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- [00:01]
Host/Announcer
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- [00:58]
Matthew Schmitz
Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and corruption in Trump's D.C. i'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So there's a movie, the Odyssey. Did you all manage to see it?
- [01:24]
Ashley Frawley
I did. I didn't get the same experience as I'm sure you did, but I have seen it.
- [01:29]
Matthew Schmitz
Yeah. I watched it on a screen that is 10 times larger than the footprint of my apartment. So I think that's how you're supposed to watch it. That's what I did.
- [01:43]
Ashley Frawley
You mean not on a bootleg on your phone? Huh? I would,
- [01:49]
Matthew Schmitz
Yeah. I leave that to you, Ashley. I have to say I was not taken with the film, but I need to follow up that with a confession. I have never been a Nolan head. I may have my millennial mail card taken away, but have never been a big fan. One of my problems with the film just has to do with the way that Nolan shoots and presents action. And I thought there was too much kind of close up, shaky cam, dark blur and not enough kind of clear depiction of bodies in space, which is how I think it ought to be done. But I guess De Gustavus and obviously the controversies swirled much more broadly about diversity in casting all these things. My own feeling was that Nolan could have made the wokest movie he wanted if it had. As far as I was concerned, if it delivered on the hand of basic action movie epic film things like the chariot race scene in Ben Hur or great fight scenes. If you had that, you could otherwise call for whatever fully automated luxury communism with DEI characteristics and it wouldn't really matter. But I think, I think I'm probably, I'm in a very small minority and faulting Nolan on this appointed. Most people probably think it was brilliantly realized precisely on the places where I'm attacking it.
- [03:35]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah. I mean it's difficult to tell a story like that in a coherent narrative. And it was Quite impressive the way that he actually did manage to, you know, include all of these, you know, touchstone kind of cultural reference points of the story and still have a story that cohered very well, which is, it must have been extraordinarily difficult. It was really amazing to watch it because I have to say I've never read the source material. Maybe that's a bit embarrassing to admit, or maybe, maybe it's common not to have read the Odyssey, but being married to a Greek for 20 years, I knew all these stories because it's so much a part, not just of western culture, but still a part of Greek culture, that every time that I would have a conversation over the years, a conversation with my husband, like talking about like the loyalty of dogs, he'd be like, oh, yes, Odysseus. When he, when he came home, the only one that recognized him was his dog on a garbage heap. You know, so. And I at that moment in the movie was like, aha, there's that moment, you know, so. But it's, it's interesting because it is still so much part of Greek culture. And the big controversy in Greece at the moment and the big complaint is that, that there weren't any Greek actors. And I was, you know, talking about this with Greeks as I live in the middle of nowhere, literally on an island in the middle of nowhere and a movie, the closest movie theater is like four hours away. So I had to actually explain to most people that there is this movie and that they didn't cast any Greek. So I'm, I'm explaining this to my mother in law who doesn't speak English. And I'm like, yeah, they made this film. The Odyssey is this big epic and there are no Greeks in it. And she was like, oh, but we have so many good Greek actors. And I was like, yeah, you know, but they cast from all the different categories of people. You know, you had these kinds of people and these kinds of people. And my brother in law was like, and gay people. And I was like, yeah, probably. And my mother in law goes, but we have gay Greeks.
- [05:35]
Host/Announcer
Why not?
- [05:35]
Ashley Frawley
They could have had gay Greeks and it would have been wonderful. So, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I mean, it's an American movie, so obviously you have to kind of let them do tell an American story. It's weird to hear like people who are supposed to be Greek yell, let's go. But I, I thought it was, you know, it's, it's fine, it's. Every culture does this, right? When you Take a story from somewhere else, you, you give it the twist of your own culture because that's who you're talking to. So I wasn't horribly offended by it. However, one thing I've noticed in all of this controversy about it is that there was a Greek. There was a Greek who had one singular uncredited line, something about like, something like that, like People of the sea. I don't know, but it sounded to me like in my terrible Greek that my daughters make fun of me for. I thought it sounded like a. Probably a native speaker. Almost certainly a native speaker. So there was one singular Greek who says one Greek line which inexplicably has to be translated for the other ostensible Greeks who are there, which made no sense. But it was a nice little touch, I suppose.
- [06:46]
Jeff Schulenberger
There's one Greek who only speaks English and then one Greek who is bilingual in Greek and English, mysteriously in that scene.
