The De-Riggable Podcast

When someone says a regulation "hurts this company," Steve says it's answering the wrong question. The real question is what it does for that company's competitors — and for everyone shut out of the game entirely.

His proof is IBM in 1969. A monopoly so total that Seymour Cray's faster, cheaper computer couldn't find a buyer, because IBM bundled its hardware and software and punished anyone who wandered off. Antitrust pressure forced it to unbundle — and that one move launched the U.S. software industry, the ground floor for open source and eventually AI. Japan let its champions consolidate instead, and got through Nintendo and Sony, some great games but not much else.

Then it opens up the question the show keeps circling: what has to be true before a person can actually say no? A life you can live without becoming desperate, infrastructure that lets you opt out — water, power, internet — the floor underneath the unfettered no.

The structural point, minus the politics: the job of a good rule isn't to knock the big player down. It's to keep the door open behind them.

Look at a thick book of regulations and you're looking at a fossil record of desperation — every rule marks a spot where someone couldn't refuse a bad deal and the system had to step in. This episode traces regulation back to its real source: not bureaucratic appetite, but the moments where people had no power to say no.

Nobody designed the desperation economy. It evolved — through layers of policies, competitive pressure, and individually rational decisions that produced collectively irrational results. This episode asks whether that makes it evil, starting from a listener's sharp challenge to the show's position. The 2008 financial crisis serves as the full spectrum in one event: a homebuyer who can't say no to shelter, a rating agency paid by the companies it rates, and a system that hid $70 trillion in risk from public view. Most of it wasn't intentional. Some of it — like the Sackler family targeting communities already in pain — was. The distinction matters because it determines whether you need better rules, clearer boundaries, or real accountability.

In this episode of De-Riggable, Ben and Steve name a force that quietly sets prices across the entire economy but rarely gets called what it is: desperation. Not demand. Not preference. The inability to say no without harm.

Through the story of a bagel-shop worker forced to choose between healing a leg ulcer and paying his bills, they show how desperation suppresses wages, concentrates profits upward, and spreads inequality through the whole system. When people can't refuse a bad deal — whether that's low wages, unsafe conditions, or unaffordable healthcare — the market isn't discovering value. It's extracting it.

The conversation also moves through why reaction isn't the same as understanding, how money functioning as political speech distorts democracy, and why policies that cut food, housing, and medical support only deepen the cycle. But the core claim is simple: a market isn't free if people can't say no. De-rigging the economy means removing desperation at the bottom — not adding more regulation on top of it.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Read Steve's A True Free Market⁠⁠

What happens when the loudest political voices belong to whoever has the most money?

In this episode of De-Riggable, Ben and Steve argue that one of the most dangerous ideas in modern politics is the claim that money equals speech.

Money is a tool for facilitating trade. Speech is a tool for facilitating democratic debate. When those two worlds collide, political influence becomes a commodity—and the result can look a lot like pay-to-play governance.

The discussion moves from corporate influence and lobbying to deeper questions about knowledge and truth in the age of social media and AI. Why do people reject evidence? How do echo chambers distort reality? And why does the scientific method remain our best defense against confirmation bias?

The takeaway: capitalism can be a powerful economic engine—but when its tools start deciding political outcomes, democracy itself begins to warp.

⁠⁠⁠⁠Read Steve's A True Free Market⁠⁠

This week on De-Riggable, Ben and Steve try to pin down a slippery word: distortion. They separate “disruptions” (like hurricanes and broken ports) from enduring distortions we create through policy—especially laws that tilt markets long-term. Along the way, they wrestle with a thorny case: price gouging. Is outlawing it a distortion, or a moral guardrail that protects communities during crises?

From there, the conversation expands into subsidies—green energy, oil and gas, and the hypocrisy of calling one “market manipulation” while ignoring the other. The biggest twist: climate change isn’t framed as an economic debate at all, but as a survival and national security issue—because large-scale disruptions become permanent global instability.

They end by zooming out: why America treats capitalism like a religion, how “economic fundamentalism” resists adaptation, and why China’s willingness to violate capitalist purity helped it become a solar manufacturing powerhouse. The core question: which distortions protect society—and which quietly rig the game?

⁠⁠⁠Read Steve's A True Free Market⁠⁠

Ben and Steve use this episode of De-Riggable to explore a truth most people sense but rarely analyze: every tax rule distorts something. Focusing first on Texas’s new homestead exemption increases — including expanded breaks for homeowners 65+ — they examine how incentives shift for both long-time residents and younger families trying to enter the market. Reduced property taxes for some mean higher relative burdens for others, and the renters — who already hold the least wealth — are left out entirely.

Steve then compares this to New York’s rent control dynamic, where entrenched tenants stay is an episode about how systems drift, break, and maybe can be rebuilt.

⁠⁠Read Steve's A True Free Market⁠

Note:

Steve quickly learned there is no income tax in Texas, like there is in New York, but his point remains valid in the creation of unintended consequences, in general.

In this episode of De-Riggable, Ben and Steve pull on a loose thread in the sweater of capitalism — and it starts to unravel fast. What begins as a joke about snake bars turns into a clear-eyed look at why income taxes quietly distort the entire value structure of labor. In this episode Ben and Steve break down one of the most overlooked distortions in modern capitalism: They explore why wages aren’t just negotiated prices but downstream artifacts of desperation, reduced bargaining power, and after-tax lifestyles. When people can’t say no to a job without harm, is that negotiation really “free”?

Read Steve's A True Free Market

We like to think value lasts — but what if it never does?

In this conversation, Ben and Steve break down why “store of value” might be capitalism’s most comforting lie. They explore how money, wealth erode over time unless effort renews them — and why accepting that decay might be the key to building a fairer economy. Along the way, they mix humor, stories, and hard questions about what really gives things worth.