Unify Action - September 30, 2026


He Thinks He's Poor Because Of "The Rich" - Until I Said This

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This AMERICAN Thinks 'Canada Should Join The EU' - What He Said Will Terrify You

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

166.15

Word count

2,432

Sentence count

39

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You cannot survive off of minimal wage.
00:00:02.220 We used to be able to.
00:00:02.940 We used to be able to, but we cannot currently.
00:00:04.920 With the society that we have.
00:00:05.780 When we were more capitalist, we could.
00:00:08.400 Would you say that we're more socialist now?
00:00:10.620 Higher taxes, more government, more regulation.
00:00:13.200 Absolutely.
00:00:15.320 In-between portion, where we agree that major industries are owned and regulated by the state,
00:00:22.420 that would be like housing, groceries, basic human needs like water, electricity.
00:00:27.360 Those are all regulated by the government, by the state. 0.97
00:00:30.580 But working class citizens, the wealth is distributed equitably, not equally. 0.97
00:00:35.600 So it's still based off of how much you work and how long and how hard you work. 0.81
00:00:41.160 But it is not, you know, you own a business and you make millions of dollars.
00:00:45.500 It is you work the hours and you are able to get that distribution of money.
00:00:49.660 Okay.
00:00:50.120 And then it also, what's the word, advocates for things such as like free health care, free education.
00:00:56.740 in those sorts of services right right so like government-owned health care yeah right which is
00:01:02.180 yeah regulated owned yes okay so i have never heard socialism defined as how much you work is
00:01:10.020 how much you get in practice at least with social like i feel like socialism has been tried very
00:01:18.200 differently everywhere so there's really no one set of like definitions of like what socialism
00:01:25.260 is no and i'll definitely agree with that which is why i wanted to yeah define it first yeah but
00:01:29.880 like in general it's government ownership of the means of production and at least some amount of
00:01:35.340 wealth redistribution right so i think like we've settled on that as our definition so you've done
00:01:42.360 some it sounds like you did a bit of research what socialism would you want to try like you
00:01:46.940 have so many examples like 40 examples whatever across the world which like because like we can
00:01:52.980 talk in theory all the time like for hours but we should also talk about what it can look like
00:01:58.040 in practice so what socialist country would you like to emulate um i have not personally looked
00:02:05.440 into like specific countries that are actively socialist governments because as we have already
00:02:12.520 kind of stated the definition of socialism is so broadly used and i think in some points it is used
00:02:20.060 very um interchangeably with communism and i think we can all agree that a communist society
00:02:26.320 only works in theory and does not work in practice giving full control over to the government does
00:02:31.240 not always work out we have countries that are communist countries that do not work right but i
00:02:37.360 think socialism and communism are very similar i think that it depends on how you define it and
00:02:42.600 well okay we should define communism as well okay then which is like all production is owned by the
00:02:50.160 governments and everything is owned communally so like there is everything is basically communal
00:02:56.180 everything is government communism is more defined as like in the in marx carl marx theory he defines
00:03:02.560 it as the um shift of power to the working class people where there is no government and it is more
00:03:10.360 so the working class and equal distribution of wealth all across the board. So it would mean
00:03:16.220 that if I work 50 hours a week and you work 20, we both get the same amount of money. That's
00:03:21.940 communism. The way that I've seen socialism defined is if I work 50 hours a week and you
00:03:27.340 work 20 hours a week, we both are still receiving an equal kind of universal basic income, but I am
00:03:35.300 still making more money than you because i am working more okay so that seems like a different
00:03:41.880 way to do it i have not heard it defined like that um but so you're saying like there there
00:03:50.380 is no particular country that you would point to as a system that you would emulate no because i
00:03:55.000 think that every system is different and it very much depends on the country and the culture if
00:03:59.940 you're trying to turn a capitalist country directly into socialism it's not going to work
00:04:07.340 you need to kind of transition those things and work towards that you can't just take a country
00:04:15.140 and immediately make them socialists okay by regulations and things okay yeah all right so
00:04:22.020 i would like to discuss some of the benefits of socialism okay kind of what are the benefits but
00:04:28.580 it would it would be really nice to also look at what the benefits are in practice like use