- [06:57]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, so it was a bit, a bit ridiculous. But otherwise, you know, I, I was, I, you know, I'm not, I always say that I don't read a lot of fiction and I, unfortunately, I'm not a big film buff. So, you know, all these really wonderful deep readings that we've had in compact. For instance, like this is Oppenheimer. No, I was just like, oh, so here I am imagining this story I've heard a million times. Or all of these stories that I've heard a million times put on the screen. It looks pretty good. So tell me your deeper reading of it though, Matthew and Jeff.
- [07:29]
Jeff Schulenberger
So I will say I was also never much of a Nolan head. I really disliked some of his biggest films. Inception in particular, which I thought had this kind of dorm room, stoner pseudo profundity and just was, was ultimately a kind of nonsensical film. One thing that, so conversely, I, I did like Oppenheimer and I liked the Odyssey quite a lot. One place where I, I would say he actually excelled was in using, you know, a lot of his films have this kind of time twisting, sort of mind bending quality of, you know, stories within stories and these kind of layered embedded narratives. And in, in Inception and Tenet, I thought most of that was just kind of silly and, and didn't really add up to anything, but I think he actually was able to put that sort of narrative and you know, sort of, in a way, sort of modernistic narrative ambition to work in a, in an interesting way. Because the, the actual text of the Odyssey is a series of stories within stories within stories. It's a story about characters wandering around the Mediterranean, telling stories to each other and trying to understand what's happening to other characters in other places and these kind of second and third hand reports. And so it's really a useful, I'd say, application of the skill set that he cultivated, again, I think in sort of pretentious and overblown ways in other contexts. But I think it actually kind of worked for this because it's quite hard to, you know, the Odyssey is not a. It's not a linear narrative. I mean, it begins in medias, Reis famously. And then again, part of the beauty of the text, which I reread last year, is precisely the way that the narratives are embedded in each other and that it's a, it's a narrative about narrative in, you know, a kind of proto modernistic way. And so that, that I think is. And, and obviously it's, it's known to be about the interface between oral and written culture. That is, it is itself a sort of, a sort of document of historically. And so that, that is really, I think actually quite well done in this. In my reading, you know, I had certain quibbles with how certain scenes were dealt with. I did think the like random character who mysteriously speaks Greek and then his Greek has to be translated for the other Greeks into English was just an example of how there, there are certain moments that don't really add up and don't seem particularly well thought out. But I think the overall concept of it, and I do think John Byron Cooner's review of the Odyssey for compact that came out last week was quite incisive in identifying what's going on in this film, particularly in relation to Nolan's last big blockbuster, Oppenheimer, and that he makes, that he makes Odysseus into an Oppenheimer figure. I think Kuhner is completely right about that. Now one thing that people have criticized about the film is that it represents Odysseus. And Kuhner brings this up as a sort of guilt ridden figure. Somebody who's, you know, he's obviously a man, you know, he's a man of twists and turns, Polytropos. This is his main character. He's a sort of, he's a trickster figure. He engages in, you know, which is a standard figure in mythology and obviously from a sort of ancient mythological framework, is not a figure who fits into modern conceptions of sort of good and evil. He's sort of somewhere in between. And so he doesn't quite, you know, by imposing this kind of moral conscience on Odysseus we could argue that Nolan sort of betrays the spirit of the original, which. Which simply doesn't have this kind of moral sensibility that we would impose on it. You know, and whatever. There's. There's a lot that we could go into here in terms of sort of Nietzsche and, you know, the genealogy of morality and so on. But without going into that, I think we can say, yes, sure, this is anachronistic. On the other hand, I suppose the question is to what extent can you make particularly a popular blockbuster that actually tries to convey something of this more pagan moral sensibility? And probably the most successful case of that, I would argue would be Robert Eggers the Northman, which is set in the pre Christian Scandinavian world and I think does capture some of the sheer kind of remorseless brutality of this. This pre Christian society. And so I think that's, you know, that that's an interesting problem. You know, the Histor, the. Before the film came out, there was all this discourse about how it was going to be horribly woke. I think on some level it's actually. Its moral sensibility is just a very kind of standard modern one, you know, sort of post Christian, sort of generic Christian morals for which the kind of things that Odysseus does are obviously going to be unacceptable. And so then the question is how you can convey that, how you can turn it into not. Not just a film that has a certain strange resonance, like, and sort of the power of illustrating a sort of alien culture in the way that the Northman quite. Well, I don't think that's what Nolan is