TRASHFUTURE - Big Paper is Watching

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Riley, Hussein, and Nate look at the collision course between a rentier economy with a shrinking set of (allegedly) productive activities to support it… and realise the podcast has become de facto illegal in Brisbane for our consistent pro-hoon position, for which we make no apologies. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’re touring the Midlands, the North, and (one city in) Scotland in May! We’ll be in Birmingham on May 14, Leeds on May 15, Manchester on May 16, and Glasgow on May 21. Tickets are available here: https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/events *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg *ROME ALERT* Milo and Phoebe have teamed up with friend of the show Patrick Wyman to finally put their classical education to good use and discuss every episode of season 1 of Rome. You can download the 12 episode series from Bandcamp here (1st episode is free): https://romepodcast.bandcamp.com/album/rome-season-1 Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome back to this free episode of TF. We are in an unusual and new configuration today. It is Riley in studio with Nate. Yeah, that's correct. I'm in studio. I came in on the weekend to handle some stuff before I took two weeks on a sort of working holiday with my wife and basically Donkey Kong showed up in the studio and threw fucking barrels at all of our plans.

And so now the guy who is normally twiddling knobs and connecting things and telling people to talk into their microphones is on. People know me from the show that I am at live shows. I am in the cast, but it became obvious a couple of years ago that when we were doing all remote recordings that like someone had to fucking stage manage, otherwise it would be a nightmare. And six, if it's five, five hosts and a guest, then it's basically a blazing squad song and no one likes blazing squad anymore.

So all right, citations need it right fine. He's saying you can go into a treatise on defending the blazing squad. I mean, I just want to reiterate, but I'm upset and like no one's found out this information and I'm really desperate to find it. There were free like reserve members of the blazing squad, according to like the official like website. And I want to find out who they were, what it was like to be a reserve member of blazing squad.

So blazing squad had defense in depth is what you're saying. You're only on blazing squad one out of every six weekends. It's the best way to get away from home. I want to find the reserve ones. I've got so many questions to ask. So if you do know anything about them, then what do you think the blazing squad reservists are up to now? I know, I know for a fact, at least one of them is like shilling a coin on Instagram.

Not even though just just based on the personality type. I feel as though it must be very, very challenging because even though they were financially successful, there were so many members that you basically got enough to buy like a decorative coaster for your house. And so like anything that looks like it's going to pay dividends where you can trade on the name brand recognition of the blazing squad, you're going to have to use it. And whether that's crypto, whether that's NFTs, whether that's what's it called a dows, whatever it is.

I was watching a documentary for my other show like a few weeks ago, which was about like boy bands and like the economics of the boy bands in like the 90s and the 2000s. And so even when you have these very successful boy bands in Britain or like the pop bands and stuff like S Club seven and everything, like these members aren't really making any money at all, despite the fact that they are sort of like the most popular bands in like in the UK and like a lot of Europe as well. So imagine like the blazing squad who sort of come afterwards, who are probably making far less money in a much more precarious like situation for pop music.

This is also like, you know, around about the time when like, you know, you have your pop idols and everything, but you also have like 15 members. You get like a two week window where you make a little bit of money from iTunes ringtone checks and then like people stop using ringtones and no more money. Exactly, but I also wonder whether this is just why you don't have like boy like beyond career where like the government funds boy bands. Yeah. Where you basically you get, you get, you get, you get assigned to a military barracks

for boy bands. They're actually, they're actually our boy band reservists. I know there are. I believe you. I know. We no longer, so we no longer have an economy of boy for boy bands. And I think that's why that's why we are in the situation that we're in. Well, if we want to talk a little bit about the situation that we're in, I think I owe

it to all of us to start as, as we did in Brisbane. Last time we were recording in this configuration with, of course, our friend, Aiden Taco Jones is the guest with an update on the Hooning situation, which has developed. What are the Hoons except the Australian version of a blazing squad? Well, well, so unfortunately in the, okay, so like I feel as though, you know, we had our, the initial ascendancy of the Hoon saga happened in Australia, where we fell in love with Hooning all over again. And now we're in a bit of an empire strikes back era of the Hoon saga, where Australia's

Queensland government has effectively criminalized our podcast for glorifying Hooning because I'll explain. They are, they're saying Australia's government, and this is a press release is taking Australia's Queensland government, excuse me, is taking no prisoners as it's making an offense to even encourage someone to watch a burnout or illegal street race, which makes us criminals in Queensland for glorifying Hooning. Whoa. Okay.