00:04:33.860 examples of what it has actually produced yeah that's where my kind of research and understanding
00:04:41.220 stops at that moment i have not personally looked into specific countries however socialism in
00:04:49.080 practice as we said the state would own uh large sorts of uh production so that would be like water
00:04:56.040 electricity housing market would be regulated groceries so we can agree on that right as long
00:05:02.600 as the government in power has the best interest of the people and citizens in mind things i see
00:05:12.760 benefit in that we can agree that the housing market in canada currently you can't afford a
00:05:18.700 home yeah and i think there are government reasons regular regulatory reasons why we can't do that
00:05:24.380 okay in a socialism or in a society yeah socialist society when those industries are
00:05:34.640 regulated by the state because the housing industry is currently not regulated by the
00:05:38.140 state it is privately it is privately owned apartment building well it is still very heavily
00:05:42.360 regulated it's regulated but it's um like owned by landlords like landlords privately own their
00:05:47.720 property and they sell it they choose their prices with some regulation from the government
00:05:53.500 however they still have the ability to charge two thousand dollars for a one bedroom apartment
00:06:00.820 per month for rent okay without utilities which is an actual number that is like even here in london
00:06:06.580 a society socialist society where the government or the state um owns those sorts of properties and
00:06:14.800 regulates them those um like numbers the price of a home price of rent can be more equally
00:06:23.660 distributed okay equal and universal to the income that people are receiving yeah more based on the
00:06:30.940 income okay so we're talking about rent control yeah which okay so it has been done it has been
00:06:37.460 done a lot um in a lot of places um famously in new york but in other places so what happened
00:06:45.920 especially in new york is they it was i think it was like the 90s early 2000s when they had a huge
00:06:52.360 amount of rent control and it was more expedient for a company to build an office building that
00:06:59.420 sat empty with no one in it, then for them to build or sent, sat empty or mostly empty for
00:07:07.200 then for them to build an apartment where that would be rent controlled and they wouldn't get
00:07:11.200 their revenue back. Right. So apartments were not built and people were burning down landlords
00:07:17.860 and people, tenants were burning down their apartments because they would get more money
00:07:22.000 from the insurance than they were from the tenants. Yeah. So it was, it was the landlords
00:07:28.320 burning down their their apartment buildings because they were getting they would get more
00:07:32.380 from the insurance than they were from the tenants right so when you take a commodity
00:07:37.340 and you artificially lower its price people are going to take more right and you don't have the
00:07:44.580 incentive for people to make more because the price is lower so they it's there's like no
00:07:48.860 incentive there we're talking about supply and demand when you artificially change the price
00:07:53.340 then the art of artificially also changed the demand right so if we went to the grocery store
00:07:57.880 and like whoa the fried chicken is suddenly like a quarter the price then people are going to buy
00:08:06.780 more fried chicken and they're going to run out right so that we're artificially changing supply
00:08:12.520 and demand i see the point in that and that definitely goes back to the point that i made
00:08:17.200 where you can't make those changes overnight we couldn't change the grocery and just half all of
00:08:22.460 the prices overnight well you also can't change human nature true however i do want to touch on
00:08:27.740 the point that you made about um new york specifically because we still mentioned
00:08:31.660 landlords in the um society where the state owns that land and the uh income that is
00:08:40.200 collected from the tenants like the rent goes directly back into the state which then goes
00:08:45.940 directly back into the tax-funded industries like health care and like schooling and in this society
00:08:53.940 would be water and electricity and everything else so the revenue that is made directly goes
00:08:59.460 back into those services instead of going into a landlord's pocket so the tenants can pay cheaper
00:09:06.280 rent and then have it equally distributed to keep things like health care free right but presumably
00:09:11.860 the government would need that rent to also pay for the pay for the gas for that building or the
00:09:18.620 electricity or the water right so the government would need that so there has to be some amount of
00:09:23.860 that given to those services right and to pay for the people working but in a government you have
00:09:30.400 more people working so it is actually more expensive right because you have bureaucracy
00:09:35.200 to go through and it's slower because it doesn't have that product profit motive so things are
