true, it's true. What's what's the uficial?

Okay? So the unofficial stuff is pretty much the party line we discussed earlier. The pyramids meant in some way to symbolize the lasting power of the US, similar to the way the Pyramids of Old with the test of time time.

Yeah, and you.

Know, you know what I found out today.

If you go to the Federal Reserve in Atlanta and you take a tour, it's the National Monetary Museum. You actually will they'll give you a bag of money when you leave.

Shredd up.

Yeah, it shredded though.

That kind of sucks, but that's kind of interesting, right.

All right.

You can't like, you can't like tape it back together.

You you have to be very good.

It's probably really thin shreds. They probably have really solid industrial shredders there.

They would have to. Yeah.

Uh, let us know if you do tape back a dollar and tell us where to bring them. Just by the way. Uh So the actual dollar, the actual dollar, the one you saw, pyramid eagle, all the weird stuff. There's a hidden owl or spider in there as well. It didn't come about until nineteen thirty five. There's a guy named Henry Wallace, and he is the Secretary of Agriculture, which has nothing to do with anything under President Roosevelt. And he sees a pamphlet on the Great Seal, and we have a factually accurate historical reenactment of this. He walks up to the President and he's like, hey, Rosie boy, you know I saw this thing about the Great Seal. It's got the motto it's a novas Ordo seclorum now Order of the Ages. That's kind of like you think you.

Know, what was he like in the Mafia?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, this version. Yeah.

And he's like, it's like new Deal of the Ages. This is perfect.

Yeah, and then Roosevelt says, never call me Rosie boy ever again.

And then he punches in, but he's like, but cool, idea, I like this, let's go for him.

Yeah, and Wallace is like, you know, we should put that on a coin or something. That would be dope. People love that kind of thing, you know. And then Roosevelt they're collectible. They're collectible, you know, they're like the original POGs.

But no, no, Roosevelt says, I will do you one better, my good sir, And he says, we're going to put it on the most circulated piece of American currency that exists, which is the dollar.

Yes, in this case the one dollar silver certificate.

Right, which means that in nineteen thirty five, when this thing came out theoretically on paper and hopefully in practice, you could walk to some point and you could be like, here's the thing, give me this much silver, and they would be like, well, he's got the certificate or she's got the certificate. They would give you silver, which was a big deal. I guess yeah, you could.

You could kill a lot of werewolves if you had enough dollars.

Huge problem. There was a werewolf epidemic in this Yeah, it was hard time.

It's true. There's a documentary about that properly. But so so now the question is there are no more silver certificates, right, at least actionable silver certificates.

So what does this.

Dollar that we've been discussing stand for, like in the real world old what is its value based on?

It's a fiat currency.

I know everybody in this room knows this, but we're gonna talk about it because we really got to hit it home for the rest of this episode.

Okay, Yeah, currency is not an automobile.

No, No, it's not beautiful, cute little automobiles. You'll you'll often hear people talk about this, how the US dollar is a fiat currency, and that just means that the what this is worth. It's not backed up by any kind of metal or anything like that. It's just it has value because some authority figure in this case, a government, says that it has value. It's literally a faith rectangle. That's what this is.

It's an article of faith.

We all agreed, and I don't want to call anybody out, so I'll call all of us out. We all agreed to continue to do agree that this thing is worth a thing. We're like, everybody wants to be cool, everybody wants to fit in. Someone's like, hey, I have like twenty of these, and we're all like, oh, nice, good job. That's way better than a bed bath and beyond coupon, you know what I mean, has some really cool stuff. They do have some steals, they have some buys.

If you're like my friend Alex over there, you can gather up like one hundred two hundred thousand.

Of these and they will give you a house. Isn't that crazy?

But if you paid in singles, can you imagine paying for a house with dollars like in a big giant sack.

Yes, that would be a ball or move. I have to say they'd have to.

Take it, but they would probably be like, oh, so what drugs do you say?

They'd make a face.

Yeah, yeah, those dollars would probably be like ninety percent cocaine.

But it's imperative and crucial to remember that despite the symbols this bears US currency, itself is a symbol of something else, the power behind the paper, if you will. It's it's something that is a boogeyman in so many conspiracy theories ever since it's creation. It's something we call the US Federal Reserve.

And we're going to talk about the Federal Reserve. Right after a quick word from our.

Sponsor, we're live, okay, Oh oh yeah, jeez, I keep for okay, all right, it's.

Really hard to break these habits. You know.

We usually we usually do this show like in a in like a weird shipping container with no windows. I don't really even know what time of day it is, and we get an electric shock delivered to us by Paul to break. So we're kind of like Pavlovian dogs of podcasting.

Behaviorism, Like we're so trained when we're just hanging out, we take commercial.

Breaks, but we're back, but we're back. We're back. Okay. So here's how it started.

The US has an incredibly muddy history with the idea of central banks. That's what the Federal Reserve is. A central bank is just a financial institution that's supposed to make sure the coupons a country uses will retain the same value they had yesterday and have it in the present day and have something like that tomorrow.

You made a face, But that's that was the train. There's a train like right up there, and it occasionally goes squeeze.

Well, I was trying to focus on what Ben was saying, but yeah, the train freaked me out there.

A little bit. We'll go, we'll go look for hobo code later.

Okay.

Yes.

So so the FED, it turns out, is not not the first central bank.

In fact, it is the third. It's the third.

Try that our country has made of this, and the the first one dates all the way back to Alexander Hamilton.

Alexander Hamilton.

You know, I think I figured out why lind Manuel Miranda decided to write a musical about Alexander Hamilton, because just the cadence of saying that name is just perfect.

Alexander, It's beautiful, It's.

Just a perfect name for a musical.

Yeah done, And you know, we all recognize Alexander Hamilton from his recent renaissance in the world of musicals. It turns out as a real person, actually did some stuff. Was a It was the first Secretary of the Treasury, and was super was was super perplexed and worried. After the Revolutionary War, which on the other side of the pond they call the America War of Independence, somebody asked us that earlier, that's the actual It wasn't the peasants uprising, that's.

But it's still referred to that probably in some circles.

Oh sure, sure. And and so Hamilton believed that the US needed some sort of banking authority because otherwise he thought the country would be doomed. It turns out that wars are crazy expensive, you know. And he envisioned this bank as quote, a profit making institution, with private shareholders holding full fifths of its stock and dilecting full fifths of its directors.

It was just the ways all of our twist or something. Yeah, this and this version is okay, it's pretty much twist. I like you.

This is highly important, though, Let's not lose any of this. A profit making institution, first of all, and four fifths of its directors. It's stock and directors would be private shareholders. Four fifths. That's a lot of private interest in this giant profit making bank.

That that means, I mean, that is important, Matt. That means that only twenty percent of the steering wheel and they would have no idea what a steering wheel is. Let's just be clear. It means like twenty percent of the steering wheel belongs to the country affected by this concept. And so we would imagine that Hamilton and co. Had to come up with a really good pitch for this, right. They were like, we need a name, like a real banger name. It's it's the first It's the first central Bank of the US. It's the first bank, first Bank, first Bank.

How about the first bank?

Oh shit, great idea, right, drop it, Mike. It's so they were like, that's the best, that's the best. A burst of creativity.

Well, I mean it's descriptive, you know, I mean, I guess they were just trying to be mutilitarian with their naming conventions. And we'll see this carry on throughout the story. But there were people who opposed this idea. We had Thomas Jefferson, James Madison. They were super against it, but despite their outrage, it was passed. It was created. In seventeen ninety one, Congress granted the Bank of the United States, the First Bank, a twenty year charter and to try it.

Out, just to try it out, just give it a go. Just twenty. That's twenty. That's not a commitment, right, twenty.

So then the bank's charter comes up, right.

