Of course, his style speaks most to rural working-class Americans. The song became an overnight anthem for the forgotten men and women. These are the people who grow most of our food, produce most of our stuff, and work many of the hardest jobs.

Oliver Anthony’s popularity has faded over the past few months. One day, he’s top of the charts and the most famous man in America. Because elites on both the right and left thought he’d be useful to their cause. But then he started saying things he wasn’t supposed to, like how politicians on both sides were guilty of selling out the American people. Or how drugs and porn will destroy a man’s soul. He even read the Bible on the Joe Rogan Experience, one of the largest cultural platforms in the country. So they cast him aside.

Isn’t Oliver Anthony a perfect analogy for the forgotten men and women he represents? The elites are quick to use the working class (or the song) as a political prop when it suits them, only to betray them when election season passes.

The forgotten men and women are some of the most important people in America, but they aren’t treated like it. They work long hours and don’t get paid nearly as much as they should. The average farm worker makes $20,000 to $40,000 a year (depending on the source). Is there anyone in the US more important than our farmers? Factory workers aren’t much better off, making an average of $40,000 a year. That’s an injustice.

Rich Men North of Richmond wouldn’t have reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 unless LOTS of people listened to it. More than just the farmers and factory workers. 80% of the US lives in urban or suburban areas. While we often think of blue-collar workers as rural, many live in the city too, and they clearly resonated with “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

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We don’t expect you to understand who we are. But we ask you to hear us, and beyond that to listen to us when we tell you we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living. And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity!

Oh wait, those aren’t the words of a blue-collar worker. That’s wealthy actor Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame. You see, actors and writers are on strike partly to protest the threat of AI to eliminate their jobs. The next economic revolution is going to hit white-collar workers hardest and they finally know it. As the Forgotten Men and Women say, welcome to the party pal.

The upside is that we can finally have a conversation that’s decades in the making. But simply complaining about how elites act is not enough. We need to articulate how our business leaders should act, or more importantly how we would act if we owned all the means of production.

So, how would you act?

You: The Factory Owner

Imagine you own a furniture factory in North Carolina. Something like this:

You make high-quality couches for $400 each and sell them for $1,000. Your factory currently runs at capacity, you pay your people an above-average wage with benefits, and after paying your operating expenses you turn a small profit of $100,000.

You hire a management consultant to see what improvements you can make to the operation. She presents you with two opportunities to make those tables for $200 each. Same materials, same quality, same sales price. Just lower costs.

• Option #1: Close your American factory and open one in Vietnam where labor is cheaper.

• Option #2: Install automation equipment in your existing factory and lay off half your workers.

Both options initially cost $500,000 but your annual profits multiply to $500,000 as well. One year of profits pays off the whole investment and the rest is yours to keep going forward.

What would you do?

Your answer says a lot about the type of capitalist you are. And what type of capitalist anyone is pretty much determines our future as a country.

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That's what I learned from the 2007 film, There Will Be Blood.

Critics consider it one of the finest films of the 21st century. Paul Thomas Anderson (one of the premier modern directors) delivers his best work alongside an Oscar-winning performance from Daniel Day-Lewis and Oscar-winning cinematography from Robert Elswit (the film received eight nominations in total).

[Spoilers — Skip to The Next Section] There Will Be Blood is about an oilman named Daniel Plainview. He manipulates Eli, a cunning local preacher, and his naive congregation into selling him the oil underneath their town. As Daniel's profits grow, so does his greed. He becomes a raging alcoholic, abandons his son, and kills multiple people who stand in his way. Bandy, one of the members of the town, allows Daniel to use his property for an oil pipeline. In exchange, Daniel has to go to church. But Eli uses the opportunity to publically humiliate Daniel. He implores him to be "washed…

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There are intelligent people on both sides. As noted by Daily Mail:

The 'godfather' of artificial intelligence (AI) has tossed a grenade into the raging debate about the dangers of the technology — after sensationally quitting his job at Google and saying he regrets his life's work.

British-Canadian pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, 75, further fanned the flames of a growing Silicon Valley civil war, as he issued a spine-chilling warning that 'scary' chatbots like the hugely popular ChatGPT could soon become smarter than humans. 