So do you think like we're never, we're never going to be allowed to go back? I don't think we can go back. Is Milo going to get arrested at the board? Well, he's not in Australia anymore. Now he's in Indonesia, but maybe they'll get an Interpol notice to arrest him on Hoon related offenses. So material support of Hooning, it says it is, it will be an offense to participate in or be a spectator at a group Hooning activity.

It's will be an offense to organize, promote or encourage others to participate or be a spectator at a group Hooning. This is one of these laws that is so broad that it's like, if your carpool fucks up just a little bit, like if you speed in a carpool, I imagine some overzealous Brisbane prosecutor is going to be like, I'm putting you in jail for Hooning. Yeah, you get, you get like all you got to do is tweet or post on TikTok enthusiastically about burnouts and then they just decide that you're the Anwar al-Awlaki of Hooning and they fucking drone strike your house in the Gold Coast.

Like I'm just imagining what the Hooning to beak would be. Like just, you know, just like a really glossy, like sort of advice for the uninitiated kind of magazine to try to turn people towards who've radicalized them towards Hooning. Right, towards the very austere seventh century interpretation of Hooning that was popular in, in, in the Arabian Peninsula that would have been practiced by Muhammad and his compatriot. I will say this too is very funny, but in Australia, there's a thing that gets written out of Australia's history because Australia has so much of a, well, a little problem with racism and also it was colonized by the British and that some of this relates to Britain's

fucking relationship with its colonies in India. But in Western Australia, in the 19th century, you basically couldn't have a pony expressed and you couldn't have railroads because horses can't fucking survive in those temperatures. But you know what can, camels, but both Brits could not fucking get a camel to do anything. Certainly not run a mail route. So what they did was they brought a Pashtun people from what's now Pakistan and Afghanistan to Australia to set up basically camel mail routes. And like the thing about it was, is it being fucking Australia, like these guys settled,

but if they went back or they to try to bring their families, they weren't allowed back in the country. But like, I want to say the first mosque in Australia was built in like the 1840s because of these guys were settled there. And like, it's absolutely a part of Australian history. It's just one of the things that's kind of written out because, you know, now, now they don't want to be like, oh yeah, like basically like there was a significant Muslim community in this country long before your fucking extremely sunburned ass moved here in the 1970s.

But you know, so it goes on, it will be illegal to possess certain items used to facilitate group hooning events such as false number plays, which fair enough, or excessive spare tires so you can no longer be too prepared for a flat if you're going to like have your carpool go a little bit off the rails. Isn't there like, there must be a risk of like overreach here because like, what if you are going too fast and your car breaks down and like some police officer rather than trying to help you is like, you're hooning, you're going to like Australian Gitmo. I mean, Australian Gitmo is definitely a thing they call it fucking Nauru or Christmas

Island. I was trying to think though, but it actually does exist. But like, why is it called? I was like, yeah, they're going to send you or they're going to send you to like the island all because, yeah, all because you were sort of going above the speed limit. Going above the speed limit. And then you had a fun prank fake license plate for your friend Stag do in your car that says King Pussy Eda and you had a spare tire and all of this is evidence that you

are an undercover Salafist hoon. I'm just remembering when you had to like, they suddenly created like a sign-in roster to allow you to buy cold medicine at like village pantry, convenience stores and gas stations in the Midwest in the 2000s because they're like, we're cracking down on meth. And I can't imagine a government doing that for spare tires, but it does seem like they're trending in that direction. Yeah. So we're going to get like a Australian breaking bad and it's just about a guy making spare

tires is really good at it. Did I ever tell anyone about the story about a police officer that showed up at my parents' store because they were suspicious that we were selling too much cow pot because like the sort of cough medicine in the UK, I think, has, fuck, what's it called? It's like the type of like, you can get high, yeah, you Cody, you can like get higher, like drinking the cough medicine. There's the stuff that has coding in it and there's the stuff that has a pseudofedron in it.

Yeah. I mean, all I know is that like, yeah, they were very suspicious that we were sort of running a ring because we were selling too much cough medicine. And I find that very, because like one of those sort of classic one police officer that doesn't actually know why they're there. Just comes up kind of shambling and like blowing their nose constantly and looking at their shoes and being like, oh, gentlemen, like, yeah, Milo and I were doing a Vox Pop and got thrown out of a fucking mall by private security and the guy was doing that and also

couldn't stop sneezing the whole time. Yeah, I'd only been in Britain like three weeks and I was just like, I didn't realize how much of a free based Anglo experience I was getting. Yeah. There's like, there's one thing being arrested by a police officer. There's another sort of one, like a civil, a civil officer or like a private security guard wanting to sort of like, uh, may see you, um, they have, yeah, they have the tiger blood in them.

