The Daily Beast Podcast - Britain in ‘Real Trouble’ After Queen Elizabeth’s Death

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Queen Elizabeth is an important cultural mascot in a way that Americans can’t understand and her death will have more implications for Great Britain and the world than simply who will take over the monarchy. That’s according to Ian Dunt, columnist at the ‘i’ newspaper and host of the podcasts, Oh God, What Now? and Origin Story, who tells hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy on this episode of political podcast The New Abnormal that the country faces multiple crises as it deals with the queen’s death. Also on the podcast Douglas Rushkoff, author of the new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, describes his experience talking to some very rich people about the “event.”  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What a great show we have today. First, we're going to talk to Ian Dunn, who of course is our England correspondent or something. But you may know him as the host of, Oh God, What Now, and the Origin Story podcast, as well as being the author of How to Be a Liberal.

He's going to talk to us about the Queen's death as well as their new prime minister, Liz Truss. Then we do an excellent interview with one of my favorite authors, Douglas Rushkoff, who has a new book called Survival of the Richest, Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, and he's going to talk to us all about that and a whole lot of other mind-blowing stuff. But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy! Molly Jongfest. The Queen is Dead.

The Queen is Dead. Long-lived the King. Yeah. Our British friends are super upset. Americans, as always, have not a ton of history with the Queen. but she was the queen for a long time. Yeah, I have no strong opinion about the queen. I know that a lot of British people do,

and it is a complete mystery to me, but I understand that it's, you know, different culture. We're going to have Ian on later on the show, and he's going to explain to us about just about how she was sort of an important cultural mascot in a way that none of us Americans can understand in any way. Right. I mean, look, we have Beyonce. Exactly, right.

You know, obviously this will be many, many, many, many years from now, but this country is going to be torn apart when our queen dies. I guess we have to understand what they're going through. And there is this super interesting question of whether I guess Charles will be king and that he will be the sort of first divorced king who murdered his first wife. I mean, sorry, just kidding. Just kidding. Who allegedly murdered his first wife. No.

That's not even true that he's the first. No, right, exactly. There'll be a new king, and he will be married to his second wife. And so Britain will be modern in its own strange. Oh, can we stop talking about this now, please? I just want to point out, though, that there's a... Dear God. There's a rhyme about Henry the 8th.

Does it sound like I have a gun to my head? Because I do have a gun to my head. No, I do want to just point this out, because there is a... There is a rhyme that is very well known in Great Britain about Henry the 8th's wives as a way to remember how they died. And the rhyme is divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That's his six wives. She was born in 1926, which is a very long time ago. Yes, I'm just saying that King Henry divorced twice and had two wives beheaded.

Yeah, we should stop talking about this because it's so uninteresting. The good news is that neither of us are dead, and so we can continue with the podcast. And that means talking about all the interesting stuff. Actually, talking about, you know what the most fun story today is, a story that I think that we can agree is really fun. Rick Scott, you may know him as the president from Mars attacks. Not the president, the alien. The alien from Mars attacks. The president is Jack Nicholson. The alien is Rick Scott. He is the head of the Republican Senate money stealing from Roob's campaign.

Yes. It's a tough acronym. Yes. And it's a job that no one wants. But Rick took it because besides being an alien, Rick has some presidential ambitions, which is fun because. he's a terrible politician. So him having presidential ambitions is hilarious because all of his ideas are incredibly unappealing, even to the hardest hardliner. So he and Mitch McConnell are in a kind of death match because, now, I don't know if you know this, but Rick Scott is most famous for cashing in right before his company had to pay $1.7 billion for Medicare malfeasance, right?

Yes. God, he's 70 years old. So he's a man who maybe don't want to give him some money. Well, it turns out when he's the chair of whatever that is, the Republican Take Your Money Away, Committee, he may have spent some of the money or all of the money, and now they need more money, But the problem is a lot of that money is going to one Donald J. Trump.

And he's using it for lawyers. Yes. It's the, I believe the National Republican Senatorial Committee is the name of the, is the actual name of the committee for people keeping score at home. NRCCC. Yes, just one C, though, I think. Committee chairman. Oh, NRSC.

Yes. Good point. So they took in like a, a. ton of money, like close to $200 million, $180 million, something like that. They are down to $23 million on hand. As the New York Times put it, now top Republicans are beginning to ask, where did all the money go? Yeah, well. And, well, you hired a guy, again, as Molly, as you pointed out, who is best known for... Crimes. Medicare fraud. Yeah. Which I understand that in today's Republican Party, that is what they look for in leaders, but except they're not supposed to do it to

themselves. You know, they're only supposed to steal the money and defraud voters and other people like that, not their own party. Right. And Rick Scott, as the kids say, didn't get the memo. He didn't understand the assignment, Molly. Well, we don't know if he stole it or if he just mismanaged it. Yeah. And probably he just mismanaged it. I mean, who cares? I mean, worse things have happened to better people than the Republican Party getting grifted by itself. It's a sort of beautiful Mobius strip. Oh, no, it's absolutely fantastic. And this is of a piece with a lot of things that we've talked about in the past 15, 16 years that we've been doing this podcast.

And it's that we are incredibly... I think it's been 50 years. We are incredibly lucky that so many of these Republicans are, are, wildly incompetent. Yeah. Because the damage, they've done, I mean, they've done incalculable damage to this country, even with being incompetent. But the damage that they would have done if they had been even remotely competent is,

I can't even, like, it's, I don't like to imagine it. Yes, I think that's a good point. Yeah. We would not be allowed to record this podcast from, from our camp. And Gitmo. Well, the problem is the cell service. No, it is. It's bad down there. Yeah, there's not a lot of towers. Yeah. So there's some really great little details. The New York Times did a good piece on the NRC budget. And they spent $23 million on investments to find new donors. And those investments raised $6 million. So they lost $17 million in trying to find new donors. So, and that's just obviously a drop.

the bucket because they somehow went from 180 million to 23 million, and which you would say, well, okay, well, I guess they must have spent that on all the candidates, but apparently that's not the case. There is this, you know, where do it go? It's sort of like it's the old missing sock in the, in the dryer conundrum. Yeah, that's probably not what it is, but yes. That's exactly what it is. That is exactly what it is. I have relatives who work in finance, and they talk like that all the time, Molly. I don't know. It's called a missing sock conundra.