going for. So you can sort of say it would be nice to have an Odyssey film that did that. But that's not Nolan's project. I think what Nolan is doing in some ways, like with Oppenheimer is trying to represent. And this is the way I would say the film does seem to try to relate to our current historical moment and sort of global situation, which is to say, well, we are in some sort of transitional moment where a particular order that has governed relations between human beings seems to be breaking down. And the question is how we move into a new era and try to rebuild society on some different terms. And so, you know, people have pointed out there's this kind of a somewhat silly dialogue where I believe Odysseus or it's Telemachus. I can't remember whether it's Telemachus or Odysseus talking to Penelope and sort of saying, you know, our Age of Bronze is coming to an end. So you Sort of love this idea that people at the end of the Bronze Age are like, well, I guess the Bronze Age is done. So, you know, that's kind of hilarious. But what's interesting about this is there's all this stuff about the people from the sea who seem to be some kind of barbarian marauders who don't obey the basic, you know, premises of. Of social relations. This kind of gift economy that should create a certain possibility of coexistence between different peoples because they all obey the same law of Zeus. And that means that they have to show a certain amount of respect and hospitality to each other. And of course, that's at the center of the tensions in the film. But Nolan sort of takes this, you know, that has to do with the suitors as these violators of the sort of law of Zeus by abusing the spirit of hospitality. So. But the point is, I think Nolan tries to take this further and make this a film about the breakdown of the global order. And then he sort of argues that Odysseus, or the thesis of the film is that, you know, essentially the Trojan horse, which is a gift, you know, it's. It's a. It's a gift that is given as a kind of, apparently as a peace offering, but then actually is used to enable the sack of Troy and absolute destruction of. Of this society. And so the, the, the argument or the idea here is that Odysseus is somehow, you know, this is why he's the Oppenheimer. He's planted an atomic bomb in the middle of this culture, this society that is governed by relations of gift exchange, by turning the gift into a weapon. Now, this is an interesting sort of anthropological idea. If people know German, the word gift means poison. There's a great deal of literature about the ways that the gift economy, that the structures of gift exchange can break down and flip over into their opposite. And the, the etymology of gift as poison seems to have something to do with that historically. So, you know, Nolan is not, he's not working with nothing here. There is something really interesting about the problems of a. Of a social order governed by gift exchange and the ways that gift exchange can collapse into conflict. And so I think there is something quite interesting in this idea of the Trojan horse, which I don't think is in the original at all. I think it's really Nolan's imposition that's clearly influenced by his thinking about Oppenheimer and the A bomb. But he's saying the Trojan horse is this bomb that explodes the relations of gift exchange and thereby undermines the basis of the society. And then what is realized is that the sea people, the people of the sea who are supposed to be these barbarians who don't obey the law of Zeus are in fact the Greeks. The Greeks have become, you know, the civilization has become barbarism. It has begotten its own. Its own form of barbarism. And so it's. It's begun to collapse. And so, you know, I think this is an. I would say it's an interesting concept. It's clearly entirely imposed on the text and to that extent quite artificial. But I, I think it's at least an interesting interpretation or attempt to, you know, make the story relevant to what's. What's broadly being perceived as a moment in which the order that is governed, particularly international relations and relations between peoples, is perceived to be breaking down. And so then the question is, what we do about that? I don't think, you know, the sort of answer at the end is you just kind of hunker down and, you know, the Bronze Age is ending, apparently, you know, that the result is just going to be a descent into barbarism, but then eventually, you know, these stories will be remembered and retold. The other kind of weird thing about it was. Spoiler at the ending before I finish is that it ends with this, which is another part that I thought was a bit silly, with Odysseus and Penelope riding off into the sunset, essentially. I mean, literally sailing off into the sunset. And there's kind of this odd utopian notion of them just kind of going and forming their own society of two and just, you know, withdrawing from this collapsing Bronze Age society, which I, I don't think is. I mean, it's, it's clearly not in the original, where the, the problem, you know, the slaughter of the suitors creates the possibility of reciprocal revenge, and this has to be resolved by Athena's intervention, you know, so in other words, the, the order is finally restored in the end, even as it seems to be upset in this case. It's like, well, the whole thing is going to collapse. So Odysseus and Penelope can just be lovebirds and ride off into the sunset and avoid having to deal with the fallout of that, which I don't particularly like as an ending, but it's at least a dramatic choice as to how to wrap things up.