Yeah, in eighteen eleven, but this time James Madison is president. This guy knows how to hold a grudge. He says, no way, not happening. I'm in charge now. I don't know what a steering will is, but I'm probably at it. And we're not going to extend this bank. We are firing the bank. Critics were on his side. They said this was this was in furious to economic growth, it was holding the nation back. But there's something else. This is crazy that you won't find with a lot unless you dig into it a little bit. Remember how we talked earlier about four fifths of the First Bank being held by private interests. Of that, of that eighty percent, two thirds of the bank was owned by private British and British interest Like, I'm stuttering a little because.

It's weird, right, It's like that's crazy.

Like imagine it's like imagine you get divorced with from someone and you're like, you know, we've we've gotten divorced. Uh, we should get a credit card.

Yeah, joint bank account.

Here, here's the keys to my house and you can, you know, have like three fifths of my cat.

That sounds great, let's do it.

What a plan, right, And.

That's mind blowing to me. I had never known that ever before. And it makes sense because a lot of the money was was in British hands at this time, right, but still to allow it to occur seems atrocious.

Well that's just me.

Maybe, and discontinues for about a year. In eighteen twelve, something occurs with another very creative name.

Oh the War of eighteen twelve.

Yeah, it was a war, and they were like what do we call it? So in eighteen twelve, President Madison changes his mind and he says, I might not fully agree with this thing, but we need something, we need something.

Well, it was because things have been relatively chill and you know, there was peace time, and it was like, you know, we don't need this bank, We're fine without it. And then almost as though they were a pattern. War flares up again, it's like, ah shit, we got to figure out how to finance this. It's almost as that we need some kind of central bank.

Yeah, so we'll make another one right right exactly, And that's that's what they do. And they say, we can only imagine. They say, well, that was that was kind of dry the first run. That was of it's weird that war turns out to be expensive. You don't really get a price break.

Who knew.

And they're like, we need a better name, though, We need a name that will inspire creativity, ambition, entrepreneurship.

The second Bank, that's it. That's it.

So in a burst of creativity, they're like, let's call it the second Bank.

And you know what you're getting, you know, it's yeah, it's what it says.

The ten right this last to eighteen thirty two branch at President Andrew Jackson is in office and he's like, no, this is malarkey.

I'm done with it. We're out of this.

As a result, the US had no central bank from the mid eighteen thirties to nineteen thirteen, and during this time numerous terrible, terrible things occurred.

Yeah, there were just crashes all over the place. We don't even have to ramble them off. But it's like eighteen seventy three, eighteen eighty four, eighteen ninety three, nineteen oh one, nineteen oh three, and then this thing happens in nineteen oh seven, called the Panic of nineteen oh seven, which would lead to some serious, serious problems.

Yeah, it was.

It was sort of the feather on the financial camel's back and the government, uh, the people in the government looked around at each other, and they were like, umph, something must be done for umph. And as so often happens in American politics, everyone could agree there was a problem, no one could agree how to solve it, and they all hated each other.

That doesn't sound familiar at all.

Right, Right, So it was even a matter of calling one party corrupt or one group corrupt.

It wasn't.

It was a matter of which pocket you were in there. Well, you're in the pocket a special interest. Well you're in the pocket of those fat cats at Wall Street. Well I don't know which pocket you're in, but screw that pocket, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this also trickled down to, like, you know, the citizenship. I mean, people distrusted these fat cat bankers as you refer to them a lot, and it was just there was no support for this kind of situation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The years leading up to this, like we've we've seen political satire cartoons in the New Yorker and stuff. Back then they were insane, They were not subtle. There was again like this top hat, monocled cane, sword wielding banker guy coming out to Midwest America putting his hand wrist deep in a baby's mouth pulling out food, and people were like, what could be done?

Yeah, don't google those propaganda campaigns, Okay.

They just don't.

They're pretty racist. And there were also there were also crazy protests, public outcry, what are we going to do? You know what I mean? The nineteen thirties sees the rise of a very serious progressive movement, and it's often ignored in history books today. But even more importantly, the same captains of industry, the same political titans who in public hated and vilified one another, were meeting behind the scenes, away from the public eye, and just a little bit, just a little bit of a quieter pitch. They were going for something must be done up.

We should maybe like do it so that it lines our pockets and our political cronies pockets, and our banking bro buddy pockets. Because we're all in a pocket, right, everyone in a pocket we're.

Sticking with for the rest of this show.

So a guy named us, this is an important character in the story, guy named Senator Nelson Aldrich. In nineteen oh eight, he gathered a group of said banking bros and political cronies. Uh, and he called it the National Monetary Commission. And the idea was to study potential economic reforms, reforms to the financial system.

And there's nothing wrong with that, right, Sure, something must be done. Okay, let's take some action. Let's let's bring private and public interest together and figure out what needs to be done.

A noble pursuit, there we go.

Yeah, chin up right, And so for two years, the National Monetary Commission investigates this idea of central banks in another country? How do you replicate that? How do I don't want to be too divisive yet and say, I think they were like, how do you make money off this? As Noel was saying in November of nineteen ten. Two years later, Senator Nelson, we'll just call him by his first name for now and I'll come into play later. Nelson is in the midst of financial disaster. People are literally starving, and he says, you know what, I know, I'm a senator and it's my job to take care of the American public. But I'm going to take some me time, you know, like I'm gonna like, when's the last time you just travel for fun? I'm gonna take a field trip. And this wasn't widely reported in the papers of the time. The few reporters who did bother to ask were told that he was going on a duck hunt, not the Nintendo game that wasn't around. He was going. He was like, yeah, the country's burned. They're like the country's burning. And he's like, yeah, but you know, like mallards, they just get to me.

As long as he had that dog, I mean, that's fine, right, that dog was.

That dog was an asshole, man, that guy.

You can control it with the second player controlling, Yeah, how is you could control the ducks? The dog just shows up like Clippy and Microsoft. The dog's just a dick, don't the ducks with the second controller. Yes, we should do a show about this. We should do a Nintendo conspiracy.

We should play it too, But for now we're talking about an actual duck hunt, or you know, at least the notion of an actual ducks.

So where is he conducting this duck So.

You guys have heard of a place called Jeckyll Island? Have you guys heard of this place? Is any It would have been.

Where Georgia I went once you went, Well, I didn't hang out there. I can't get in and hang out.

What do you mean you just like we're doing like recon. You were just like checking it out, like peeking through the I was in the area, hedge maze like I was in the area. This is a different show. But Jackal Island, what's that? If you're not familiar with Jackal Island, it is still and certainly was even more so than and incredibly opulent get away for the super super super one percent of the one percent of the one percent rich to you know, go do their things and maybe have secret meetings and pretend duck hunts.

Well, woa WHOA Okay?

So, in their defense, by the way, Nelson takes five of his buddies, which we'll get to. In their defense, this was not an obviously fake cover story.

There is a duck hunting season.

It starts in November around this time, stops for a little bit, it resumes from December to January. So maybe they were maybe they were hunting ducks.

Maybe they were like in the end, it doesn't matter, right, right, So these his five buddies.

It turns out, surprise, surprise, I hope this is not a Shyamalan move for everybody. It turns out that they were very prominent in the world of private banking, and they were very active at the thing Noel mentioned earlier, the National Monetary Commission. And despite the fact that these fellows had enormous power here in the US and abroad, they were afraid to be seen hanging out with each other. So one by so, Nelson Aldrich hooks up this really sick customized railcar like it's it's got mahogany, it's got chrome, it's very it's flashy, and he decides the best way to hide it is to hook it up to a train in New Jersey, and one by one, these prominent titans and captains of industry sneak onto the train, not not using their names, and because.

I think they had they had to have at least like one servant.

I think they definitely pared down the staff, which was that was huge for them, right.