Some of the world's greatest minds are split over whether AI will destroy or elevate humanity, with Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates championing the technology and Tesla founder Elon Musk a staunch critic.

The bitter argument spilled into the public domain earlier this year when more than 1,000 tech tycoons signed a letter calling for a pause on the 'dangerous race' to advance AI.

When that many brilliant minds can't agree on the outcome, then let's face it — nobody knows how the macro situation will shake out. I'm reasonably confident that most of the billions flowing to any startup with "AI" in its name or pitch deck will be lost. Some of them are borderline scams. The next Kozmo.com, WeWork, or Fyre Festival is already here. We just won't know which ones are the cautionary tales until the doors close and the documentaries come out. Surely, some of the survivors might become the next Amazon or Google, but it's hard to pick winners this early, as the dotcom bubble showed us.

In the meantime, we can observe some trends and make some guesses about the future. Barring the Terminator scenario, the AI revolution could lead to the greatest rebalancing of societal power in history. It's The Real Great Reset. There's a plausible scenario where The Forgotten Man and Woman re-emerge more powerful and prosperous than ever. Where the elites lose their grip on centralized power. Where freedom, economic mobility, and an ownership society become the norm (again). It's not the great reset Klaus and his merry band of elites had planned — and they aren't going to let the "freedom" version happen without a fight. But let's explore this scenario further.

Working In Reality

Three quick stories:

1. Our beloved family dog Sunny just had throat surgery. Her larynx was paralyzed, making it hard for her to breathe. In extreme cases, dogs with this condition can drop dead from a cardiac event. We could have let Sunny live as a shut-in and atrophy until she died. Instead, we opted for surgery to restore some quality of life in her golden years. The surgical vet was a guy from New York who looked and talked like Chuck Schumer. He said, "I've been doing surgery for 30 years. It's the only thing I do. It might be the only thing I'm good at." It's a delicate surgery with serious risks. But the vet opened a 10-inch incision in Sunny's throat, tied back half her larynx, and closed her up. Thankfully, she's recovering well.

   

2. Two doors down from where we live, workers have jacked up an entire house and placed it on piles of railroad ties. They are building a new foundation underneath. Once the house is back on that foundation, we assume the plan is to renovate the place. It's probably simpler to tear the house down and start over. Still, for permitting reasons that we've unfortunately all come to accept, the renovators probably concluded it was easier to lift A HOUSE six feet in the air and keep it there for a few weeks.

3. An article in the Wall Street Journal talked about the impact of AI on finance jobs. They spoke with an analyst who wasn't exactly sure how AI would impact his job. He guessed his usual output of one comprehensive analytical report per month might increase to four. 

There's a saying going around:

This saying is partially true, but it's a sliding scale. Who in the above three scenarios should most fear for their livelihood?

The vet has no fear. A robot isn't doing that surgery in our lifetime and probably not our grandkids' lifetimes. And people aren't just going to let their otherwise healthy dogs die. The vet is safe.

The house renovators have no fear. Lifting that house was grinding work that required a mix of skilled machine operators and manual laborers. Sometimes those were performed by the same guy. Terminator would have a nervous breakdown before he could do that job. The renovators are safe.

Our analyst makes multiple six figures and has a lovely studio apartment in NYC. He's on track to make managing director by his mid-30s, making over a million per year.

The analyst is screwed.

Three other people on his office floor will also be able to use AI to increase output from one to four reports per month. Unless the firm suddenly realizes it needs four times as many reports, then three of those analysts are gone. Joined by laid-off analysts from the firm on the next floor up, analysts in the office across the street, and a bunch of ticked-off former analysts from Boston.

An Economic Revolution Unlike Any Other

The AI revolution won't be like previous economic revolutions. During the Industrial Revolution, many migrated from farms and shops into cities where jobs were plentiful at factories that mass-produced goods. This ultimately led to a manufacturing boom, especially following World War II when America helped rebuild the world that Germany and Japan had bombed to the ground. Prosperity went up, and poverty went down.