- [20:03]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah. And the other kind of addition of writing the present onto this historical epic, which is inevitable in just what you do and how you tell stories and in a way is why these Stories last. But the thing that kind of irked me, as it would because I, I noticed therapy culture everywhere, is the way that there was this kind of, like, I think Matt Damon said in an interview, something like, oh, this was the strongest depiction of PTSD I've ever seen, or something like that. And just annoys me so much because one of the big kind of theories about the way that ancient Greek kind of epics work or these poems work is that they don't really have the same kind of interiority that we have now. Like, it's that this was like a historical development and historical kind of achievement actually when they had kind of. Obviously they had deep kinds of problems and fights with themselves and, and so on. But the way that it was dealt with, it's projected onto the gods. So it's almost like something outside that acts upon the person. Like, why do I feel fear? Why do I feel hope? These sorts of things. It's because of the gods, you know, and so this kind of like, intense interior existence is like, so foreign to that entire epoch. But I, I hate how it's like, oh, well, all humans must always have had ptsd. And it just like, project that all the way back into the past. I hate how that kind of erases one of the, you know, the extraordinary and interesting things of when you look at this literature. It's that how different it was to be a human and to feel yourself moving about in this world and how we just imagine it must always be the same. We must always have been quite vulnerable and damaged by our experiences and so on, instead of a culturally specific and historically specific way of making sense of human emotion and struggles and so on, which was not in this, like, internal struggle of psychology or whatever. So that, I mean, obviously it's a film, you're not going to do that. But it just bothered me that that's the kind of message that comes across when, you know, that's a really key point that often people make in my kind of world of literature and therapy culture is that actually this, these, these, these psychological kinds of ways of making sense of the self and the problem and problems really didn't come into literature until like, you know, the last, I'm not Quite sure, maybe 500, 600 years or something like that. And, and, and instead it's just like, oh, this is just the way humans are forever, you know. So that bothered me a little bit.
- [22:42]
Matthew Schmitz
One thing you see right now is the kind of Wright claiming the Odyssey as a conservative movie. This comes in the wake of lots of warnings that it was woke. I think it would strain credulity if you told a conservative around the time of the handing down of the Obergefell decision that conservatives would be embracing a movie with a transgender actor in a prominent role as conservative. But I think just the commercial success of this is so overwhelming that there's American conservatism is pretty populist in orientation. And at some level, conservative pundits believe the people can't be wrong. So I'm not surprised that the box office returns have changed the the mood among conservatives. Maybe the funniest thing is Bronze Age Pervert, the online right figure, indicating that he doesn't hate the movie. Because my read of Nolan's casting decisions is that they were intended not least to ensure that this movie couldn't be raised as some kind of banner for a radical right. You know, there have been such widespread concerns among academics working in the classics about how a far right can adopt the classics as some kind of badge of white identity or some kind of banner of a perverse and aggressive political program. So I think that's one of the clear purposes of Nolan's casting decisions, sort of just to indicate, okay, this is not a far right take on the classics, and we're creating something that can't really be adopted by the far right. We need to make it unpalatable to them in a certain way. And that's not entirely working.
- [24:52]
Host/Announcer
This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. The agents wrote the copy and managed the timelines, while our human creative director made sure it all made sense.
- [25:03]
Ashley Frawley
Easy.
- [25:03]
Host/Announcer
Create your own AI agent. Today on Monday.com in other news, Andy
- [25:09]
Matthew Schmitz
Burnham is the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I understand it's somehow significant that he's from the North. He plans to devolve governments. Actually, I'm not really sure why any of these things matter. They don't seem to really speak to the fundamental challenges the country is facing, but there's a certain excitement around this figure. Is that right, Ashley?