The whole thing.

They had to use only their first name because they wanted to maintain some level of anonymity. So who's in there, Yeah, so undercover of night, one at a time, these guys sneak into this railcar. We've got Frank Vanderlip of National City Bank, Henry Davison of Morgan Bank. We've got Paul Warburg of the kun Lobe Investment House. These are all names that stick around to this day and companies that have on through various name changes but are still basically doing the same thing. We've got Apat Andrews from earlier, who was then the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department. And we also have Arthur B. Shelton who was the Secretary of that National Monetary Commission that was kind of doing some of the legwork that led up to this meeting.

And they know they may have actually haunted Ducks, but on the way they by the time they were done, they had discussed and formulated a plan in secret to create another central bank. And they were like, ah, the two times that's a gimme. But Hey, lucky number three, right right, And we've got a question. Why was this meeting held in secret?

Well, the biggest thing is that they knew.

Can we've kind of just touched on it, but they knew that if word got out that they were trying to present this kind of idea from both a private and public side, the House of Representatives, the people that actually represented the public of the United States, would absolutely shut this thing down before it even became a thing, right, So they had to keep it as secret as possible. And then we're gonna find out a little later because it does happen spoiler alert. The way they got it past was a little.

Right right, Well, I mean it makes sense it was associated any anything associated with fat Wait, okay, I gotta stop, all right, So I've been using the phrase fat cat a lot tonight, and I want to apologize. I do have a fat cat at home, and I don't want to be disrespectful. His name is mister Jackpots. I will show you pictures on Instagram after the show if you wish.

So you should come up with a new word then, So you're kind of like not throwing your sweet boys under the bus.

Yeah, A big feline I don't know. We just reinvested your etch time, just like anti fat cat prejudice.

Right there we are. So it's true.

Though, Matt, like they knew that this would immediately be dead in the water, and that is why they held this meeting secret. But holding this meeting in secret in nineteen ten this results in a breeding ground for speculation, right rumor metastasizes, it becomes conspiracy theory because no one knows what's going on. But since we have decided to be here tonight, we won't be conspiracy theorists. Let's be conspiracy realists. And that means that we can't believe we're except a bunch of speculation without fact. So here's a fact for you. There's a fact we found. These guys did not admit that this meeting ever happened for years and years and years. It was not until the nineteen thirties in the depression where with like one or two of them said, uh.

Yeah, I mean this thing happened.

We didn't really hunt ducks. That was just we thought it sounded cool.

But yeah, and they call themselves the First Names Club, like we mentioned. So by the end of that time, on Jackie at Aldrich and all his guys had developed this plan for a Reserve Association of America, which would be a single central bank with branches across the country. And then on December twenty third of nineteen thirteen, Woodrow Wilson agreed, he signed the Federal Reserve into existence.

Yeah.

Yeah, and this was it's December twenty third. This tricky thing. A lot of a lot of legislators are at home with their families or back in their home state, and there's a tricky thing here. So they said, the federal reserve banks, the regional reserve banks like the one that's here, I would be owned not by individuals but by commercial banks. So this means that there's not like, you look responsible, but you can't go by a regional reserve bank. And I'm sorry that you had to learn it here, but neither can. I not feel bad. But the thing is these banks would be coordinated by a committee that's kind of sort of appointed by the president.

But yeah, they get a list, right, that's kind of the idea. Just slide a list across the table, be like just pick like seven, cool, all right, cool?

Yeah, So then it goes to who really owns this thing?

Who owns this gargatuan thing. The officials governing parts of the system can own interest, in particular commercial banks, but no one officially actually owns those shit riddle dollars that we all just robbed at the beginning of the show. In fact, the FED considers itself independent.

Oh yeah, this is this is important, and this it's mind blowing. Okay, And I'm trying really hard not to just be infuriated throughout this entire show. I have been during every show that we've done so far. In this Okay, The Federal Reserve says the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms. Now, when you hear this at face value, you could say, oh, this is very reassuring. This means that no matter who's in the White House, no matter how much I like him or her, no matter how long they are in the White House, no matter which Senator or House of Representatives person gets elected, my money is safe with the Federal Reserve.

That sounds lovely.

Yeah, I hate to ah you here, but that's also kind of terrifying, isn't it, Because what they're old.

You know.

Another way to look at it is they're saying, no matter who you vote for, no matter who's in charge, we're in charge of the money.

Yeah, like you know you can vote, that's cute. Yeah.

There was a quote from Alan Greenspan, who is the Chairman of the FED and you've heard of. He said something to the effect of there is no government body, there is no elected official that can do anything about any of the decisions we make. He just very brazenly said that out loud and like, yeah, So that's the vibe that we're working with with the FED here.

It's been to be reassuring. So officially, this system is a bulwark, right, That's what it provides. It stabilizes these faith rectangles. I love that phrase, thank you for me. That Matt made that one though, was great. And it stabilizes the dollar against the ups and downs of the uncarrying, chaotic, ridiculous, horrible place that we live in. And the thing is, it doesn't matter what you would believe. It was created without the consent of the American public. No one voted on it, no one can vote on it. It is also arguably one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. Pyramid lidless eye creepy Latin catchphrases, the whole nine.

Yeah and ah oh man, I'm just gonna I'm gonna bring it back to this. In the more than one hundred years following its creation, more and more people are asking is there more to this story? Is it just this organization that exists outside of the control of the voting people of the United States, or is it more sinister?

Here's where it gets crazy.

Yes, I love it when he does that. I love it.

Well, it's true. It's true. We're going into crazy territory now. So I hope you're comfortable, because maybe it'll be uncomfortable at the end of this. The most popular and most prevalent, most prominent conspiracy theory about the Federal Reserve is that rather than mitigating or preventing financial disaster, the Fed creates financial catastrophe to it manipulates the money supply for the benefit of member banks and most importantly, the shareholders or the owners of those member banks. So no one can own a regional reserve bank, but anyone can buy shares in a commercial bank. It's just a question of how many you own. And this argument, uh, this argument proposes that we the public are taught that financial disasters occur through two things, accident or incompetence subprime loans, right, right, And the argument is that the opposite is the case. And this is a really weird one to us because it unites people across a political divide.

Yeah, it really does. By the way, we've been on the road a lot. Has something been happening with the stock market. We haven't exactly been keeping up, but I just noticed all the lines were read when I looked at my phone earlier.

Everything's okay, We're all okay.

We still my mom sent me a text about it and said that my inheritance was dwindling away as we speaks. So yeah, I'm gonna have to make this podcast game.

With it. Yeah.

It's weird, though, because this is this is a conspiratorial belief that unites people on either side of the sort of circusy political dichotomy. And you will find people who consider themselves libertarians and the like, yeah, I read in the FED that's messed up. But then there are people on the far left who are like, you know, eat the rich, screw the FED, let's just get rid of it. And they're like, you know what, You're right once again. Everyone can agree that there is a problem, no one can agree how to solve it. Harm harrumph. The most famous stories or conspiratorial beliefs about the Federal Reserve come from a specific book.

Yes, it's called The Creature from Jekyl Island by this author named G. Edward Griffin.

Like a like a black lagoon kind of situation, or no, or the creature is the Fed I get it.

I got it in that meeting and it emerged, and then it got on that rail car and it headed back towards New York.

I'm just I'm making all that up.

But I can imagine listen to it.

I can imagine it.

So he considers the Federal Reserve more than just this simple tool to control Americans via debt.

We're not controlled by debt. We're fine.

Nobody has any student loans or mortgages here. We're good.

We're good.

Oh my my my girlfriend is here tonight.

Hey Brandy.

Can everybody say hey Brandy, Oh, hey Brandy. Hey uh and uh. We've had some tension because my my primary girlfriend is Sally May. It was accustomed to a certain leg Oh I'm gonna pay for that.