It's taught in business schools across the country. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. But either way, the point is here that you got Rick Scott, who's at best, incompetent and worse, a criminal. And you've got, you know, he's mismanaging the Republican Party's money. And we all hate to see it. And if hate is like. Oh, I thought you were going to say if hate is like something else,

but you were just no yes no i get it no if hate is like then we hate it but i would like to say that scott is fighting back he wrote a scathing opinion piece in the washington examiner you will remember the washington examiners basically yet another one of those republican websites uh you know he's not happy he's going to fight fight fight and you know i mean okay i think ultimately we're seeing Mitch mccormick who is pretty smart, though quite evil, setting Rick Scott up for a huge fall. And I think that's where this goes. You know, if Republicans fail to capture the House or the Senate, certainly for the Senate, which looks like it's already inevitable, he'll be able to blame Rick Scott for it. Yeah. And one of the favorite games in Washington is obviously blaming someone else. Yes.

The only problem with having Rick Scott, as he's a sacrificial lamb, is he has no There's no wool. There is no wall. There's certainly not no wall. You're not going to get, you know, a nice rug out of sacrificing Rick Scott, who, by the way, I'm going to point out once again, is not the aliens in Mars attacks. He's the observer from Fringe. Oh, yes.

As our producer, Jesse Cannon well knows because he has a tattoo of Rick Scott on his person. Why are you got to do that? That's so mean. Listen, just like the observer. right, a premonition that he was going to be very important, so I got it. You guys are really missing out on the real analysis here, though. He thought it was the National Rick Scott Committee, which is why he embezzled all the right. Yeah, that makes sense.

Very good. Very good. Let's take that again, but with me saying it. Okay, three, two, one. So I know it's the National Republican Senatorial Committee, but I guess he must have thought it was the National Rick Scott Committee. There we go. There we go.

A joke's so good. It has to be stolen. Should we go back to talking about the queen? Absolutely not. I am impressed she had a lot of dogs. She did. She had a lot of corgis. Yeah.

Yeah. Love a corgi. Do you think she named them? Horgy the corgi. Bess? They all, I'm sure they had fancy British names. There's a chart that's going viral today with all the names. Oh, really?

Also, really, are we discussing this right now? Well, we had to go back. It's a holiday week, Jesse. People are just back to work. They're just back to school. They need some light entertainment and, you know, without any substance whatsoever. And we are here to provide that. I heard Steve Bannon got arrested, guys.

Yeah. This is the second time the Steve Bannon has gotten arrested. This time it's for money laundering. Wait, what is the... Can you read out, can somebody read out all the crimes Steve Bannon got arrested for? Let's see, money laundering, conspiracy, scheming to defraud for his alleged role in We Build the Wall. I'm quoting here from a Politico article. Basically, Alvin Bragg has proven once again that as long as you're not the capo...

Is this Alvin Bragg? It is. Oh, wow. He surrendered to Alvin Bragg. Yeah, Alvin Bragg, who will go after everyone but Trump? As long as you're not the capo, Alvin Bragg is on your ass. Yeah, as long as you're not Trump. Yeah, the thing about Bannon is, like, yes, obviously he's a grifter.

And like most of the people these days on the right, the Charlie Kirk's, the Dave Rubens, whatever, they're all grifters. Bannon, I think, is a grifter who also happens to be a true believer. Like, he's both. Who knows? So I think that makes him a little more interesting in a way than some of these people who just straight up don't believe what they're saying and are just in it for the money. I'm just saying, I think Bannon is absolutely he is like a, you know, white supremacist. A 22-page indictment. Yeah.

I mean, he's just a straight-up fascist, but he's also a grifter. I mean, the thing I think about Bannon that's interesting is he's smart, which you cannot be said about a lot of other members of Mac. Yeah. Like, he's actually very smart. I mean, he's, and he is ideologically quite racist. Letitia James and Alvin Bragg are going to have a press conference. They're working on this together.

The object of the conspiracy was to obscure the fact that contrary to We Build the Wall, Inks, by the way, we build the wall is all one word, representative about its president and CEO, unindicted co-conspirator I, not taking a salary. Unindicted co-conspirators, one was, in fact, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation from We Build the Wall, Inc. I feel like that's a trope. You see a lot in Trump world. people saying they don't take a salary and then getting millions of dollars other ways.

Yeah, and usually the other ways are from the money that they scammed out of the ordinary people they claim to care so much about. It's weird how that happens over and over again, coincidentally. Seems like a trope. It seems a little bit like a trope, yes. Months later, Bannon is quoted as saying at a fundraising event, remember all the money you give goes to building the wall. Right. Except the money that went to him buying multiple shirts.

I look forward to seeing him wearing two jumpsuits, one with the collar up and one with the collar down. And again, this is this interesting thing where he has been pardoned, but you can't be pardoned. If federal pardon does not work on state crimes. Right. I was going to say, you know, the interesting thing is that until the Trump administration, none of us ever had to lure that that was a thing. Right. Now it's true.

It's true. Some of us sort of learned it during the Clinton era, but we all learned, like, what constitutes an impeachable offense. We've all learned what pardons cover, what pardons don't cover, and it's amazing. The best thing about this Bannon story is he, I guess, gave some remarks as he was led into the building after being arrested. And no one could hear him because people were heckling, and one woman was yelling, Stop hurting America, you greasy grifter. Yeah, see, greasy grifter. It's the perfect term.

It really is, like, the greasy. Like, that's his, you know, like the zodiac killer and people like that. Like, he's the greasy grifter. Put it on a shirt. Yeah. Put it on a shirt. Ian Dunn is a columnist at the eye newspaper, host of, Oh God, What Now, an origin story, an author of How to Be a Liberal.

And I'd like to know, when we taped this, we didn't have total confirmation that the queen had passed. yet. So if you hear us referring to it ambiguously, that's because we wanted to wait till it was confirmed. Welcome back to the new abnormal our British correspondent. Can we call you our British correspondent?