- [25:36]
Ashley Frawley
I mean, yeah, when you've got all these problems and you can't govern, everyone thinks you can just wipe the slate clean. It's like if you're in a bad relationship, sometimes before people mature, they're like, let's just start over. And then everything goes to hell again because the problems are deeper than, than you realize. So my take, my read of this is that the Labour Party has a problem, a major problem with a lack of popularity. They came into power trying to say, as little as possible, and just let the Conservatives dig as deep a hole as possible for themselves and come into power just by default, essentially. Then once they actually come in, it's very, very difficult to get anything done, because what did they promise? Things that people didn't necessarily want. And also they brought in things that weren't, that were not promised, that were not in the manifesto that probably would have been controversial, but they avoided because they didn't want to kick up any controversy. So they became more and more and more unpopular. And they seemed to think that just by kicking out the leader, the symbol of that previous administration, and form a new government, then everything will be fine. And they're not dealing with the deeper problems within the Labour Party. It's a cliche that's going around. It's like, labor doesn't have a leadership problem. They have a Labor problem. There's a problem in the party. So Burnham gave his first speech as Prime Minister on Monday and made it as vague as possible, promised big economic reforms that will be figured out and released down the road. And the big. His first order as prime minister is to end rough sleeping. And that just seems to me that these are not people who have big ideas. They don't have a sense of how the world works, how to govern things. It's kind of. They had all these meetings, they sat down, they're like, well, what would. What will make the people kind of like us for a while? I know, let's end rough sleeping. You know, it's like the most. How are you going to argue with that? Oh, we should have more people on the streets, this sort of thing. It's not, it's not deeper thinking about the problems that face us, but it is something that you can kind of say, here we go. I've got a policy problem, I'm going to solve it. And to be fair, he said we should have a politics that is about trying to solve problems. So that's his first order of business. But I predict down the road that. But also the one thing that annoyed me with that being that headline kind of policy for his first days in office is that it speaks to this deeply, deeply ingrained idea that the left is caring and kind, and you have to bring in this caring and kind politics. And he says that with politics, that we should be about caring for people, and that essentially the government becomes a kind of charity and that that's, that's how it. It should. Its power should be wielded. And the, the right is kind of mean and harsh. And this sort of thing. And that's the real divide in politics, which I think speaks to our incredible disorientation in politics generally. That isn't going to be solved by cycling endlessly through all these different leaders. And I mean, I'm not sure that it can be solved within the current parameters of society, because we have the end of history and so on. The problems just get bigger and bigger, but the thinking can't get bigger. And you can see this. You know, I've talked about this before with any attempt to kind of have an enormous overhaul, like Liz Truss and so on. Having to trying to have these big ideas, however misguided, were just viewed with horror and are, you know, you immediately get disciplined by the markets, disciplined by the electorate. So I do kind of understand that governments are stuck between a rock and a hard place here. But nonetheless, it's. My prediction is more of the same. Eventually they were like, okay, we're unpopular because of our leader. Let's pick the guy who's the most popular. Like, Andy Burnham is known as, like a very popular mayor. He's a nice guy, he's good at talking to people. And Trump will probably like him because he's handsome. You know, that's, that's what people are saying he likes. He likes handsome guys. So, you know, pick a likable guy that'll look good on the world stage and just hope to God we can make it through the next two years and we can do it all over again and wipe the slate clean again. But eventually, you know, the problems get bigger and bigger. Military, you know, the talk of the enormous amounts of military spending that are necessary and, you know, these, you know, global political challenges, but failing economies, all of this, it requires somebody who doesn't, when he's, when there are problems, doesn't just kind of sit in a room writing on the back of an envelope. You know, it requires somebody who knows how, who understands the world, or a party that understands the world that has some kind of guiding ethos, some kind of guiding economic something. Even if it's wrong, this is what's necessary now, and this is what cannot come within our current kind of political climate. And so we'll just see the same thing again. It's a bit like carnival. You know, you all kind of gather together and turn the world upside down for a few days, and it cleanses the order so that things can go on anew for a little while longer. So it's a sort of carnival of Andy Burnham at the moment, most of
- [30:55]
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- [31:24]
Matthew Schmitz
Trump's teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez has been placed on unpaid leave after being accused of placing six figures worth of bets on Trump's speeches on prediction markets There are widespread concerns about prediction market bets that have been placed on forthcoming policy decisions by the Trump administration, including Trump's memorandum of understanding with Iran. It seems that the culture of corruption around online betting is rampant in Trump's D.C. and concerns especially center on his young staffers in this regard. There are additionally concerns about other kinds of corruption in the Trump White House related to bitcoin, shady real estate deals involving very high level players in the administration. All kinds of things. Just looking at the prediction markets, I guess I'd say two things. If young staffers are doing this, they may be looking up and seeing that high ranking staffers are getting very rich off this administration. Trump himself has become much, much wealthier while president, in part through things where it seems clear that people are trying to curry favor with the White House. And when young staffers are seeing their superiors getting wealthy, it's not very surprising to me that they would try to get in on the action
- [33:08]
Ashley Frawley
then.