One's Sally may anymore.

It's something called Navviant just kind of came out of nowhere and all of a sudden, it's like it's not Sally anymore. Now, it's now it's Naviant. I guess I have no choice but to pay Navviant now. But you know, right, and the.

Ideal with Creature from Jackal Island is that this this practice has been expanded and franchised out to other countries, and that the Federal Reserve is using the practice of deceiving people through chickanery, which we looked up earlier.

It's a new word for us.

Yeah, is this people or state actors to fall into debt and then using that to using that debt to control the actions of those countries. But he's got a lot of critics, Griffin has a ton of critics.

Well, and wouldn't that kind of be the way that the British interests that you know, we're part of the original First Bank or whatever, could have potentially exercised that kind of control back over the colonies right by having that much of a steak in the First Bank.

Yeah, I mean it's possible.

The problem that we're running into here is that g Griffin took that train. Sorry, I got to make a tea. There's some delicious food here or there. I guess they stopped serving it.

Wait, what's the what's what's the beef though?

Oh yeah, the beef is Let me just recalibrate here. He took he took the pearl that's at the center of the oyster of that that nineteen ten secret meeting, and then he created a whole bunch of stuff around it that he kind of it's not necessarily pulling out of thin air, but he's creating a conspiracy from that real thing.

He's engaging in some what iffery.

Yeah, it's dangerous, it's dangerous. I'm gonna get off my soapbox. Let's keep going with the show.

Do you want to do you want a soapboxes?

No, No, it's fine.

Sure, it's just a dangerous s Matth's Soapbox is a segment that we will have.

Yeah, it just happens a lot these days where there is this one little grain of truth which is on the show. It's what we try and do we find that grain of truth. Right, that's the most interesting thing for me personally. And this guy did that. But then he just kept going down a rabbit hole, and he wrote this book that is fascinating, but a lot of it probably is in it's just not factual.

And the most one of the most salient questions that you get from this book if you read it, is the essential thing. The gi just boils down to this, could someone act purposefully and successfully manipulate something as gargantuan as the US economy and therefore, you know, the international economy. The answer to that is yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely to a scary degree, Like think a war and Buffett he could tweet today and sink a company, It's true.

Yeah, Or you got like Jeff Bezos or Carlos slim Halu or any of these other profoundly disgustingly rich human people that can, like you said, just by communicating their intent to do something, or you know, they're some kind of diversification that might happen. It can change the entire course of at least segments of the economy.

Yeah, And that's the question. Though The question then is does it mean that the FED could do the same thing. The FED is a group of people, and there are multiple avenues of oversight, and I'm not going to presume to know about your friends. But have you ever tried to order pizza with a group of a or more people? It gets really nasty, really quickly. And and that's just pizza. That's just like the argument over whether or not someone likes pepperoni or is gluten free. And this is this is talking about one of the most important financial instruments in the world. So it's it's kinda I don't know, it's it's kind of difficult to digest it. But but we found another we found another conspiracy theory. This is I would say this is like my second favorite.

Oh yeah, yeah, this is a this is a great one. We've done an episode that kind of touched on this before in the past. But again, it kind of goes back to where you were talking about nol the whether or not there's British control over their former colonies.

Still, yeah, the idea is that.

Okay, So in this one, the Federal Reserve is now a foreign banking institution is controlled by the British, and the British are still super pissed about the Revolutionary War. It's like they're main thing. They're like, we have a lot of problems, but damn it, it's time to go back, you know, and someone's like, hey, maybe we should fix unemployment. Hey, maybe we should look at immigration. And then like the Queen turns around in a swivel chair and it's like, no, let's be weird, putting me back my colonies right And in this, in this idea, it goes a step further and they'll say, oh no, no, no, no, no, no no no, Matt nol Ben Michigan control. This is not a matter of the queen. It's a matter of the true power behind the throne in the in the world of the United Kingdom. It is the Rothschild family. You knew they were gonna be here at some point.

It's yeah, there are a lot of just the the targets that are aimed at with a lot of these conspiracies. The Federal Reserve of the Rothschild's Britain. We're hitting them all tonight. It's a real just doing the hits.

Folks.

We had a Rothschild actually, or somebody said they were a Rothschild a few cities ago.

But who are the Rothschilds. Yeah, so it was a huge influential family. That is the very old family as well, founded by Mayor Armshell rothschild, and they amassed enormous amounts of wealth in multiple areas segments including finance of course, but also over the generations.

They've diversified in a very big way.

They're active in wine and technology, mining, the bond market, arms trade, just about anything you can think of, they've probably got their hands in it in one I mean, it's a huge family as well, and they're so diversified and spread out with the various members of the family it's almost tough to kind of trace the money and understand exactly how much the entire family is worth and how much influence they wield exactly.

And this is a huge deal.

My dad is in the audience tonight and he was an accountant at this private club for a while, and he can tell you the difference between old money and new money, and with old money, it's all of these it's just a tiered succession of inheriting fortunes and each one just then becomes another fortune. And then the fortune just spreads out to this point where you go, oh, yeah, I'll join that club for fifty thousand dollars, no problem.

And that kind of wealth is it's intense.

And then but this goes back to the same question. This presumes that this family, this large influential family, somehow cooperates and moves in unison like what happens today. You get together once a year and they're like, Oh, what's our what's our weird thing gonna be this time? You know, I doubt I don't know your relatives, but I have never been that cooperative with my own. Again, that pizza example comes from US.

It was like utter financial control of an entire country's monetary system on the table for you and your family. I mean, I figure it out, You might figure it out. I make some concessions.

We can maybe swing Tennessee. But but this is interesting because there's a paradox in this idea.

There's a bit of double thing.

Right. The same people who say, oh, the UK wants to control the US because they are still, again for some reason, cartoonishly pissed about the Revolutionary War, they will also say, but the United Kingdom doesn't really control itself. It's owned by this elite banking cabal, and they're the ones who are really who are really making the decisions, And that sort of invalidates the beginning of their idea. That means that this in this conspiracy, it's really an economic proxy war between like one family and then maybe a couple of families here in the US. It doesn't make sense, but the Rothschild family shows up in so many of these stories, so many pieces of this folklore tradition. We have a we have one that we found that we really enjoy and it doesn't take place on land. It does feature the rothchilds. It takes place at sea.

We barbershop quartet this one.

Yeah, the trio Conspiracy Etsy Conspiracy Atsy.

Mats. You have a beautiful singing voice. I was not prepared. I did not prepare them for that.

I just totally pulled that out and you guys really did a good job.

Thank you for hearing me.

On WHOA trout the b that's conspiracy with it s e a at the end of the way, And we're not talking about the conspiracy cruise, which is apparently a thing.

Really we've never been invited to participate on that, but we're talking about something else entirely. So there's this even more bonkers, in my opinion, conspiracy theory that the roth Child family in league with their banking crony and federal Reserve cheerleader JP Morgan was directly responsible for sinking a supposedly unsinkable ship. You may have seen a film about with the Heart of the Ocean and the hands on the Steamy Window and the New Drawings.

And you love that.

Well, I've really in this tour come to realize that I saw that movie like ten times when it came out in theaters, when I was like, you know, eleven or something, and I.

Was like, why did I Why did eleven year old me like that movie so much? And we've traced it back to the New drawing.

Yeah, it was the painting scene.

Some boy called called out, somebody in the audience called me out, and it's like, you know what, that's that's pretty much accurate.

Although it is a beautiful love story, although it doesn't make sense though, why didn't she make room for dude?

Okay? I said that like a million times. That's my main with She's just flary and you know, she's hogging the door. She lets Leonardo DiCaprio.

Go, and let's be honest, he's not a super big guy.

