Imagine you're 14 years old. You're walking the
streets of a city that is actively hunting you
down. Right. And to survive, you can't just hide,
you know? You have to become a phantom. You take
on a fake name, a fake religion, a totally fabricated
family history. It's the ultimate high wire act.
Exactly. You have to walk right among the very
people who want to destroy you. And you just
have to smile like you belong. Because one slip.
I mean, one wrong word or even just a nervous
glance and you're dead. Surviving that kind of
crucible, the absolute darkest period of the
20th century in Nazi occupied Hungary. It doesn't
just leave a mark on a person. No, it rewrites
everything. Exactly. It rewrites how they perceive
reality itself. It teaches you that these rigid
rules of the world, these institutions that seem
invincible, they're sometimes just malleable
illusions, illusions that can be bent or manipulated.
Or broken. Well, welcome to another Deep Dive.
Today, you are joining us as the third person
in our conversation as we unpack the life, the
theories, and frankly, the intense controversies
of a man who took that exact lesson of survival
and used it to shake the globe. We are, of course,
talking about George Soros. Right. And our mission
today is to navigate this massive polarizing
landscape of his life. And we're drawing strictly
from his incredibly expensive Wikipedia page,
which is this fascinating chronological map.
Yeah, it really is. It tracks a guy who went
from... a frustrated philosophy student, to a
financial titan, to this massive global political
lightning rod. Okay, let's unpack this. Can you
give us a high level overview? Sure. So to give
you a sense of the scale we're dealing with here,
Soros was born in 1930 in Budapest. Over his
career, he amassed a net worth of over $7 .2
billion. Which is just staggering. It is, but
what's even more staggering is the money he no
longer has. He gave away an unbelievable $32
billion of his own fortune. Wow. 32 billion.
Yeah. And along the way, he became this central
figure in global finance, international philanthropy,
and as you'll see, modern political conspiracy
theories. Right. And his origin story, it really
reads like a high stakes historical thriller.
I mean, he was actually born Jorgi Schwartz.
Yes. But his family changed their name to Soros
as this protective camouflage against the rising
anti -Semitism in Hungary back in the 1930s.
And the name itself is brilliant. The palindrome,
right? Yeah. spelled the same forwards and backwards.
In Hungarian, it means next. But his dad was
a massive Esperanto enthusiast. Esperanto, the
constructed language. Yeah, exactly. And in Esperanto,
the word soros means will sore. Oh, that's incredibly
fitting. But. That survival instinct was tested
to the absolute limit. In 1944, when Nazi Germany
occupied Hungary, 14 -year -old Soros survived
by posing as the Christian godson of an agricultural
official. Which just sounds terrifying. It was.
He even had to accompany this official to inventory
the confiscated estates of Jewish families. Escaping
that kind of environment requires this profound
psychological detachment. you learn to observe
systems from the outside, you know, understanding
that the official reality is often entirely constructed.
And that raw survival instinct, it transitions
directly into his intellectual awakening, because
he escapes to London in 1947, and he ends up
studying at the London School of Economics under
this famous philosopher, Karl Popper. Right,
which is a pivotal relationship. Yeah. And Soros
actually wanted to be an academic philosopher.
That was his absolute dream. But his grades simply
weren't good enough. That's amazing. Yeah. So
that failure basically prompted him to pivot
to banking. The irony there is just so rich.
His academic failure in philosophy is exactly
what unleashed his financial empire. He didn't
just abandon his philosophical theories when
he moved to Wall Street, he weaponized them.
Weaponized them how? Well, he applied Karl Popper's
ideas about the fallibility of human knowledge
directly to the stock market. And that leads
to what is arguably his crowning intellectual
achievement, the theory of reflexivity. Okay,
we need to spend some time on this because if
you don't understand reflexivity, you cannot
understand how Soros made his billions or like
how he spends them. Absolutely. Because traditional
economics, it generally assumes that markets
naturally find a rational equilibrium, right?