Congratulations, you've been promoted. That's very kind of you. I mean, you don't actually pay me any money. So really, the job title sounds fantastic, but I'm not sure what you're a contributor now. Okay. To this podcast. Welcome.

Thank you very much. What the fuck is going on over there? Well, quite a lot. It's happening at the same time. So we had a new Prime Minister, I don't even know what day that was now. Was that Tuesday? I think that was Tuesday. And now it's Thursday. And it's sort of gone into emotional lockdown.

So you would be very hard pressed to be optimistic that the Queen's going to make it through because it's a very unusual set of events are taking place. We're watching the House of Commons. There was an announcement by the Prime Minister of her new energy plan. You could see one of her ministers pass her this note. Oh, the Prime Minister. To pass the Prime Minister a note, yes. You read the note in the House of Commons.

We obviously couldn't see the note, but instantly you could just tell that doesn't look normal. Right. And the leader of the opposition, the leader of the Labour Party, Kiyosthamah, was then passed a note, and he looked ashen and just instantly left the chamber along with his deputy. And that is absolutely not a normal thing to do in the middle of a Prime Minister's statement. So then it was pretty clear. Unusual things were happening. And then the statement came out from Buckingham Palace.

Now, Buckingham Palace releasing a statement saying that... It's unusual, right? It's very. unusual. Exactly. Like as soon as that happens, you're like the mere fact of this statement, even though some of the language is reassuring, she's comfortable, blah, blah, the mere fact of the statement just sort of made you feel like, okay, here we are. And pretty quickly after that, the news channels here, so BBC One just switched to the news. And shortly after that, Hugh Edwards, who's probably sort of the most august, long-lasting newsreader appeared in a black suit.

And that was the moment for me where I was like, okay, so they've got Hugh Edwards with a black suit. And that tends to indicate that this isn't going to win well. And she's 96 years old just for that. So she's not young. And then there's also this thing. I mean, I think that's an important detail. There's also this thing where the newscasters are wearing black ties. Will you explain that? There's an extraordinary degree of preparation for an event like that has gone on for decades. I think they started prepping for this in the 1960s. There are whole alarm systems within the BBC and the Foreign Office that are designed specifically for dealing with this event. I think it's called Project London Bridge.

London Bridge is falling, I think, is the code name for it. Yes, I read about it in The Guardian. It's very intricate, very, very detailed. And, you know, about when do the trains move? I mean, down to the millisecond of like when the funeral possession would reach Westminster and when Big Ben would sound. And that includes the media. So the media, there's even a sort of a special light system that applies for commercial

radio, you know, the stuff playing like 1980s pop hits, that then leads them to start playing completely different music. So suddenly they have to play very sad music, that'll go on for days. I think it was in 2011 that a guy from BBC Radio 1, which is supposed to be like the young radio station plays mostly pop music. So as you know, if you hear this kind of music on radio one, you should turn on the TV because something very bad has happened. It's usually it's going to be there's a war or a major attack or the Queen is dead. And so it's very, very carefully coordinated. As soon as you see that kind of clothing come out, that indicates that things are going in a particular direction. It's interesting to me when I read this article about it,

which is from 2017, so obviously this is pretty well known. There's a lot of this that goes on, like they don't necessarily tell you the queen is dead when she dies. You know what the thing is, we don't know how this works because we've only ever had one queen. Right. I don't know anyone that remembers another queen. Right. Yeah, I mean, my dad is, you know, I think 75, I think. I should really know his age, but apparently I don't. He's 75. I mean, my dad wouldn't know any other monarch. So we just don't have any experience of what this is like. I suppose to try and explain it. The way it feels right now is you can kind of feel the emotional wave building. And that is personal as well, by the way.

And that will apply to people who are Republicans here too. And you can see them even now expressing it on Twitter. You know, loads of half of my feed is people going, I don't care about the royal family. I'm not a royalist. So why am I crying? She's a larger cultural experience than just being the queen. Right.

Well, she's all you know. It's very hard, right, talking to Americans about it because, of course, that role for you guys is the president. But it's really not. It's really not exactly because it's political, right? So you can't, you know, you all hate, a bunch of them and maybe like another, you know, but more importantly, they will go. You know, they'll go in either four or eight years. I mean, they won't be lasting for 70 or 80 or however

long she's been there. It's just on a national, emotional level, it's quite hard to even begin to comprehend what it will do to us. Like, it's, and it's such a strange kind of facet of the human experience, because it's not personal, really. I mean, you feel it personally, but it's not like you've suffered a bereavement. It's about your sense of country and your sense of identity within the country and a mass feeling of that, of people feeling at the same time. And of course, in that taking place in a country that functionally is completely unable to talk about its emotions. And so all of that will be a very, it's going to be a very strange process. And today, you kind of just get the sort of distant thunder of that emotional process.

You can hear it. But obviously, you know, it hasn't hit yet. So let's talk about your new prime minister. Oh, God. I mean, I go to England for a quick trip. trip. What the hell is happening? I do love to stick to this idea that you're somehow personally responsible for all of this, like some kind of back-kick sort of form of chaos, yeah, chaos agent. Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to be, but it just happens.

So, I mean, I told you last time, I think. When we had dinner in July, yes. Yeah, and then the chaos began. So I told you guys last time I think about the cheese speech, the cheese and pork markets speech. Yes, remind our listeners who are not as versed in British weirdness. So a few years ago, when she was a cabinet secretary, she did a speech to the Conservative Party on how disgraceful it was that Britain imported so much of its cheese and on our aspirations in the Chinese pork market.

And it was the weirdest, most presentationally appalling and intellectually bereft speeches I've ever seen a British politician make. But you would think basing it on pork and cheese, it wouldn't be. You know, even the cheese thing is just extraordinary. Because it's just right. How can you love Brexit so much that you now hate Brie? Like, how can you have become so broken psychologically that you reject French cheese? Very good. It's better than cheddar.

I mean, cheddar is, frankly, one of the most overrated cheeses on earth. That speech should have destroyed. That's for me. No, I mean, it's true. It's true. We got to stay focused to your team. Okay. continue with the speech because we're getting very distracted on the types of cheeses.