He could have fit on there.

And I feel like she was just looking for a convenient into a romance.

I'm gonna say it, she ghosted, she ghosted on.

Him or James Cameron was looking for a convenient plot device.

Oh that's my argument.

I mean, how well did doors flow?

What about that old couple though you remember?

No, no, it's been a while, okay, so hey know what ship or are we talking about?

Either this had the Titanic, the RMS Titanic, that's the full proper name. So if proved to be be true this thing, we're about to enter the realm of wild speculation. That's what this segment of the show is called. It's called the Realm of Wild Speculation aka.

Conspiracy at C.

So, if proved to be true, this would surely go down in history as like one of the most batshit, heavy handed or possibly genius assassinations in the history of the world.

So let's let's jump. Let's jump right in.

Let's do it.

Let's wade into these icy waters. Let's dive in.

Yeah, exactly, So JP Morgan inco finance the International Mercantile Marine Company, which was an Atlantic shipping company that kind of strong armed its way into dominance in this industry by you know, doing what these kind of companies do absorbing some smaller, weaker shipping companies from America and Britain. One of the IMCC subsidiaries was a company called the White Star Line, which owned the RMS Titanic. So Morgan himself was actually booked to be on this doomed Maiden voyage, but he canceled at the last minute, citing like tummy troubles or something.

And he wasn't feeling well. He was unwell.

Yes, it's really sad, but you know, fortunately or unfortunately at for them, there were plenty of captains of industry and your fat cats been on this ship. Because Matt, you did a good job of describing this in the kind of context of this particular idea, you could look at this thing as like a giant honey trap for the affluent. Let's get them all here, get them all in one place, and then we'll take him out.

Yeah, if we're gonna go along with this conspiracy theory, which is kind of ridiculous on the face of it, But if we go along with it, we're already there in the speculation part. But if we go along with it, this kind of could be a perfect trap because you're gonna have a lot of the people that you may want to target that don't hold the same beliefs about financial systems, you might get them on this ship. You actually have a pretty good chance of doing that, just because it was such a spectacle at the time, and the people that you're targeting are some of the most opulent and they want to do things like be on a Titanic. Okay, let's just put that out there. Yeah, it could be a good trap.

But okay, okay, So I'm sensing some sinister stuff here, nol. Who were they targeted? Were they targeting specific people?

Well, there are the three main ones that are mentioned in the stuff that I've read about this story. But like you said, Matt, I mean, it was an absolute playground of the rich and powerful. So I think if there is any truth to this at all, it would be include people outside of this set. But we have Benjamin Guggenheim, who made a fortune in mining and smelting operations, is it or Strauss, who was the co owner of Macy's and also a powerful politician and a business And then John Jacob Astor, the fourth of the Astor family, which is one of the most powerful and wealthy families of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was a builder, a real estate tycoon, an investor, you name it. So these are the three that are cited. One thing that they have in common in everything we read about this is that they were against the Federal Reserve. They did not want this to happen, and they had enough clout and street cred to possibly fur their weight around and maybe stand in the way of this happening.

Yeah, and then all Morgan had to do is just strategically place that iceberg, and.

It was all ahead, placed, right done, right ahead. We're good.

Now, So how does this all shake up? Well, it speculated wildly. Mind you that one of the things that.

These guys hadn't common, like you said, was opposition the Federal Reserve. I've also seen it as opposition to income tax, but those things are kind of conflated in this story. But the ship sank in April of nineteen twelve, and the FED was formed the very next year.

So this here's the thing.

That this proved to be financially disastrous for Morgan's company, the IMCC. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in nineteen fifteen. So why would JP Morgan ruin his own company by sinking this unsingable shit.

And how would he even do it?

Because the arguments that I've seen were like he had to have influenced the captain of the ship to like mess up. And you know, there's also stories about how there weren't enough lifeboats that this thing was doomed to begin with. There were issues with like the technology where the compartments like magnetically sealed, like trapping.

People, and all of this. I mean, it was a whole There's.

All kinds of things just about the Titanic seeking in general that are.

A little off.

But why would he actively do this and cause the ruin of his own company and something that he would cause him to lose a lot of money. Does this mean that he absolutely had nothing to do with it or was it maybe like the perfect alibi?

I think more likely the first one.

But it's fun to think about, and like you were saying, Matt, with these seeds of truth.

In these grains, this is one of those. Yeah, I think there's some.

It points to this idea of incredibly rich and powerful people going to any length that they need to to get their way, and this would, again, if proven to be true, would be a pretty elaborate Rube Goldberg esque example of that.

You're making the evidence fit your narrative. Can you do this kind of thing?

It's just so it's so weird because there were more than twenty two hundred people on the Titanic, and then if they're just killing, they're just seeking this.

Ship to kill three people. What is that the cost of doing business? Yes, it's called collateral damage, my man.

Okay, So the same way that a bank makes several billion dollars and they're like, we gotta find two hundred million dollars.

She because given what we know about these how these like shadowy banking bros. Are able to rake in the profits off of the backs of American taxpayers, Maybe the loss of a little shipping company might be worth the exchange of utter control and domin and lifelong profits that no one can ever vote you out of making.

So who knows? Sorrybe it is just the cost of doing business. Two questions? Got two questions? Okay, So.

Doesn't it sound a little overcomplicated, Like couldn't they just poison someone or have like a horse accident or something.

Well, it's like I said, I mean, these are the three that are named, but I mean that, you know, maybe they just wanted to like bump off, like all of these these fat cats.

It's not about the money, it's about sending a message.

That's probably true. I don't know.

Now, this is definitely most likely completely bunk.

But it's a lot of fun to talk about I.

Want to think about. Yeah, I agree.

And when when you were you were doing this research, you found some unanswered questions, like about these three guys' stances too, right, Yeah, I mean.

There was nothing like really out there that was them just like totally soapboxing about how they hated the Fed. There were just some things about like their business practices and their politics that were slightly anti Fed leaning. But it was a little unclear as to why these three guys in particular would have been the most problematic.

But they did actually die on the boat.

They did, in fact die on the boat. It's true. It's true.

Let's move on to the next one. Boys, let's do it. Is it you here? Yeah, I'm going to talk to you about this. Remember we mentioned that five sided building called the Pentagon. Well, guess what, here's a conspiracy theory that perhaps the Federal Reserve exists in some way as an extension of the United States military. Oh okay, all right, now this is a little wick a noodle, but let's get into it. There's some compelling evidence that in several cases, this country has fought wars specifically to preserve the ascendancy of the US dollar. A lot of times we refer to it as the petro dollar because it's tied to oil in a lot of ways. We've gone over that before in an episode, or check it out if you want to learn more about that. But in this case, we're talking about evidence that's been provided by a gentleman an author named John Perkins.

Yeah, yeah, right, you're talking about Confessions of an Economic hit Man. It's I would describe it as a book, you know, like it's it's he wrote it. It's there, but he makes some interesting observations. For years and years and years, Perkins worked in the quasi government quasi private sector as ostensibly an economists, but according to his recount of the events, his real job was to travel to developing countries and to broker huge loans for infrastructure repairs and to to beguile the people and lie to them essentially about about how effective or not effective This infrastructure would be in about how affordable or not affordable it would be. So just imagine you're in a place where the lights don't always work sometimes get the bad water right with the hobo code thing earlier, and then someone says, hey, not only can we give you clean water all the time, not only quin give you power all the time, but it will be a steal. It will be so great for your country. You will make so much money. And there's just like one small detail. We only accept payments in US dollars.

Yeah, and just by the way, yeah.

Right, like you might have your own currency. That's very endearing, good hustle, but we are a dollar business. And through the power of this economic influence, the argument goes, or his story goes, they brought other countries to heal and force them into deals with multinational US based conglomerates.

