A podcast where politics, history, and culture are examined from perspectives you may not have considered before. Call it a parallax view.
Episodes
Friday Nov 25, 2022
Friday Nov 25, 2022
On this edition of Parallax Views, in the first segment Wall Street Window's Mike Swanson returns to the program to discuss the FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried crypto scam scandal as well as Elon Musk's buy out of Twitter. Among the topics covered in the course of our conversation:
- Sam Bankman-Friedman, Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried's apology letter and his claim that what happened with FTX was a bank run, and whether what happened was a case of an inside job fraud or not
- The high-risks involved in the crypto exchange; how these crypto exchanges aren't banks and are not regulated in a meaningful way; the damage that the FTX scandal has done to people
- Relating past events like the Enron and WorldCom scandals and the the stock market's Dot-Com Bubble of the 1990s to the present day
- The influential American venture capitalist firm Sequioa Capital and the FTX scandal; Sequioa Capital's failure in relation to the FTX scandal is symptomatic of a bigger problem; firms not wanting to miss out on the hot new "Thing" or fads
- Reports that Sam Bankman-Fried ran FTX as his own personal fiefdom
- The political Left, the political Right, and the economy
- The divide in the Libertarian movement over crypto currency
- Karl Marx, Peter Thiel, and the possibility that the capitalist system itself is producing too much capital in ways that drive down interest rates; the issue as being more than the Fed just making mistake (ie: a problem with how the 21st century capitalist system itself operates currently); new money influxes as slowing down the bear market
- The lowering of interest rates and the creation of bubbles
- Jacob Silverman and Ben McKenzie's upcoming book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud; elements of the libertarian world agreeing with leftist critiques of crypto currency arguing that it's just a bubble or scam
- Gold and silver, the stock market, Robin Hood, and "meme stocks"
- Younger people becoming wary of stock trading
- Elon Musk's buying of Twitter for $44 billion; Musk wasn't able to back out of the deal; Twitter losing money
- Meta, Facebook, the Metaverse, and Mark Zuckerberg losing money; the layoffs at Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon
- Casino capitalism, carny tricks, and social media misleading people on issues like crypto
- Social manias, the madness of crowds, financial bubbles, and not falling for hype
In the second segment of the program, Daniel Pinchbeck, author of a number of books on psychedelics including most recently (w/ Sophia Rokhlin) When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance, joins the show to discuss his recent WhoWhatWhy article "Why Psychedelic Capitalism Sucks". Among the topics we cover in this conversation:
- The rise of psychedelic corporations/psychedelic start-ups
- The demonization of psychedelics in the 1960s and the cultural thaw that's led to a psychedelic renaissance through groups like MAPS and the Beckley Foundation; the reconsideration of psychedelics by society today and contemporaries studies on psychedelics related to alleviating depression, etc.
- Festivals like Burning Man and how resource-rich elites and entrepreneurs became interested in psychedelics
- Predatory practices and the critique of patents in regards to psychedelics and psychedelic therapy
- Compass Pathways and patent laws
- Downsides of psychedelics and psychedelic use
- The ecological crisis, today's profound social inequality, and psychedelics as a way to inspire social and structural change
- The contemporary psychedelic movement's focus on medicalization that fits psychedelics
- Psychedelics, creativity, and pattern recognition
- Psychedelics, temporary bliss states, and a possible 1984/Brave New World scenario
- Pioneering psychedelic researchers Sasha and Ann Shulgin's approach to psychedelic research vs. the approach of psychedelic corporations
- Psychedelic use and messianic delusion
- The positives of psychedelics and psychedelic usage
- The question of consciousness
- The climate change crisis and transforming how we live our lives; the importance of storytelling
- Shifting away from industrial agriculture
- And much, much more!
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