The textbook idea is that people act rationally
based on economic fundamentals. Right. But reflexivity
completely throws that traditional model out
the window. Okay. So what's his argument? Soros
argued that markets are actually driven by the
fallible heavily biased ideas of the participants
themselves. Beliefs and events are actively influencing
each other in real time So it's not just that
people misjudge the market. No, it's that their
misjudgments physically change the fundamentals
of the market. It creates these massive, self
-reinforcing, vicious or virtuous cycles of boom
and bust. OK, let me make this relatable for
you listening. Think of it like a rumor at a
high school that an upcoming party is going to
be epic. OK, I like where this is going. Because
people believe it's going to be epic, everyone
decides to go. Right. So their belief actively
makes the party epic. Until it gets too big and
the cops show up. Exactly. And that's the bust.
The belief changed the reality, which then ruined
the reality. That is actually a perfect analogy
for what Soros calls dynamic disequilibrium.
It's this state where the market never settles
into that textbook balance, but just keeps wildly
over correcting based on collective psychology.
Right. And to ground this in the real world,
look at the 2008 housing crisis from the text.
Lenders started making more easy money available.
So people bought more houses, which naturally
drove the housing prices up. Making everyone
feel rich. Exactly. Then the lenders looked at
their balance sheets and saw the collateral in
Erica. The houses were now worth more, which
made them feel safer to lend even more money.
Wow. So it's this massive, unsustainable loop.
Exactly. And Soros built his fortune by identifying
these exact loops. He bet on exactly when that
rubber band would finally snap. So reflexivity
wasn't just some abstract academic theory. For
Soros, it was literally a multi -billion dollar
weapon. A weapon he used very effectively. Which
brings us to the event. September 16th, 1992.
Black Wednesday. Yes. So Soros looks around and
he recognizes this massive flaw in the UK's position
within the European exchange rate mechanism,
the ERM. Yeah, the UK was legally obligated to
keep the value of the pound within this very
specific narrow band against the German mark.
But the UK had triple the inflation rate of Germany
and they were using these high interest rates
that were just crushing their asset prices. Right.
The pound was fundamentally weak. The government
was just burning through its own foreign exchange
reserves to constantly buy up their own currency
and create fake demand it was an illusion and
Sora sees this and he doesn't just casually bet
against the pound he builds a staggering short
position of over 10 billion dollars 10 billion
in 1992 yeah He forced the UK into a corner where
they literally ran out of financial ammunition.
They had to withdraw from the ERM and let the
pound devalue. And the result of that? He earned
himself over $1 billion in pure profit in a single
day. He literally became known as the man who
broke the Bank of England. Which cemented his
legendary status in the finance world forever.
I mean, his quantum fund became the most successful
hedge fund in history. Since 1973, it has generated
roughly $40 billion. OK, but here's where it
gets really interesting. And I want to push back
a bit here. Sure. He basically bet against an
entire country's economy for fun and profit,
as the economist Paul Krugman once described
speculators like him. Right. Krugman even coined
the term saroi for them. Exactly, saroi. So how
does a guy who actively crashes national currencies
Square with his later image as this massive global
humanitarian Well to answer that you have to
look at what he actually did with that wealth
for Soros Accumulating wealth was never the end
goal. Okay, what was it was the funding mechanism
for his ultimate philosophical ambition engineering
what he calls open societies and Understand that
we have to go back to his old professor Karl
Popper The philosopher from the London School
of Economics. Exactly. Popper's core philosophy
is based on fallibility. The idea that no human
being has a monopoly on the absolute truth. So
because our knowledge is always imperfect, the
only way a society can survive and thrive is
if it remains open. It has to protect freedom
of speech, democratic debate, and human rights.
So that bad ideas can be peacefully replaced
by better ones. Precisely. Authoritarian and
communist regimes, by contrast, are closed societies.
They claim to possess the ultimate truth and
they use force to suppress anyone who points
out their flaws. Okay, I see the connection now.
He survives a closed society built on this lethal,
absolute ideology of the Nazis. Then he goes
to London, learns about the open society. He
uses the fallibility of humans on Wall Street
to make billions. And then he takes those billions
to fund a war against closed societies globally.