You know.

Yeah, And the whole point is that they're loaning you an ungodly amount of money you will never pay back. It sounds familiar, right, A lot of money that you'll never pay back, maybe thirty years maybe if you're lucky mortgage. Oh yeah, anyway, if your a giant company, you're getting you know, perhaps billions of dollars in these US dollars that you don't have, that you're supposed to pay back somehow, and ultimately you just end up doing the bidding of whatever this lender wants you to do, at least within this the realm of this conspiracy theory.

So it's actually not that implausible if you think about it. We don't have to agree with Perkins like forty thousand foot view, as they say in Corporate America. We don't have to agree with this big picture. The very disturbing thing about this is that several of the cases he recounts are true. They're absolutely true. Indonesia is a fantastic slash frightening example. Read the book, if you want, read the Wikipedia. I'm not gonna believe you about it. Just let us know what you think and think about how the actions of the FED and the actions of the US dollar affect countries abroad. The world is an increasingly smaller place. But speaking of fantastic segues, it turns out that we are headed toward the most wonderful time of the year.

Yeah, we only have a few days, right, Yes, it's twenty eighth right now.

Oh my gosh, what's your costume going to be?

I'm buzz My wife is going to be Jesse, and my three year old son is going.

To be Woody. Oh man, Yes, we're adorable.

That is the cutest. That's right for us.

The most wonderful time of the year is Halloween. So we wanted to save our last crazy notion, the craziest one we heard for the very end. And it's this. Okay, go with me here. Pretend we're all at the same bar and it's like two am right, Okay? So what if? What if? What if? What if the Federal Reserve, instead of a financial institution, is an occult institution?

Oh shit, people really believe this.

We didn't make this up.

The idea is that what if every single dollar spent to treat it from one party to another is actually a spell. I'm not gonna this poop on it, man, I'm not gonna.

I want to cast a spell.

So for some fringe researchers, this means that the Fed is way more Slytherin than systemic. It's been way more like Warlocky than White House, you know. And if the dollar is a spell cast by some strange cabal, then the following assumptions have to exist.

Well, it's like this idea of exchanging energy or somehow hoarding energy through the exchange of currency, which again has this imaginary value, and the one of the proponents of this theory talks about how it's all about like a dollar represents energy because when you are spending it, you are paying for a service or something that would require time to do or actual physical energy. So somehow this system they can harness this and kind of hoard it so where and use it for some purpose. But here here are the assumptions that what's the first one is that magic, at least this type of magic is real.

That's cool.

We've got that reproducible, reproducible, right, yeah, We've got this idea secret group of people not only exist but cooperates.

And we've talked about how hard cooperation can be. But to work this magic.

And to crewe this energy from billions of other people, and that some portion of this can actually be stored and used in some nefarious way.

You mean, like stored up in giant bank vaults in places where you could store all your energy, or maybe in the stock.

Market or in the Illuminatus trilogy, that kind of energy is stored in the Pentagon from traffic does.

Exactly what the different book, right.

And a work of fiction as far as we know. But it's it's a tall order. This is spooky stuff, right to people who believe that the FED is actively some kind of u evil Harry Potter thing voldemortine it's way through the international financial system. The symbols on the dollar represents something else, entirely, something that the Bureau of Engraving does not mention in this idea. That all seen eye on the floating capstone is not the eye of Providence.

Instead, it is the eye of Satan.

Sorry, I watched you. I'm so sorry.

It's yeah, it's the eye of Lucifer morning Star. And the light represents a different sort of illumination.

Yeah, exactly.

In this case, it's it's Lucifer's light, right, the illuminated one, just like that illumination global unlimited that which, by the way, thanks you for all for joining us tonight. There is there is kind of a little ritual we have to do as we exit for them. We'll we'll talk about it later. Yeah, but you'll notice, you'll it'll be fine.

Yeah, Okay, but.

This also this light result. This light is meant to symbolize in this idea, the light of the illuminated ones those who are aware of this mechanism. But the light has a double meaning to this idea, and it's the idea that you and us and your cousin that you probably should call check in on them after this show that we are ourselves transparent to this gaze and incapable of holding secrets. And then there's this whole other thing with the eagle right.

Well, well, first of all, before we get to the eagle, just that whole idea that we can't hide anything from this organization or the most powerful people. Can we just one more time we talked about all the time we're all walking around with a SERI in our pockets. We get home, there's a Google Home hanging out there, and Alexa just chilling going, what's that you said?

Oh, just keep talking, It's fine, just keep talking.

I'm listening. I'm listening. Or you know, we've got a cat that I've got covered up by the way Ben has covered up Nole, Is you just covered up?

Man?

I don't care. You're going.

They can have my precious data as long as I can play POKEMONO.

I'm just saying, we don't need we don't need this to be an all seeing eye and actuality.

We're already doing it to ourselves. Bros.

Okay, all right, are you good? Fine, Let's just do what it keeps. Keep going good, keep going, doing a commercial breaker. It's way power.

So the eagle, then, in this idea, this is a cult idea, is not the bald eagle. What do we call them, Gregory, It's not your pal greg Instead, it's an It's taken from ancient pagan symbolism. And people who believe this will say, well, well, you know, Nole, you know Matt that uh. That eagle was also used to signify the Roman Empire, and again it was used as a nikon for a certain German regime.

Do you in World War Two? This is Benjamin Franklin talking here.

This is this is a historically accurate Benjamin Franklin somehow aware of the nineteen forties.

I told you, guys, the Hits, the Nazis made an appearance.

They of course all the hits, and the Nazis were weird, just show up in.

Everything, dude.

The full society was a real thing, and there were some occult stuff going on there, a ridiculous thing.

But this this also leads to differing more esoteric mentions of numbers because a lot of people believe in numerology as well, So it doesn't matter what you care about just aesthetically, there's a there's a shit ton of groupings of thirteen on the dollar, like they went all in.

Are what are some examples?

Yeah, we've got the thirteen stars, thirteen stripes in the flag, thirteen arrows that Greg is clutching in his little little eagle talents. We got thirteen leaves and berries in the olive branch, letters in the phrase give it to me Ben as miss aniid queptis, thank you Ben. And then we have we have also thirteen layers in that creepy pyramid.

Yeah, what else do we have thirteen of? When we founded this country? Colonies, so totally makes sense. It's fine, it's just thirteen colonies, right, Yeah.

But we're really like going down this numerological rabbit hole. Maybe the founding Father's like it's got to be thirteen. Yeah, you gotta have thirteen because that's how we're gonna make the spell work.

Yeah, And so it was like, why are you freaking out? We got nine that's solid And they were like, no, man, we've got a thing we're gonna do later. But but to be absolutely clear, the off chance that someone is frightened about this, uh there.

None of this stuff has been proven.

None of this stuff has been proven in a way that people accept or at least when we say that, we mean that no one has come to us and said, ah, shit, you guys figured it out, you got me? Was it we had a good run? Was it thirteen? Where they're too many?

Thirteen?

We were worried about the thirteens, But my god, you guys.

So no one has proven this.

But it is true that the Federal Reserve was conceived and founded as the result of a genuine conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory. These people conspired to create this thing and then they covered it up effectively for years, and even today many of its operations are conducted in secret. So it's no wonder that the story here inevitably ends on some vital questions. Does the FED prevent disasters or does it create them?

You know?

And if it does create them, does it do so through honest mistakes, through incompetence or through design.

That's it.

I don't know.

I mean, Matt, dude, it's crazy. We can't do anything about this. Seriously, none of us sitting in this room could do anything about this.

Ha ha.

A fun show, you guys.

Sorry, I'm sorry. Really just frustrates me to all.

Hell.