- [33:08]
Matthew Schmitz
Beyond that, I just wonder how practical is it to think that bets of this kind won't be placed when the means are there? I think it's very hard to limit this kind of thing unless you actually limit the prediction markets. And it's funny, we got by for not only for decades but for centuries without these prediction markets. It wasn't that long ago that we didn't have them. I think it would be perfectly fine to go back to that.
- [33:36]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah, the prediction market. It's kind of bizarre that. Well, they're obviously kind of of a piece with the explosion of online sports betting, but I do think this is a, it's a significant development in American society over the past couple decades that we went from having this explosion of casinos largely on Indian reservations back I believe beginning more or less in the 90s, to having the rise of online sports betting. And now these prediction markets which are really, I mean, they're an incredibly bizarre phenomenon and just seem so sort of obviously corruptible in, you know, and sort of corrupt in their very essence and corrupting. So I don't know why, other than the fact that I suppose some people are already benefiting from, you know, people in power are already benefiting from using them as well as from presumably lobbying from the major, you know, Poly Market and Kalshi. So these are, you know, I think some of the worst and most destructive companies out there. And I suppose what, you know, the Trump administration is doing is largely just kind of shamelessly taking advantage of these things that exist. And so we can fault them for that. But I think we also need to fault our society as a whole for tolerating the rise of these companies. And then the other thing in terms of the corruption of this administration that I think is quite, I would say in some ways just so hilarious in its irony is the role of cryptocurrency in all of it. Because cryptocurrency in its origins was sold as an anti government, anti state technology. It was sold as a way of freeing money from the corruption and sort of self dealing with of the state and state aligned elites. And so that was really the promise of Bitcoin. People can read Peter Ryan's Money by Vile Means, which really lays out the history and how it immediately fell into all of the patterns that it denounced in the preexisting economy and the sort of absurd levels of corruption that now surround it. But, you know, what's fascinating here is that you have a state which is using this. You have state officials who are using a technology that was ostensibly created to avoid state oversight of financial transactions, essentially to create a black box in which they can corrupt themselves without any possibility of real detection or of understanding what's going on. And so it's really the absurdity of this technology that it now is simply enabling an even more naked form of the kind of state corruption and self dealing that it was ostensibly founded to prevent and get in the way of.
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Ashley Frawley
So
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Jeff Schulenberger
I think what's really striking about all of this is again, these technologies, you know, we, we can hold the, the current administration responsible for the rise and spread of these technologies and the way that they have become immense bubbles and thereby have accumulated wealth that allows them to lobby powerful people. You know, Kamala Harris's campaign also made appeals to and seemed to respond to the enticements of the cryptocurrency lobby. So the cryptocurrency lobby really, especially after the Sam Bankman Fried episode and the crash of cryptocurrencies back in 2022, it really put a huge amount of effort into lobbying political figures. And so that's, that's part of how we got here. And as far as what this administration is doing, I think it shows that, you know, they have contempt for the, admittedly, you know, often sort of highly flexible standards of decency and probity of the previous regime, which obviously was, was corrupted and corruptible in various ways. But they've replaced that just with a kind of shamelessness in their willingness to just engage in open corruption, which is I think still somewhat obscured perhaps by the nature of these technologies and platforms that are enabling it maybe is partly something you can get away with because it doesn't just look like the old fashioned graph that it essentially is because it's channeled through these new technological tools and platforms. But I really think the shamelessness and kind of post scandal nature of this, of this, of this administration is really on display here. And you know what, what I think it shows is that you need a certain emergence of an anti corruption politics which should also be a kind of anti vice politics, which I think would have to identify the corrosive influence of not just prediction markets, but of things like sports gambling, online sports gambling. And it would have to have a kind of quality of something like the temperance movement or these various kind of anti vice crusades in order to bring not just a kind of good government argument, but also a kind of moral argument about the corrupting effects of these technologies on our society as a whole.