So, I mean, that speech would have ended anyone's political career in a functioning country. I mean, it was just, and I do, I strongly recommend that anyone that hasn't seen it, watches it. And you should watch the full version just to see just the way that she tries to replicate what she thinks humans behave like. She is a deeply, deeply broken personality. So if you don't have this speech, and it should have ended her career, and now that woman, of all human beings in this country, and I still can't quite get my head around it. She's actually the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. She that's that who the prime minister is right now. She is, as I said,

presentationally utterly bereft, intellectually, you're almost completely absent. I got told a story the other day by a civil servant who worked with her. There's this sort of tactic that civil servants have where they just sort of pack the options with shit. So there's one thing that they want the minister to do. So they come up with about three other options, all of which are completely insane and no one would do. And that way they box the minister in and try to control them. They stopped doing it with Liz Trust because reliably she always picked the maddest fucking option.

That's very, very Trumpy, right? Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So the whole system for controlling MPs falls apart because she doesn't really function like a normal human being. And she is, again, now in charge of the entire country, extremely right wing, I mean, quite deranged. So to give you an impression of the derangement, she was asked during an interview

the other day, is the French president, Emmanuel Macron, friend or foe? I mean, also, stop for a minute, just consider what has happened to this country that that is even a fucking question that people ask an incumbent British Prime Minister. And she said, yet to be determined. She couldn't even answer. That's how far as we've gone, one of the greatest democracies on earth and one of Britain's closest allies. But because it's France, which obviously makes cheese that somehow appallingly we buy, she has decided that he can't be judged. He's not necessarily a friend of this country. When she was asked about Donald Trump,

she changes her tone altogether. She's asking, you know, saying, has he broken the law, blah, blah, blah. She says, I can't possibly comment on someone who might be running to become the president of an ally country. So that gives you an indication of where she is politically. That's what she is. But I should add, she's very boring to listen to. So it's hard to get too upset.

She's saying all this dreadful shit, and obviously, like, your heart is upset by it. But actually, it's quite hard to stay awake. Her intonation, her choice of words, the content of what she says is so tiresome, so profoundly tedious, that in a way it's mitigates against the emotional impact. So you would say she's like Boris without the brains. That's interesting. She's different. I think probably she does have core beliefs, unlike Johnson.

We've discussed this in the past, you know, what do you want them to have? really bad beliefs that they genuinely hold, or otherwise, I think she does genuinely hold her beliefs, which is just kind of boring 1980s sort of laissez-faire market knows best, you know, that's right-wing reactionary sort of chat. That's basically what she thinks. I think she genuinely holds those views. So she's probably less vacuous than he is. She's infinitely less charismatic. I mean, there's that, you know, there's two ways around it. Like, I mean, he knew how to tap into the British susceptibility towards irony. And that was a, for the moment that it worked, until people realized that they were the

butt of the joke, that was a really powerful. That was a really powerful political mechanism. She doesn't have anything like that. I mean, charitimately, it's like watching something die. So there's that, that's different as well. She's probably a better human being. I mean, it would be quite hard to find a worse one. I've got to say weak enough, you know, today, when the news about the queen came, I was just

really grateful that Boris Johnson wasn't prime minister when that happened. Say more. Well, I just, you know, because he's such a cynical, manipulative clown that I just didn't want that to be the prime minister talking to the country of that period. It's sort of almost anyone else would be better than having him in that position. And therefore, it is better to have her in that position than it is him. He's only just gone, like two or three days ago. So the timing kind of works. And the fact that I thought that, I'm kind of processing this as I'm talking, because also I think this might be the first time I've ever said anything nice about Liz Truss. The fact that I thought that indicates that I clearly do think that she's a better human being than Boris Johnson was.

But then, you know, he was just fundamentally like a really quite an unpleasant human being once you got past the fake Bonner Me. And on that basis, yeah, I mean, you know, so she is superior in that respect, I guess. I feel a bit sickened by the things that are coming out of my mouth. Look, man, where does the UK go now? have this incredible inflation problem. I'm thinking the number is 10.1%, but that seems like too high. But I think that's what it is. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's going to go up from there. We're fucked. I mean, it's very bad. Yeah. And what we're looking at is, is catastrophic short and medium term decline, which is quite a thing to say for a country that's been in decline for nearly a

century now. So no, I mean, we're genuinely real trouble here. I mean, the kind of energy bills that people are talking about, you know, three and a half thousand a month, going up to five thousand a month. I mean, that's the kind of, you know, that's the shit that kills people. I mean, that's where you can't feed, you can't feed your family, you know, or you have to decide to keep warm. So she had to step in and do something about it. She clearly still doesn't have a plan for how she's going to do that, which is a frankly unbelievable thing, given that this has been going on for about six months, but she clearly has no plan. That announcement. That announcement, that she made in the comments today was basically to say, I promise I'll come up with a plan later and I'll give you some financial, you know, information. None of that matters now because of the Queen's stuff, but nevertheless, she clearly doesn't have a plan. The NHS, the National Health Service is in a state of complete disrepair. People dying for ambulances, people that have had strokes, waiting for over an hour for an ambulance, being held outside the hospital for hours, dying in that ambulance, people being kept in hallways for days on stretches. It's in complete disrepair and it's not even winter yet. You see, industrial, this

disputes across the landscape. I mean, we're talking at the moment of like half public sector workers who are in some stage of an industrial dispute that could lead to strikes. And then you start looking at, you know, Scotland's pushing very, very hard for another independence referendum. Liz Truss, active in trying to stoke a trade war with Europe and trying to break international law over the Brexit deal that she did. You know, you look around. There is nothing that is working in this country. Like absolutely nothing. It feels in a really advanced state of decline. And then again, I don't want to keep on coming back to the Queen's, but it just feels almost like it's written for a BBC drama.

But that to be happening right now is this proper sense of national crisis and a Prime Minister in place who doesn't show any of the intellectual or moral capacity to deal with it. It's pretty fraught stuff at the moment. From what I'm reading, most people think she will not be able to survive this. Your newly installed Prime Minister. My hunch was the next election is sort of tabled for about two years from now. And I would have put money on the fact that she wouldn't make it for those full two years. You know, that she would be toppled probably by Johnson himself.