Well, it is true, man, I mean, either way, there's some We don't need magic to be real to know that there are problematic things here. There is a disturbing truth at the heart of these conspiracies. There's a bit of historical fact hidden in that fiduciary fiction. And the next time you pull out a dollar, think about it. Ask yourself what it may or may not represent, and how it impacts the world in which we live. As a matter of fact, the next time you walk by a strange bit of odd graffiti scrawled and sharpie or chalk or spray paint along a busy street, ask yourself whether it's a work of art a hidden message. If so, who is it meant for? What does it say? Is it something they don't want you to know? Okay, all right, Matt, So that's mostly the show, right, Yeah, it.

Was pretty good. I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed that but being on it and listening to it.

Good job Ben, good job, good job, Dil, good job everybody. Also, we were probably doing a better job in that episode because Paul mission controlled DECANDT was at the show.

And that's the whole reason. He just gave all the vibes.

And it was the fifth iteration, the fifth time we had done it, so we had ironed it out a little bit.

Oh but there's one other thing. Yeah, we maybe we should have mentioned this at the top. We like to do sort of a Q and A thing at the end of a show, and we had a Q and A that took place not in Atlanta but earlier in Philadelphia. And we really enjoyed this QA. At least we enjoyed doing it at the time. I haven't listened back yet.

Oh it's great, Oh good, just so many good questions and passionate people. Probably it was my favorite QA as well. So we're going to listen to it now.

Hey, hey guys, Hey man.

Trevor.

Hey, how's it going. Oh, it's going well.

Going back to the beginning of the podcast, you guys were talking about the hobo symbols. Yes, so if stuff they don't want you to know how to hobo symbol, and you guys were going to post one on the outside of World Cafe Live after we leave here with that spray paint that didn't bring.

Oh what would it look like? I can tell you what it would be.

Yeah, we cannot officially tell you it would be the first. We cannot officially tell you that it would definitely be.

The first three alpha numeric letters from our phone number.

Why that's t D.

We cannot cannot officially tell you that would that that it would be something involving an eye in a triangle like and we cannot officially tell you that it would be something involving a triangle, all.

Right, or maybe maybe Trevor, maybe it would be.

Yeah, there you go, Here you go, that's the thing.

Okay, yeah, Redo, Redo, We cannot officially tell you it would be a six fingered tap.

Thanks for coming true, Thanks Trevor.

It was Hi. My name is Chris, Chris Listener. I was just wondering if, like with this.

Theme of like Federal Reserve, you know, like control, like if this like you ever thought about like student loans as a way of like controlling I think about every.

Dad, Yeah, dude, Yeah, student loans just like just like.

A medical condition, like where it's like a form of control. But right, here's how you do.

Yeah, I'm working on it, that is.

But because I've got I've got I've got one long term relationship in my life.

Uh it's my main girlfriend, Sally may still. Yeah, mine got sold. Mine's not even Sally anymore. I don't even know what it's called.

Oh yeah, but yeah, that's that's the one.

Yeah Na, Yeah, Well that's that's I mean, that's an important question, and it is. It's strange because it will occasionally get reported, but it's crippling the growth of future generations.

You know.

Have you ever had somebody who's older in your family, maybe a little stodgy, and they're like, well.

When I was, when I was twenty eight, I had you know, like I had my job at the paint store, and I sold my first house and made it a rental, and then I bought a car, and I just you know, pooped everywhere.

I don't know, pop a lot of poop.

But but it's it's true if your's but if it's interesting that you asked this tonight because I looked into it and for that situation in post world.

War two and the boom of the economy to exist. For someone making minimum wage to buy a house, have two point five kids, all that other census bullshit, the minimum wage would have to be slightly over forty five dollars an hour.

That's how imprations worked out, right now.

Yeah, I don't make that. Does anybody make that out here? They're not gonna say, oh, of course you do.

You do.

Yeah, that's what they bill me for. They don't pay me that exactly.

But yeah, that's actually that's that's something that we've been putting a lot of digging into and we're we're hoping to do an episode on that pretty soon. Thank you for asking this question. As far as the implications of it, I would say, yes, it is. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy people are conspiring to privatize education. Like at the same time that student loans boomed and I'll get off my soapbox in a second, I hope you don't regret asking this. But at the same time that student loans began booming as an increasingly privatized industry, there also occurred this change in the zeitgeist wherein you were told we were all told that the only way you can have a life worth living in this country is if you can sign yourself to college, if you can sign yourself to grad school, if you don't go to trade school, if you like we we were taught to look down on people for that reason. And that's yeah, and that's that's insidious.

And it's like it's.

Going to affect us, it's straight up. Edward berde.

Nice, I'm Lindsay. I'm here with Chris Lindsay.

I've been listening for a couple of years.

How do you guys stay optimistic? You dive into.

Some of the things they bor on ridiculous or esoteric.

But tonight you talked about a lot of things that affect us as citizens or just people.

So how do you keep the optimism.

With the show?

And you seem optimistic?

You have beer?

No, I don't know. It's hard. It's hard.

I mean I have a me and Matt have kids, and that makes it extra hard because it's all filtered through this notion of like what's it going to be like for my nine year old?

And I'm constantly living in fear and dread.

But you know, one day at a time, and I just I just I just have faith that my kid is smarter than me and it's gonna be like pluckier than me and just figure that ship out and just like navigate whatever.

Throws at her. And that's that's my optimism there.

So I honestly have to say that it requires cognitive dissonance to continue. I'm being completely honest to know the things that we all in this room know and continue on as though everything is okay. We just can't. We kind of have to not look at it. And I think that's the way it's been for a long time for a lot of humans.

Yeah, but it's literally our job to look at it.

But we in particular, Yes, but that is that not a head in the sand.

For me, it's video games, alcohol, and nicotine.

So yeah, I have about three feelings a year. Optimism is not one anybody else somebody else. Thank you so much for passing around.

Yes, thank you. This is fun. It's connecting us all.

Hey guys, hey man, I'm in the construction industry. So to the student loan thing, we're now seeing a dip in available labor really because.

Because of that idea.

But uh, going back to the beginning, there's a great documentary about the toy and beetles called Resurrect Deadline.

Starting everything from that. Yeah, it's a great film.

It's really good film.

Fan a ridiculous history.

Oh wait, show everybody, everybody?

Hello, thanks so much. Snow you know they didn't give us free t shirts? Can you believe that we had to buy our own because they print them on demand? Yes? Hello, hey switch?

Oh there it's a switch on the bottom.

Hello.

Hello, my name's Kelsey. I have a question in regards to our conversation earlier about the Federal Reserve, so the errors that it makes. Do you think there's any possibility that good algorithms could offer a level of accountability for what they do?

You you want to bring AI into this.

It's slippery slope, my friends, It's already there.

It's really it's that's a that's a wonderful question, because, regardless of how someone feels ethically about the concept of machine consciousness, which is not really where we're at now, a machine consciousness would be everybody thinking to some degree the way that we do. But what we have now when we say artificial intelligence, is we have things that are very good at solving specific problems. So like we can make the mind of something that could go through a maze or compare columns of data and answer questions in those parameters. We don't have anything that can do something like ask why, right.

Are you a data scientist?

Yeah right, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm a science, Technology and society major.

Okay, yes, yeah.

So, so to your question directly, the truth is that this sort of technology is inevitable, and in certain spheres it's much further along than some people might imagine. In the stock market, in the trading industry, a lot of a lot of very quick calculations are made, but they're not made for a greater good. They're made for a profit margin for a specific group or in some cases an individual.

Well, there has to be a philosophy behind how you use the algorithms to and that's sort of what the FED does.

In some ways.

It's like, what is the economic philosophy that we're chasing, and so how do we put these algorithms to work to that end?

But it's kind of like the trolley problem with autonomous vehicles.

Right.