- [39:50]
Matthew Schmitz
Yeah, this Miguel Perez guy who made these predictions, the teleprompter dude, what he did was wrong. He should be prosecuted if he did it. I don't know. I won't jump to the conclusions. And he should be prosecuted, punished accordingly, to the extent he broke any law. But really the occasion for malfeasance should be removed. I mean, if you create kind of massive societal temptations, people are going to succumb to it. That's just in the nature of things. And I don't, I mean, where is the public good in these prediction markets? Oh, well, it gives us knowledge. It's a more accurate predictor of electoral outcomes or something. I don't care. I don't care. I mean, you can have a functioning democracy without Nate Silver, all right, or without something even more accurate than him. It simply doesn't matter. There's, there's absolutely no societal good served by any of this. It's just the most ridiculous introduction of Gambling into every aspect of life. And yeah, it's fundamentally undemocratic in its nature too, because it creates these powerful incentives to trade on insider information and rewards insiders. And that's really counter to our public ethos. You're supposed to be serving the public, not serving yourself. Our elected representatives and their officers are not supposed to be trading on this information. They're not supposed to be benefiting from their closeness to power. Obviously they do, and they always have in various ways. But we shouldn't be promoting it in this bizarre way. And I just despise the ads for Kelshi and Polymarket that are everywhere. May have something to do with the amount of sports media I consume, that I just find the constant kind of gambling and quasi gambling kind of prediction market shilling just omnipresent and oppressive. But where are the social conservatives? We have to bring them back. This was a huge mistake. We got rid of these scolds, these Southern Baptists with their kind of unfashionable neckties. We got rid of the Phyllis Schlaflys and the Anita Bryants and all this. And maybe we have had reasons to dismiss them or to think that they were vanquished in the past, but at some level we need that, that censoriousness. We need some kind of willingness to stand up and wag a finger. What is going on in this world? Am I the only one around here who goes f about the rules?
- [42:57]
Ashley Frawley
Well, look, Ibowski, I agree. I agree this is all really terrible. However, I will say I prefer I have a begrudging respect for the nakedness because it's not like previous administrations didn't, you know, have their charities with their friends, all appointed board members and so on, and they're just like, yeah, I'm still gonna do it, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna be a badass who lies, who doesn't lie about it.
- [43:26]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah, yeah, it's.
- [43:27]
Matthew Schmitz
No, it's a point well taken. But I've thought a bit about this and I think I miss the hypocrisy on this one. And I mean, your point, it's absolutely true that there. Remember the Clinton Global foundation and all this?
- [43:42]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, exactly. And the fact that it's so blatant and open means that it opens the door hopefully for a kind of politics that, you know, an anti corruption politics or something like that, you know, so maybe it'll just repeat the cycle again, though, who knows? But the other thing that I find interesting about this is it may be a crisis indicator, recession indicator, because there's all, there's often this kind of cluster of these kinds of behaviors, not necessarily blatantly in the political class, but just generally like all this like cryptocurrency, large pools of money looking for returns that really, it's, you know, can't be made in productive investments less attractive to do that. And then you start seeing like captured regulation instruments or regulation gets relaxed, financial instruments becoming increasingly detached from ordinary economic production. And also insiders start pulling strings and benefiting from their proximity to power. All of these things are noted among economists as ratcheting up in one to three years before a crisis, before a recession, before some kind of economic instability. So the fact that it's so blatant actually screams out, oh, we've got a big problem here. We've got a problem here. Generally mor. But it's maybe a sign of a deeper kind of crisis in our society that people are so blatantly making money in these underhanded ways as opposed to productive investment. And this guy is a real estate mogul like that should tell us something, that he's putting all his money in crypto. So, you know, I, I appreciate the blatant nature of it. At least it's not going through a charity where I can just be like, oh, I guess that's just what those rich people do. No, and this is also what those rich people do and tells us something more important about the state of our world.
- [45:39]
Matthew Schmitz
This message and all of our podcasts is brought to you by Kalshi. No, it's not. If they want us to change our tune on this, they're going to have to buy us out for a very high price. But thank they're brought. Instead, our podcast is brought to you by you, our listeners, our subscribers. If you don't subscribe to Compact, go to compactmag.com subscribe join our work. Put in, put in a dollar or two so we don't have to take the millions from the prediction markets. And we'll talk to you next.
- [46:27]
Ashley Frawley
Sam.