00:09:41.240 slowed down in this socialist bureaucratic industry slowed down doesn't necessarily mean
00:09:48.500 not functional though okay it's just because revenue is coming also in socialist um
00:09:55.120 societies taxes are also usually higher which is something that i definitely can see
00:10:03.320 as a con to socialism well yeah it has to be higher yeah it has to be higher because the
00:10:10.660 income needs to go into the services and there's more services for the income to go into that makes
00:10:15.560 sense but it does provide more equal opportunities to all of the citizens even if their taxes are
00:10:22.080 higher because wealth is equitably distributed so people are still able to afford basic human needs
00:10:28.720 because also things like housing and groceries and such can be lower in price they can still
00:10:36.380 afford to live even though that the taxes are higher, which is not something that current
00:10:42.000 capitalistic society has at the moment. You cannot survive off of minimum wage. It has
00:10:48.300 been tested. It used to be able to. Used to be able to, but we cannot currently with
00:10:53.320 the society that we have. When we were more capitalist, we could. Would you say that we're
00:10:57.320 more socialist now? Higher taxes, more government, more regulation. Absolutely. What policies
00:11:04.540 have been recently added from the past to now
00:11:07.820 that have made the country more socialist?
00:11:11.040 Certainly expanding dental care, like free dental care,
00:11:16.200 or government-subsidized dental care.
00:11:17.660 That is definitely a socialist policy, for sure.
00:11:22.060 I would say that supply management of dairy and poultry and eggs,
00:11:27.380 which makes it 40% more expensive than the United States,
00:11:31.440 where they have a capitalist-run system for all of that,
00:11:34.540 it makes it more expensive for us.
00:11:36.580 So that is a socialist idea,
00:11:38.720 the management of supply for the benefit of a certain few.
00:11:42.160 So that is socialist, and that is one way that we are socialist.
00:11:45.720 We're in fact actually one of the only countries in the world
00:11:47.700 that has a system like supply management,
00:11:50.120 like a CODA system for dairy, for eggs, right?
00:11:53.680 And it makes it more expensive for us.
00:11:55.780 So that's some of the things.
00:11:57.260 But also under Trudeau, we had like a 13% increase in regulation.
00:12:02.400 we have the slowest permitting processes in at least the g7 we are very slow on regulation
00:12:07.960 we're not reducing our regulation and we have like bans on certain industries like a tanker
00:12:14.800 ban for oil off of bc which is we've been told will remain in place we're not building new
00:12:20.280 pipelines we're not developing our industry for indigenous people especially up north i feel like
00:12:25.180 we should be allowing industry to go up there that will really help them benefit them give
00:12:29.320 them jobs and work so we have so much regulation in canada and it is growing it is getting worse
00:12:36.340 and it's really nothing is being done about it and everything is being held up in bureaucracy
00:12:43.100 so i would not call us a fully capitalist i would not call us a capitalist country
00:12:47.640 when everything is held up in government i wouldn't also fully call us a socialist country though
00:12:53.180 we're getting more socialist and i think that the problem that we are recognizing at the moment is
00:13:00.540 still kind of very similar to what i described about the landlords where if you try to put on
00:13:06.440 those regulations when there is still individualistic revenue like you want to increase
00:13:12.680 your money you want to earn more money as an individual person if you still have those things
00:13:18.340 in place then it's not going to work again you can't make those changes overnight simply adding
00:13:24.600 regulation does not benefit the system okay but would come would government be able to do it
00:13:32.340 faster it depends on the type of government as i said it depends if the government has the best
00:13:37.380 interest of the people in mind or the best interest of the revenue of the country in mind
00:13:42.020 okay but how do we keep the government to have the best interest of the people because right now
00:13:46.660 they just have the best interest of their vote and that's the problem with communism and government
00:13:52.680 owned societies where you cannot directly say that the government has the best interest of
00:13:57.900 people in mind and that's why communism hasn't worked in practice okay yeah oh i definitely
00:14:03.380 that is part of it for sure um but would you say that our current government
00:14:07.280 sorry would you say that our current government where we have a sort of quasi-capitalist country
00:14:16.420 not quite sort of socialist not quite would you say it has the best interest of the people in mind
00:14:22.020 i would argue no okay i'd say that
00:14:25.580 there's claims that they have the best interest of the people in mind however there is a lot of
00:14:32.900 policies that have been put in place that do not actually directly benefit the people