Uh, so this is the last thing on the, on, on this Australian, I guess not excellence to be honest before we move on. This is a police minister, Mark Ryan, who is had a almost poetic, uh, sort of claim to make. He says, to sum this whole thing up, he said, if you want to tear up our roads, we'll tear up your car. Life is precious. Hold on, hold on.

If you want to tear up your roads, we'll tear up your car. Life is precious. Hooning will not be tolerated. That's what they want. They want you to, they want, they want you to, they want their cars to be destroyed. I don't understand. Yeah. The Hoons are seeking martyrdom.

Kill them. That's what they actually want. I mean, surely that's the lesson that you should learn from like the failure of the war on terror, which is that like, if you're fighting, if you're fighting people that glorify and love death, then like the thing you should do is actually not go out of your way to not kill them, right? Make them like incredibly frustrated and mad. I feel like if there's any lesson to learn from that, it's like, and oh, we will fix your

car. That's right. That's what you should do. You should fix the car, give him like a nice paint job, you know, make it so nice that you wouldn't want to destroy it. That would make them furious. Mark Ryan, Queen'sland police minister, Mark Ryan, what you need to do is you need to discover an unpoppable tire and then force all Hoons to have that in there.

They'll be just burning out for hours and the tire will never burst. I just love the second sentence there. We'll tear up your car. Life is precious. Hooning will not be tolerated. It's so poetic. There's an extent to which it just kind of reveals that, I mean, look, I know there's actual serious social problems in Australia.

It's not paradise, but it does make me laugh a bit. This is the stuff that the public figures in law enforcement feel they need to make a big kind of like breathless press releases about because at the end of the day, like, I imagine hooning is annoying and dangerous. If you say you're driving a fucking mini van full of kids and there's someone doing sick burnouts on the road, like that is dangerous, right? But like, it's probably not a huge pressing, you know, on the fucking precipice of disaster social issue.

It's just like, but they have, I have seen more press conferences and official statements and weird fucking threatening videos on social media about hooning than anything else. Like Australia basically has like, it has like chill mode or crisis mode. And like the two things I've seen them go into crisis mode is stop the boats and hooning. And they treat, stop the boats and hooning the same rhetoric, the same like, you know, like camera work, like video where a guy is looking straight in the camera and telling you he's going to fucking steal your car. Like, it's weird.

I don't understand it. Look, can some Australian please help us under? Oh, I can actually shed some light on how this works, actually. It's quite a bit like Britain. And the reason it seems so uncanny is that rather than like these sort of curtain twitching that are sort of right-wing local media encourages, right? It's like, for example, a good example is just today, you know, so the Daily Mail basically has done a hit job on a private citizen for having like, for having like, you know, Corbinite

tweets and like trying to get the Breckenbeekens Park renamed to its original Welsh name, right? There was a whole article on just excavating every detail of his private life for daring to participate in public life while being progressive. And also just to add that this reporter who's been doing this type of stuff, like his beat has literally kind of been for the past few months, at least, to just like find anyone on Twitter who is like saying anything remotely kind of like, anti-Tori or like perceived to sort of be like, you know, because the whole, the whole sort of like advanced argument or the arguments that they're trying to advance now as like the government is basically collapse

or like the system is collapsing under its own contradictions is that, oh no, it's actually like woke people on Twitter that are undermining all the efforts that the government is trying to make to sort of like fix things. And so by kind of instigating a pile on via our front pages, we can, you know, return, you know, we can like facilitate the government. I don't even know. I don't even know if they believe that. Yeah.

The end goal doesn't really make any sense, but it's like, there's some sort of loop there where it's like, as long as we, if we just hold the public to account and make people answer for like their pro-Corbin tweets from 2017 or 2019, then that can somehow lead us to bung a bob for Big Ben's bongs for Brexit or whatever the fuck. The reason I bring this up though is that it's the same, that's the sort of like local news cycle in the UK. That's where they get the red meat. In Australia, the local news cycle is just sick burnout.

Yeah. Sick burnout, dole bludgers, fucking like stories about people smoking ice. Yeah. Like it's, but it does feel a little bit more parochial and I don't know, which is, I don't want to say the Australian media is less harmful because like it's still Murdoch media. It's still in say, it's just adapted to the local climate. You know, you know what it is? It's a little bit more whimsical at least.