For the last 40 years, a combination of globalization and technological advancement created a new economic revolution where millions of manufacturing jobs were lost. Knowledge work became the "it" thing, and it was a troubling era for many. They told us those job losses were due to automation. Yes, some jobs were lost to automation; that was inevitable. But ironically, millions of manufacturing jobs showed up in other countries during that same period. Jobs making the same stuff that was made here decades earlier. That part was avoidable.

Take it directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

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She's not the first to describe history as a pendulum. It's just another framework that tries to explain why history appears to be cyclical. Here's another one:

In a previous article, we explained how the US is in the "weak men create hard times" phase. It doesn't matter who you vote for when only 41% of Americans regularly go to church or one in five members of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ. Social media has made degeneracy the norm. And Gen Z is just now reaching adulthood. They'll become parents, bosses, and leaders within the next decade, so their power and influence over our culture will only grow. Most Americans believe the US is on the wrong track but don't have the guts to do anything about it. As a result, Americans will continue to suffer until we become so miserable that we turn to something else.

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While Michael Moore is a leftwing propaganda artist - and an ultra wealthy one at that - he does a great job of highlighting the human misery globalization has caused many American communities. The same workers who helped build GM to become the world’s largest car maker were cast aside for efficiency and profits. Moore never actually gets that interview with Smith, but he’s able to communicate a powerful narrative along the way and bring awareness to the impacts of worshiping efficiency at the expense of the people who made you.

But what if Michael Moore had gotten the interview? What would he have asked and how would Roger Smith have explained the closing of factories? We can be sure that Smith’s initial responses would be corporate PR gobbledygook. The question is whether Moore could have persisted and gotten to the deeper issues.

If a movie like Roger & Me were made today, the white whale wouldn’t be Roger Smith. It would be today’s titans who influence the movement of trillions of dollars in wealth and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. It would be people like Larry Fink (Blackrock), Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), and Klaus Schwab (World Economic Forum).

Introducing Klaus GPT

We weren’t able to get any of these guys on the phone, but ChatGPT can imitate famous people with surprising accuracy. So I did the next best thing and had a conversation with the ChatGPT version of Klaus Schwab. It was a roller coaster ride, with a revealing but predictable ending. Here’s how it went. (Pardon any typos, I wasn’t editing in real time as I asked questions).

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"Politics is downstream from culture" - Andrew Breitbart.

Lately I've been trying to understand why every society has classes. No matter what economic system you choose, there's always an upper crust of rich and powerful people making all the decisions. I've concluded that some form of ruling class is inevitable. But it's up to the people to determine how much authority we give them and what that looks like. In the end, the elites simply reflect the population at large. Many conservatives believe that we’re due for an American revival, but they don’t have the stomach to stand up for it. We’re going to get the hard times we deserve.

The Group Model

People tend to organize themselves in groups. On a micro level, people form families, work teams, and friend groups. Those groups unite to make larger groups like communities, tribes, and nations. The group model has been used across cultures and throughout history.

Groups of people naturally create cultures. These cultures are the sum of everyone's little choices throughout the day. For example, in America, we drive more cars, drink more alcohol, and eat more unhealthy food than people in other countries, demonstrating how much we value our right to choose. In Scandinavian countries, they care a lot about work-life balance, which is why they work fewer hours than we do.

Theoretically, individuals have complete and total freedom to make these little choices. But freedom means nothing without power. In a world where everyone is free, the powerful will always use their resources to dominate the powerless. It's human nature.

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The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.  

Every little act of rebellion is a vote against the elites and a vote for freedom. So today we discuss some more tangible ways to do that.

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Let’s back up a little. As they say, the generals are always fighting the last war. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low in the early 2000s in response to the Dot-com bubble and 9/11. Easy money makes people do stupid things. Banks started lending money to anyone and everyone, many of which were adjustable-rate mortgages (ARM). A massive Jenga tower of derivative securities based on these mortgages emerged. But we didn't find out about it until the Fed raised rates and took the easy money away. And the rest is history.

If you thought that was easy money, wait until you hear what the Fed did after 2008. First, they lowered the Fed Funds rate to effectively zero. That means negative interest rates after inflation. That means YOU literally had to PAY the bank to keep your money. Then they injected trillions of free dollars into the economy by increasing its balance sheet to almost $5 trillion.