He seems to want to stick around in the comments and have another go at it. It's the queen thing. You know, the queen thing just changes everything. It's such a foundational moment that politically you can't even begin to see the outlines of how that would impact. but my guess is that it will trigger a really traumatized appeal, kind of a bit like what COVID did for Johnson in the early days, people were scared, and so they'd go towards the leader. I think, I mean, at the moment this morning, you know,

her opinion polling was terrible, even though she's just come in. Usually you get a bounce when you first go into Downing Street, and that will do you for a good few months before people realize you're useless. If the queen goes, I would expect that there would be a big wave of support for her, not even in an articulable way, but not even something people could intellectualize, but they're not going to be in the emotional space

of criticizing a prime minister. They're just not. It's just not going to be that. People are going to want reassurance. They're going to feel very unusual, and they won't know where to put it. And I guess, and it's just a guess, because the size of it is too big to have any kind of accuracy about your forecast.

But my guess is that that would actually, I feel kind of cheap saying this, but I think that would actually lead towards a poll bounce for her. and it might change the fundamental underlying political calculations around her premiership. There's no way to unfuck this thing, right? Yeah, you know what there is. No, there is. I mean, what it requires is a serious country that elects serious people who have serious plans for how to fix things.

There is nothing that is happening in this country that has to be this way. It's because of populism. You know, over and over, it's because you elect people that come up with imaginary enemies, the Europeans or metropolitan liberals or whoever else to blame on their, problems rather than sitting down and doing the hard, granular, painstaking policy work that is required to fix national problems like productivity and the economy, like your trading networks, like the health service. It can be done. We've had governments in the past that have done it. And they're the kind of governments that are a bit more boring than, you know, putting a clown suit

on a man and ruffling up his hair and going, ho, ho, ho, aren't the foreigners also very funny? It's about sitting down and doing the fucking work of politics. And it can be fixed. The country can be fixed. And the country will be fixed the moment that it decides that politics is actually a serious business and not just another sitcom that you watch on the television. And I'm going to ask you this again because I can't not ask this again and again. Can UK go back to Europe? All of your problems, right? Part of the problem is you can't get workers. That's because you're out of the EU. You can't get, you know, fuel. You can't get this. You can't get that. All of these problems, or at least the lion's share. I mean, you serve.

have a lot of other problems too, but a lot in share of what you're dealing with right now is caused by Brexit. Right. It's exacerbated by Brexit. I mean, lots of them aren't cool. I mean, you know, so the inflation stuff isn't necessarily caused by Brexit, but it's exacerbated. In every angle, it's certainly exacerbated by it. At the moment, someone like me, obviously very keen to get back into Europe, I think the way that we look at it, the way that I'm looking at it, I don't speak to it. I mean, will Europe take you back? Yeah, I mean, they would need to be pretty sure that this wasn't just a passing fad. So I mean, to me, I think the thing is you get a labor government in for the second term, what you're looking for them to promise is to join the customs union.

Customs union is, you know, that joint sort of tariffs organization that you have around Europe. So it's kind of a, you can join that without being in Europe. You're not signing up to freedom of movement and all the immigration stuff. You're not signing up to the political project. You just say, right, we're going to join the customs union. And to someone like me, I think we think you join the customs union and gradually like the remorseless truth of the, you're not going to of political and trading gravity from there, we'll just take over and bring you closer and closer towards your biggest trading partner.

But it's sort of, you're probably not going to go full sale, let's join the EU in sort of seven years' time. You're going to say, let's do the customs union, and then you kind of let political reality take over after that. You are in a situation, which America is in, to a lesser degree, which is you have a tight labor market, you need workers. all of this can be solved by immigration. I mean, you have it worse because you're smaller and you need more, you know,

but ultimately the same problem in the States. I mean, does anyone ever go like, oh, immigration could solve this problem? Or we're just going to completely not do that? Yeah, yeah. You know the funny thing is that the extent of immigration hasn't fallen since Brexit. It just changed location. So because they know, because ultimately, when you get past all the political rhetoric and you go and sit in Downing Street, you sit in the cabinet office, you sit in the

civil service, they know that you need the immigrants. So as soon as you lose European immigration, sort of young French, young Spanish, young Poles, young checks coming over, it shifts over and you start seeing a rise in typically Asian immigration, you know, India, Pakistan. So on some level that's well understood, on a basic economic level you need it. The debate is pretty much cut into the cultural war lines publicly of, you know, know, left-wing, liberal, metropolitan saying, yes, we like immigration and sort of towns, especially in the North and Midlands being more hostile. However, we've now seen for a sustained period an increase in support for immigration and recognition of the benefits that it brings. That was from

before Brexit. It was about three or four years before Brexit that started. And it's continuing now. At the moment, there are more people that will respond to persistent opinion polls, saying that immigration brings benefits to Britain than those who think that it damages. Britain. Now, that's unusual. We didn't have that in the 90s. We didn't have that in the noughties. It was always much more popular to condemn immigration. And that's probably a demographic shift. That's probably just that there's, you know, more older people dying, more younger people coming online as voters. They tend to hold much more liberal views. But also they closed heat throw because they didn't have anyone to unload the bags. Every single part of the country is

absolutely falling apart. And in many cases, that is labor shortages or skills shortages. You can't pin all of it on immigration, but in lots of cases it is that. But the deep, the thing that gives you most satisfaction, the thing that gives most hope for the future of the country, isn't even about the news right now. It's basically that younger people hold different views on immigration. They hold different views on an open society. They are coming online now, electorally, in really significant numbers and fundamentally changing some of the terms of that debate. Let us pray. Thank you so much, Jesse, has now just texted me, we are way over. I didn't even get the dragon face. Thank you, Ian. Thanks, money. See, C.