So, there's a study that came out recently about autonomous self driving vehicles.

The big question is if.

They have to hit someone, How do they decide who to hit?

Right?

Is it a? Is it?

Do they do they hit like an average person walking on the street? Ye?

Or do they hit like right? Or do they hit they have a child?

Well, it's funny you mentioned that because I think I think who ever said that realized that there was a massive poll done.

Recently and our species agreed overwhelmingly hit the elderly. Yeah, which is really cool for us right now, But keep in mind, we're going to be old when that stuff's everywhere. So so that same question applies to the Federal Reserve. Who, like, who profits from a certain area of stability?

Right?

If if we can do if if we have an algorithm that tells us uh, uptick and interest here is very good for this specific part of the economy or this specific demographic they're in, but very bad for another demographic, then who who programs it to value you that question? Because again, we're a long way off from building an artificial mind that can ask why it's solving a problem. And so if that, if we have something steering the Federal Reserve before it can ask why it's doing something, then we are setting ourselves up for a very very interesting times, I believe is the euphemism.

I would say the pattern recognition of machine learning could definitely have some help there to try and predict when financial institutions may be weak or be ready to crash, or then you know how much to the interest rate go up or how little, And you actually have just a machine that's doing that and looking at the patterns and not actually making decisions, but giving you feedback. I think that's a really good thing.

Also, any AI algorithm run on the student loan problem would come to the same conclusions that we came to tonight.

I'm just saying that is true. Yeah, anybody else, anybody else? I see a hand over here?

Cool? Oh, I see one over here too.

We got we let's do where We've got one question here first and then you are next, sir, if you want to hang.

Out A big fan, thanks man. Didn't finish college, so no loans. But so I love everything conspiracy, everything from aliens, do they exist? What are they really doing on plumb Island? Blah blah, But this one is the real one. If I think you know, it affects us in our everyday life. And so I've dove pretty deep on this and there's all these theories about and I don't know if you guys came across this in your research, but there were three presidents who made a really really hard push to get off the federal reserve. Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and they all have something in common.

Like Executive Order eleven eleven sery I believe, yeah.

Right right, And we're actually our sitting president has made some pretty forward comments about getting off the reserves.

Forward comments that guys all class he has the decorum of.

A set, but it's just kind of yeah, it makes you scratch your head a little bit, and it makes you curious, you know, like maybe there would be a pattern forming. If three isn't enough of a pattern.

Get up to thirteen?

Well, yeah, thirteen?

Right, then I would say that some of that executive order stuff in the theories, depending on where you're reading it, it isn't really based on the stuff that it says it's based on. There has more to do with what was it. The whole silver standard thing is a little more murky than what a lot of these websites claim it to be. Yeah, specifically with Kennedy.

Well, also Kennedy had very few friends in the halls of power. It's kind of a situation where it's like, well, if he wasn't shot for one thing, here are the other other reasons, other multitudes of reasons that people decided it would be cool if he had a hole in his head, which I know is graphic, but that's what happened. That's what happens, harsh, That's what happens. But to your question, what's really interesting is Abraham Lincoln actually was, especially during the Civil War, very opposed to the interest rate that the nation was getting saddled with through banking.

And it's kind of weird when we read when.

It's kind of weird what parts of historical anecdotes are specified and what parts what characters are left blank or vague, because it's always like Lincoln was pissed that the US was going to be broke, Hamilton was pissed that the US owed money to whom. You know, those people aren't often named in specific or in particular. And I'm going to keep this thought you sent in my head if if, if something happens, and then I think we have a lot of dig in to do.

But obviously I don't.

I don't personally want just anyone in the world to get shot, although statistically many people did while we were recording this show.

Too Dark. Sorry, guys, there are a lot of the guns. They have to hang out with me all the time.

Here you go, I need another one of them.

Yeah, let's let's let's let's take one more question and then we'll one more question, one more question.

Are we doing?

Hey, Hey, Hey, what's up?

Man?

So first time? First time? So, Yes, this was pretty awesome. This was a birthday gift from my friend Aaron. It's my birthday, so let's give it.

Hey, what's your what's your name?

Mike on the counter?

Three? Can everybody say Happy birthday? Mike? Okay? One two?

My wife's birthday the same day.

Two and her name is Kim, So Kim.

On the counter.

Three, Happy birthday, Mike and Kim ok sir one two three, Happy birthday, Mike, came, Kim.

We didn't ask you how.

That's good.

Yeah, thank you very much, Mike.

That was recorded. By the way we recorded. That's going to come out.

It's being recorded by the girl that bought the tickets.

Somebody, all right, what's up? What's up? Birthday man.

So here's my question, and I have like seven hundred thousand questions after like being introduced to the world.

That are you guys?

But no, boy, all right here, it's going to be.

A softball or it's going to be a curveball.

So let's see, let's go.

We started about twin be tiles, we started.

About hobo code.

How difficult is it to articulate the difference between hobo code and Hota cobe.

A question? So thanks, guys, like.

You just wanted a birthday wish.

Seriously, the whole time you were talking, I thought it was Hoda Kobe.

Uh is there is it a burning question?

Oh?

It's John? What's up John? It's John without an age?

John without an age?

Thank you?

Okay, So about two days ago, three years ago, somebody won one point five billion.

Dollars, right yeah, personally.

Yeah, I wish it was me, But I think I could do more more good with more money than more power. Do you guys think that you could do more good with one point five billion in dollars? Or do you guys think you could do more good running a country, running a city because or more power.

Well, I'll just start off and then you guys build really fast. I think the money is the power in this instance. Because we've said this before, Ben has this phrase, what is one of the biggest superpowers, the actual real superpower you can have?

Oh yeah, money, money, like is one of the.

Real superpowers that exists because cut yeah, go.

Ahead, go ahead, can I yeah, it's all such a nice said.

All right, So I feel this is one of my three feelings though, it's that Batman is often built.

I'm mean, I get to I'll make it quick.

I know we have to pay and stuff, but uh, Batman is often built as this amazing superhero because he's the world's greatest detective and because he doesn't have superpowers, he has ingenuity that is utter. That's an utter line of horseshit. Because Bruce Wayne is a billionaire. He didn't build the suit himself. He didn't build the Batmobile. Instead, he paid someone to do it, which means that if you look at the way of functions, the use of money is just value over time. So he's functioning as a time traveler. He's doing things through the use of money that would have taken decades, decades and decades to do. So money may not equate one on one with power in all situations. However, money does equate to taking the hours of someone else's labor, which I'm not I'm not going in a socialist direction with this.

That's just the way. That's just the way it is.

If somebody is paid five dollars an hour or forty five dollars an hour, then that is just the price of an hour.

Do you know what I mean? A billionaire?

Yeah, things you guys say, I will say. You guys do say that money corrupts?

Yes, right, yes, So if you guys.

Were one point five billion dollars rich, would that not corrupt you?

Of course the lottery is terrible for people when they.

Will win the lottery. Ever like that just save your life.

I think it would corrupt me, to be honest, I don't know. You seem like a pretty cool dude. I try.

Here. Here's here's my reasoning behind this and why I wanted to reference that, because if you're the leader of a country, there are so many condos on you on what you can and can't do, because there's so many interests that you have to look out for. And that's everything that's economic, that's the people who live in your country. That's medical. I mean, it's just it's literally all the things right that you have to deal with. If you just independently get several billion dollars one point five billion dollars, you can use that however you want.

Really, you can trying to jump in.

Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna end on one thing, John, I think your question.

I think the more I think.

About it, I would I would go for I would go for power because if money is an idea, then a good idea can be money. So I would go I would go for a movement or an idea, not to start a cult.

I don't know what about you and NOL. You want the last word, I'll start a call. All right, let's start. Hey, guys, thank you so much.

And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.

We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events.… 
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