Just when the F…

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With that said, choosing freedom is something you can do every day. Yes, some day we might all be in same corridor yelling “One Way Out” as we run toward the sunlight. But until then, defeating the elites can be done one person or family at a time.  

Rebellion is a lifestyle. Daily choices and priorities. Here are some ideas for choosing freedom in ways big and small. Let’s start with the big:  

Value family 

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Main Street Insiders

Our Theme For 2023: Choose Freedom

2023 is the year we choose freedom. That's our theme for the year (in case you missed the big words at the top). It starts with your finances. But that's just the jumping-off point. Our goal is to help you choose freedom in all areas of your life – including your mind, body, and spirit…

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4 years ago · Jeff Perlot and Luke Perlot

That's why we were recently inspired by ‘Andor,’ Disney's latest ‘Star Wars’ spinoff show. It tells a beautiful story about resisting power. Andor is set in between Episode III and Episode IV. The Empire rules the galaxy with an iron fist. And no one has been brave enough to stand up to them yet. The show follows Cassian Andor as he's caught up in a plot to ignite the rebellion that eventually takes down the Empire. It's a fantastic show. And it's well worth your time. 

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However, there’s much more to freedom. You can choose freedom every day in little ways that feed your mind, body, and soul. Every improvement you make to your health and well-being is a slap to the face of the elites. They depend on your little addictions - to foods, distraction, anxiety. It’s their business model. Without our impulses and addictions, they are just carnival barkers.

It’s worth considering what little improvements we can make to our finances, health, relationships, and habits that will make us freer. Each of those choices is a small act of rebellion in our pursuit of freedom.

Today, we are reposting an article that represents some low h…

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“What difference can I make? I’m just one person?”

– Everyone 

There are easily more than 100 million people in this country who value family, faith, and freedom - just like you. We call this group Main Streeters and together we can move mountains...if we work together.    

Why are some NFL teams better than others? If you lined up their rosters side-by-side and compared vital stats for each position, it would look the same. Average height and weight. Average 40-year dash. Average max on bench and squat. Physically, the teams are practically carbon copies of each other (with rare exceptions). 

Then, why do some teams consistently win and some consistently lose? Because one team . . .  

• Has a better strategy 

• Demonstrates better teamwork 

Being the Change

We can apply this to our everyday lives in powerful ways that will save our country and any other country that chooses freedom.  

Why do we write about the elites so much? Is it to make you anxious or angry? No, that’s not our intention at al…

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When you hear the word freedom, you probably think about voting or the right to live your life the way you want to. That's political freedom. Or the right to go to church. That's religious freedom. We built our nation on these rights. And they're what makes America special. Freedom was a radical idea when we created the US. We proved that people prosper when they're free, and that's how the idea of democracy spread. 

Freedom often revolves around decisions. Who should I vote for? Where should I go to church? We're lucky to have the freedom to make those decisions because billions of people around the world still lack that privilege. 

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The Main Street Story

You're our hero—the Main Streeters of the world. When we say Main Street, we're not talking about a place. We're talking about everyday working people—the backbone of America.

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"All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down." - Friedrich Nietzsche 

Words are often compared to a scalpel. They can harm, and they can heal. It depends on how you use them, and who is using them. During the 19th century, some of the most influential philosophers, like Freidrich Nietzsche, used them without boundaries to explore concepts like morality and identity. Many of these philosophers were German, and Germany became the intellectual hub of the world. The words of Nietzsche and others heavily influenced the rise of the Nazi Party. That's what he meant by the power of words to turn the world upside down. 

Modern media organizations are no different. They use a wide variety of tactics to control the narrative. This article will focus on one in particular: the use of wording. 

The mainstream media uses carefully worded headlines and articles to fit their agenda. We don't even realize how much they shape our everyday conversations. Let's break down a few examples: 

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That's how it used to be. We used to have a sense of decency. We all wanted what's best for the country. We just had different visions for how to get there. And we could put politics aside and still enjoy our lives. 

The Elites Play To Win 

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