So talk about the scale of this philanthropy.
It's massive. He's donated 64 percent of his
original fortune and he started early. Back in
the 1970s, he began funding black students to
attend university in apartheid South Africa,
which was a deeply closed society based on racial
absolutism. Exactly. He also actively supported
dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. He funded
the Solidarity Movement in Poland and Charter
70. in Czechoslovakia. And I saw in the sources
he even pitched this $100 million Marshall Plan
for Africa. Yeah, to foster education and employment.
And he poured massive money into higher education,
like a $500 million endowment to Bard College
in the US. And he founded the Central European
University right in his hometown of Budapest.
Right. So what does this all mean for you listening?
He's not just writing checks to charities, you
know. He's operating almost like a sovereign
nation. trying to single -handedly pry open closed
communist societies with a tidal wave of cash.
But when a private citizen uses billions of dollars
to actively engineer global political outcomes
like that, they inevitably become a massive target
for backlash from all sides. Okay, stop right
there. Before we dive into this next part, we
need to be crystal clear with you, the listener.
The sources we're looking at contain highly politically
charged material from both the left and the right.
Yes, very charged. We are absolutely not taking
sides or endorsing any of these viewpoints. Our
goal here is simply to impartially report what
is contained in the original source material
just so you can understand the full picture.
That context is vital because Soros's political
spending is largely unprecedented. Take the U
.S., for instance. He spent millions trying to
defeat George W. Bush in 2004. Which he called
the central focus of his life, right? Right.
And more recently, he's poured massive sums into
local district attorney races. He backed Larry
Krasner in Philadelphia and George Gascon in
L .A. Pushing for criminal justice reform, bail
reform, police accountability. Exactly. And the
backlash has been fierce. From the right, and
particularly from nationalist governments, he's
enemy number one. In his native Hungary, the
Fidesz government ran nationwide anti -Soros
billboard campaigns. Framing him as a national
security risk who was pushing migration. Yes,
and his wealth and Jewish identity have made
him the perfect code word for far -right conspiracy
theories, falsely framing him as a puppet master.
And that rhetoric has real -world consequences.
I mean, in 2018, a pipe bomb was mailed to his
home by Cesar Sayoc. The pushback isn't just
from the right. During the 1997 Asian financial
crisis, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir
Mohamed, blamed Soros for the massive plunge
in their currency. Oh, right. Using blatant anti
-Semitic tropes. Exactly. Claiming he was orchestrating
a conspiracy. So he gets attacked from all angles.
Which brings up a fascinating contradiction.
He writes books warning about the super bubble
of market fundamentalism. He says the free market
system is inherently flawed. Yeah. Yet he used
that exact unregulated system to become a billionaire.
Is he a hypocrite, or is he simply the only one
honest enough to exploit a broken game while
trying to change the rules? Well, he'd probably
point right back to his theory of reflexivity.
He recognizes the flaws because he understands
how human bias shapes the system. He even joked
that he used to get severe backaches when his
portfolio was positioned wrong. His body's subconscious
telling him the market reality was shifting.
Exactly. He exploited the system, yes. But he's
using the winnings to try and engineer a better
one. So let's wrap this up. Just look at the
incredible arc we've covered. from a teenage
boy hiding from the Nazis, to a frustrated philosopher
who accidentally broke the Bank of England, to
a polarizing mega donor who gave away $32 billion
to shape the world in his image. Right. And why
does this matter to you? Because whether you
agree with him or not, Soros's life proves that
abstract ideas like reflexivity and open societies
aren't just textbook theories. No, they're not.
They dictate the value of your currency. the
political ads on your screens, and the shape
of modern democracy. Which leaves you with one
final, really lingering question to chew on.
If Sorios's theory of reflexivity is true, that
our beliefs about reality actually change reality,
what happens when a billionaire uses his massive
fortune not just to predict those feedback loops,
but to artificially kickstart them in global
politics, are we all just living inside his feedback
loop? Think about it.