Douglas Fruskov is the author of Survival of the Richest, Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. So, Douglas, you wrote this article years ago that I paid you the compliment of, I think it's the article I've shared the most about your experience talking to some very rich people about the quote-unquote event. Can you explain to us what that is and why they were so concerned about it? It's weird. I mean, you know, I'm a media theorist kind of tech thing. care guy. So I get often, you know, mistaken for a futurist and invited to try to help digital type people and investors basically choose what to invest in. It's not what I enjoy doing, but if they pay enough, I go and do it. You know, so they offered a ton of money. Like, I calculated one third of my

professor's salary at CUNY to go out and do a talk about the digital future. Oh, wow. At some desert resort. I usually try not to do these. I want to be a good, you know, anarcho-sindicalist, radical occupy person and not give secrets to the evil side, but screw it. Money talks and so do I. So I went and did this thing. Tell us where it was. I can't tell you exactly because I don't want them to come after me. It was out in the desert at this crazy resort that actually somebody emailed me who identified it from my description. It's like got these weird like pavilions nestled into the rocks of this big place. It's like three hours. It's like three hours. from the airport, although when I got there, like right down the highway from it, there's this

municipal airfield where all these G5s and... Oh, so I know where this is. Yeah. Yeah. I think you set this to me as a vacation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know where this is. Mac Greenfield says it's too expensive.

But I know where it is. Yeah. They have like hot tubs in every room. And yeah, well, these guys have could afford it. So I went there and I thought they were taking me to the talk. But I was in the green room waiting to get miced up. And they brought these five guys in. and they were five. Well, three of them were definitely billionaires. Two of them, I think,

are billionaires, but I couldn't find them on any lists later. And they started peppering me with these questions. First, it was the typical questions, you know, like the augmented reality or virtual reality, Bitcoin or Ethereum, you know, what's going to happen? And then it was Alaska or New Zealand. And they spent the whole, really, majority of their hour with me, asking me things like, how do we maintain control of our security force after the event, right? The pen, or nuclear disaster, climate change or whatever it is that, you know, renders civilization, obsolete, and they've got to survive in their, on their water world, sea-steading pontoons. Amazing.

It was crazy. This was pre-pandemic, though, right? This was pre-pandemic, right? So I could really, I still was able to laugh entirely at them. Right. I think they were crazy. Over the next few years, I realized I, too, am one of them. You know, thinking about installing at Amazon doorbell or something to keep out the riffraff while they

drop their, you know, Grubhub and DoorDash at my door and I spray it with with, with, uh, Clorox and bring it in. But no, but these guys, I mean, they were pathetic. I really, honestly, for most of the time, I thought this was a game. I thought that they were going to, just like the walls were going to drop and they were going to, you know, candid camera or something. Right. Right. I'm punked. Your Ashton Coucher's going to come out. But they didn't. And maybe it's Partly, you know, on the one hand, I was so sad to think, here is the richest, most powerful people I've ever been in a room with and they feel utterly incapable of influencing the future, you know, that the best thing they could do is hide.

Hide, right, is accept the inevitable catastrophe of their own making and try to earn enough money to escape it, you know? Right. Or what I came to believe, and especially during COVID, was, no, this isn't the disaster for them. This is a fantasy. This is a wish fulfillment. This is why they've been living the way they are.

This is why they want to go to Mars and virtual reality and build their tech. They're afraid of women. They're afraid of nature. They're afraid of us. And they want an excuse to abandon ship. Wow. That's really interesting. You think some of this is like, not to get too psychological here, but that this is people experiencing guilt.

Them? Yes. Like they know what they've done. And so they're convinced that it will come back at them. Well, interestingly, you know, I never talked about this, but they also mentioned a few times, I mean, they're a little afraid of AI and stuff. And they were talking about Terminator-like scenarios that the robots and the AIs are going to come after them because we've, you know, been mean to them. And I'm like, do you really think that's what's going, you know, that maybe these movies about robots coming back because we enslaved them? could that be sort of white Western tech bro culture's way of wrestling with the legacy of slavery, maybe?

Right. No, but I mean, it's clearly there's all sorts of weird issues here that are coming back, if that makes any sense. Yes, I do think so. I mean, the way I've normally been framing it is, you know, that these tech bros are stuck in a mindset that they think they can build enough technology to, you know, to escape from the externalized harm. that they can stay one step ahead, like the Epson executive, who would actually make a decision to have all their printers brick after a certain number of pages, so people need to throw them out and buy new ones,

that that guy's thinking he's earning enough money in that transaction to insulate himself from the damage he's creating by throwing printers on waste heaps. But I think you're right that there's also this kind of not original sin, but all of the guilt of what they've been doing, over these years, manipulating people, destroying the environment and all. Right. That it's not necessarily just that they want to insulate themselves from it,

but that they have an outsized fear. In some ways, they have more fear of this stuff than you and I do. Yeah. If the event has happened, right? Like, we've had the event. Yeah, I know. We had a massive pandemic. It killed a million people.

It brought the average lifespan down two years. Like, we had it. It happened. I mean, there may be more. maybe worse, but like, we've lived through it. So I'm curious to know how do you think, and again, I know this happened before the pandemic, but I'm curious, how do you think this changes their calculus? I think their calculus changed around the time Trump got elected.

You know, that's when we see the tech bros suddenly wake up and go, oh, you know, social dilemma. Maybe social media is bad for people. Oh, oh, you know. We're going to, you know, keep all our stock in Facebook and Google and all. but we're going to make movies on Netflix about how sorry we are. Good luck with that. You know, it's like they're never going to divest.

It's like they're always going to keep one foot in there. I honestly think it was Trump, on the one hand, Zika, remember the Zika? Right. Oh, I remember that. That was part of what was getting them concerned. So a lot of them, right around the time I did the thing, they were all supposed to be going down to the Brazil Olympics

and they all had to cancel their things. And part of this, the reason I did this thing was, I think I was supposed to go down, originally down, you know, with them to like Brazil or something. It was one of those kind of things. So they were aware, you know, the flames that touched their Malibu houses. And it's like, huh, it's getting a little hot under the collar. But also, these were, if there's such a thing, these were kind of low-level billionaires who'd been reading about Peter Thiel and C-steading and reading about Musk and Bezos with their rocket chips.

And they were kind of thinking, huh, what are we going to do? The only reason they call someone like me is because they think I might understand how Teal and Musk are thinking better than they are. I asked them, I said, don't you guys build rocket chips and stuff? Can't you just get out of here? And they were like, oh, no, we're low-level billionaires. You know, the best we can do is like try to get a seat on one of Branson's flights. But we can't do it ourselves. So they're in that weird in-between place where they're rich enough to be evil, but not quite rich enough to get off the planet.

To be really evil. Yeah. That's amazing. So, Douglas, obviously, after this, you wrote that article many years ago, but now you have a book about it. Many, many by today's standards. It's, you know, four years ago, I guess. But I guess that's many by the three-day news cycle standards. Yes, yes, yes.

Four million blog years, as we used to say. Exactly. Early Trump era. Yeah. So where did you get to with this book that you just wrote about this? Oh, it was weird. You know, I left that thing kind of depressed, first thinking. Shocked.

Yeah. That these are the richest, most powerful people I've ever been with in my life. And they are less powerful than I am. They feel utterly impotent to do anything. And then more I thought about it, the more funny they seem to me. And I started to look back at my own kind of career as a tech thinker, philosopher, and the people I've engaged with who I've been so intimidated by. And all of them started to seem the same to me.

And I came up with this sort of, you know, concept. I call it the mindset, which is this sort of silicon, Valley belief that humanity is a problem to be solved with technology and that they can somehow, you know, make a car that could drive fast enough to escape from their own exhaust, you know. Right. And it just doesn't make sense. I remember really when I was like eight or nine years old, we used to have those air conditioners that go in the windows of our little house and queens. And I went outside and I felt all the hot air blowing from the air conditioner. And I remember going to my dad and saying, wait a minute, aren't we just making the world hotter with the air conditioner? So we're going to

It turns out yes. So the seven-year-old got it. But these guys kind of don't, that they can't get away from it. What I did was I kind of went on this journey to understand where did this mindset really come from. And it turns out it's a really old sort of dominator mindset of it's based in partly in a kind of atheistic scientism and a techno-solutionism and these kind of adherence to the biases of digital code and understanding human relationships purely as market phenomena and and overall, this kind of deep fear of women and nature. I mean, I went all the way back to really Francis Bacon, who's kind of the founder of empirical science and this great quote, the Royal Academy

of Sciences uses and attributes to him, where he says that empirical science will allow us to take nature by the forelock, hold her down, and submit her to our will. And instantly what I think of is, oh, Jeffrey Epstein, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to find a lot of scientists. And then I started thinking, oh, you know, I was once at a party with Jeffrey Epstein at, of course, John Brockman's apartment where I got into an argument as, again, a young, intimidated, you know, I was the tech kid that they let in these rooms because it was like me and Jason Calacanis knew about, you know, technology. So we got invited to it. Well, Brockman was like obsessed with technology.

too and writers. Right, and rightly so. It was the new thing. So I'm there at this party with Richard Dawkins, who's talking about memes and how human beings are just, it was really awful. He kind of described human beings almost like cassette players that we just get run by various memes where we're like running memetic software and we're not really conscious and there's nothing really going, like move on, nothing to see here, move on along. And I was arguing that no human beings we're kind of weird and quirky and special. There's something about us. Maybe there's a spirit or soul or something that maybe consciousness proceeds, matter.

And they look at me like him and the scientist, like I'm crazy. And eventually they dismiss me. They say, oh, Rushka, you're just a moralist. I'm like a moralist. And they're like, I'm just not immoral. I'm not immoral. I'm not amoral. And, you know, I've read my Victinstein, you know, and whatever.

I know that there's other meaning systems that scientism is one meaning system. It has the assumption that we live in an evidence-based reality. I mean, Scientism can only prove itself, finally. And they call me a moralist, but now 20, 30 years later, who is it pictured, you know, that you see on Twitter on Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express heading to the TED conference? It's Dawkins and the same scientists. That's what happens because their belief that human beings are nothing but carriers of genes

dovetails perfectly with Jeffrey Epstein's desire to, you know, giant islands and dormitories for teenage girls to host his fetuses, you know? Yeah. It's like so much of that sci-fi stuff is actually what they think. It's where they got their education, a lot of these people. I mean, especially the tech bros, they have a good idea when they're a freshman in college and they get plucked by, you know, Peter Thiel or Sequoia Capital. Before they've taken economics, before they've taken ethics or philosophy or history.

So you get a child, you know, a child brain with, they don't even. and have the ganglionic, you know, the myelin sheaths aren't developed over their frontal lobe. They're pulled from college and they, Peter Thiel becomes, you know, their new parent figure. So of course they're crazy. Of course, you end up, you know, with Mark Zuckerberg, you know, one of the richest men in the world trying to be like Augustus Caesar and copying his haircut. I mean, I'm glad it's Augustus and not Caligula, right? Right.

Is that really what it is? Is that why he has that terrible hair? That is why it's to look, look at the things. He's got pictures of himself with the statue of August. That's what he wants to be because Augustus Caesar built all these, you know, all this infrastructure in Rome. He was a great dictator, but he was a dictator all the same. You know, it's very insane. Read the rest of the story, please.

Take one course, one good course. Yeah. Oh, that's fucking brutal. Yeah, it's like child mind. It's child mind. And then when you combine that with the fact that wealth, now we know wealth erodes empathy, that billionaires, it turns out, their brains change. They don't identify.

Wait, stop. Neither Jesse nor I have heard anything about this. I hadn't either. No, there's studies now. They like shove billionaires in MRI machines. And what they find out is that when you reach a certain level of wealth, your empathy begins to erode. That the neuroscientists who studied it said that billionaires, they don't identify with the pain or emotions of others.

And it's, their brains show evidence that they, they have damaged frontal lobes, as if they've had head trauma. And it's hard to know the cause and effect, right? But apparently it doesn't happen until after, you know, that it deteriorates after the wealth. It's not that there's sociopaths before, even if they, even if they might be. But I think what it comes from partly is the guilt, you know, that if you're going to try to win in the way that they understand winning, it means.

leaving the others behind. I mean, every one of these businesses, all these technologies, they're all based on what business people call an exit strategy, you know, which means that you leave someone else holding the bag and you get out with the money. And every kid, every billionaire, this is what they do. They might have a good idea when they're a freshman in college for a new technology that's going to connect people with cab drivers or people with each other or this, With that, they take a few million dollars from venture capitalists, and then they're asked to pivot towards something else. It's entirely less generous to its users and workers and entirely more extractive.

So then you have, if everything you're building, if all of the technologies we're using are based on some exit strategy or another, eventually you get to the point where you think, I need an exit strategy from this whole thing. And that's where they're at. Wow. So interesting. shocking to me. And then when you see how it dovetails not just with old science, and this is where

it got really scary, but it dovetails with like Bannon and accelerationism and, you know, the new alt-right. Wait, talk about that more too. Well, it sort of, it works in two ways. And I was trying to make a schematic to make it really simple to be able to explain it. But on the one hand, the Q&ONN people and conspiracy theorists, they're the only ones who really take the tech bros at their word. Right. You've got a lot of well-meaning neoliberal tech bros who go to Burning Man and do some ayahuasca and come back and go, oh, climate change, we've destroyed the world. I've got a software stack for that, right? I've got my new techno-solutionist eco-village plan, like SimCity, as long as we clear-cut this forest and, you know, wipe away all of Europe, I can plant my seed and grow my new civilization.

You know, at least Musk is going to do it on Mars, you know, God bless. Yeah. But they're crazy, right? It's like the great reset that comes out. out of Davos and the World Economic Forum, that we're going to put all of the, you know, all of the world on a blockchain and monitor pollution and we'll save the world with these new computers. It's all fa cacta, right?

This doesn't work. It doesn't work. It works as well as Bitcoin works. It's not a thing. But the people who believe it are the conspiracy. They go, oh, my God, you know, they've got nanobots and Bitcoins and cryptos that are going to track everything and do, you know, and wear watches and implants.

So they believe it. And of course they're going to think of it as this awful conspiracy theory that they have to fight. And then on the other hand, you've got guys like Steve Bannon or even Musk who go, oh, look, these people believe this stuff. I can leverage this energy. And you know, two parts Gamergate, three part conspiracy theorist and one part Q and on is going to yield me my army of meme, troll, angry Jan sixth conspiracy theorists who are going to bring. bring this thing down. And bring this thing down is the operative phrase there. So you've got Bannon, who is what's called an accelerationist. So are these tech billionaires. It's an idea that came from a science fiction novel, which is that you accelerate technology in society fast enough to tear it down so that you can start again.

And lo and behold, you've got guys talking about game B, right? Game B is like, we're living in game A, but they're going to do, Don't worry. We're going to just reboot control, alt, delete human civilization and reboot the system. Yikes. No, that's not a, that's not a coherent theory of change. Thank you so much, Doug. Please come back soon.

Andy Levy. Molly Dungfest. Who is your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is a guy who just won't go. He just won't go away. And he really, really needs to. He's the former governor of the great, the tremendous state of New York. Who could that be?

And his name is Andrew Cuomo. As activist Durey shared on Twitter during the week, he has an ad running on Facebook that is paid for by friends of Andrew Cuomo, which has to be alike because he don't have friends. Why does he have ads going? Well, that's the thing is, so it's a big ad and it's got a picture of, of Andrew sitting there and it says next to it, Cuomo's resignation is hashtag Me Too excess, not success. And then the copy itself that is under Andrew Cuomo's name above the ad says, the story about Governor Cuomo is one of political grudges and a Me Too driven rush to judgment. And then it links to a New York Daily News story, which I assume.

Oh, yes. Yeah. An editorial. was written by an actual pile of steaming shit. Lindsay Boylambout was one of Cuomo's first accusers. Years ago, by the way, and she got destroyed for it. She got absolutely destroyed for it. And good for her.

She's still out there fighting. But she pointed out that there's some, you know, New York state law that allows Cuomo to use, like, campaign funds and stuff or whatever he has from when he was governor to run these ads, to pay for these ads. It's absolutely gross. Like just, again, just go away you and your dumb brother. Between the two of them, they don't have a single ethic.

They both just need to go away and they both refuse to go away. And we're stuck with them. And we're stuck with Chris Cuomo doing some show on, I guess, Dan Abrams network called News Nation. And Andrew Cuomo is trying somehow to salvage a reputation that in a sane world, would be beyond repair. And it just made me, it makes me realize, like we lost something when we stopped exiling people. I'm anti-death penalty, but I do think island exile is sort of the way to go for some people. And I think we need to bring that back.

I think we need a serious discussion about bringing exile back to the U.S. criminal code. But until then, I am just going to continually and continuously say, fuck that guy. Do you want to know who my fuck that guy is? Yes, please. His name is Ronanon. He is from the great state of Wisconsin. He sucks. And he's this morning.

The very narrowly divided Senate is trying, the few sane Republicans are trying desperately to codify same-sex marriage before the end of the term. Because they're really worried as well. I think we all are that the superfluing. Court, which is now 80% Republican, it's not 80% Republican, it's six Republicans and three normal justices left, that they are going to go after same-sex marriage, just like they went after Roe. It seems very likely that that is a possibility. And so a few same-republicans are trying to codify same-sex marriage, Oberfield, and Ron John, Ronan just wants us to know. that he believes that the same-sex marriage was wrongly decided.

And he is not going to support the codification, not that he would have anyway. But I just want to point out, like, and I really do think Ron and On sucks. And he's constantly pushing anti-Vax, conspiracy theories, lots of stupid crap. But he also is, he's running in a swing state. Like, he's not running in Mississippi. be. Like, he is running in a very purple state with a Democratic governor. And it's just interesting to me that he thinks that he can pull that. I also continue to wonder, is he just stupid or evil? I think it's both. Yeah. I mean, the good news is he's down in the polls, but I'm told by a reliable source that he was also down in the

polls in his last race. Is that correct, Molly? Yes, against Russ Feingold. No, I mean, look, and you know, the truth is, I mean, if we've seen anything from the last six races after Roe, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we've seen that the polling, there's a lot of, we really don't know how to poll. So we'll see, right? We will see indeed, Molly. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens?

Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studied the Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.