At least it seems more whimsical from here. Right. Right. Australians, please stop grinding your teeth. Please, please stop loading up in a boat for the six month journey to come here and beat our asses. We're just winging it based on what we know and we love your culture and we love your country and I really wish I had a sick Holden Commodore that I could fucking break pop the

tires on. Yeah, that's, we all just want the Holden Commodore of the spirit so we can spiritually pop the tires. You know, high blasting in excess, getting pulled over by the cops, destroying my tires on a road design to destroy my tires and I drove there intentionally like that just seems like paradise. Yeah, getting just popping your tires and then immediately seven police cars descend on you and pick up the only gun in Australia to do a legal kill.

So but I also, you know, I think it's worth remembering it's a sort of on what I was saying that comparison about this guy who just campaigned to say, hey, why don't we just change the name of this national park to a Welsh name because it's in Wales and this is what it would have been called. Just the, there's this concept I think is very useful when thinking about the British media. I'm doing a little bit of a segue here, which is that you have to imagine and I think this has been true for a very long time.

It used to be mostly true with celebrities where there's the, the sort of again, like I think there's a prurient element to the curtain twitching British culture that is absolutely encouraged by our press and that they would be at war, they would pick celebrities to be at war with who don't doff their caps to the protection market, but increasingly as like culture war has just rotted all of the brains of the like pensioners who's like fucking adult children do not talk to them, right, that the daily mail and others have understood that the way to like keep the juice flowing is to terrify and frighten and infuriate them with this idea that other people you live with who you don't know, but you can

imagine are doing no go zones. They're doing woke renaming of parks and all of this stuff and they will, and the extent to which I don't think people outside the UK really fully grasp this. They will just try to destroy your fucking life. And also like, and who's saying I want to get your perspective on this because I know you that knew this more intimately than I do, but I, I know this from both from reading about it and also from meeting people this has happened to, they'll just make shit up. They'll just fucking make shit up because it's so hard to bring a libel case to court

in this country. And even if something is based on like, like, like an event happened, the interpretation of it, the way it's written in a headline, the way it's written on a front page article will be so sensationalized to the point that it's, it's just a fabrication. It has no relevance to what's actually happened. And then they'll just publish like a fucking correction to it either on page 30 a month later or behind a paywall online. And that's such a common thing.

They just fucking make shit up. And look, I realize American media is not exactly fucking blameless in this regard, but the degree to which in Britain, if they want to slander you, if they want to smear you, they will just make shit up about you. Like, yeah, well, yeah, I mean, this is also like a product of like the structure of how media works in this country anyway. And I don't want to like, I won't go into too much detail because it's boring and like, you know, just tedious, but also everyone knows this, but you know, the gussing of like

media across the country, you know, so, so on the one hand, you have like local media that doesn't really work, like on a functional level. And so the national media kind of like, I think as you sort of alluded to Riley takes on both sort of the qualities of being a national paper, but also sort of this extremely instrumental tool when it comes to directing government policy. Because as we again, as we've talked about, like the intersections between government and media are sort of so intertwined that like, you know, you have like sort of this over dependent.

So as a result, you have like the Daily Mail acting as if it is a local newspaper, profiling a guy who like, they claim is sort of trying to change like the title, but they framed it in a way that's like, you know, kind of fixated in the culture wars. And then you also have like a structural issue where it's like, at these big papers, you know, there is no sort of, you know, the quality control is minimal partly because like they just don't fund that partly because like they just don't like, you know, you know, it is not commercially viable in some cases. But then I think there's also this broader recognition that like the point of these newspapers

and the point of like new circulation is not to distribute information. It is not to kind of like advance democracy in any particular way. It is used as an instrument to achieve political goals. And I think, you know, and in some cases with like, you know, especially with Daily Mail, but like the Telegraph, I think is another good example of this, you know, they sort of very openly say that like, you know, we very much like the fact that we have this very unique and direct influence in government and we would vary. And that's kind of like the use of it, that is also why, because, you know, we're recording

this on a week when like lots of media organizations have either like shut down entirely or have cut back so much they may as well have shut down entirely. And like the question is like, okay, why do these right wing outlets like seemingly, you know, why do they not have to do layoffs because they, why aren't they pivoting to AI and stuff like that? And it's fundamentally like, because while they're being funded despite being lost leaders and they're being funded despite like not having ever made any money in their entire lives and like, what is the reason that they are being funded?

I think that sort of the instrumental question, Matt, should be like asked whenever they pump slop straight into the brain and people loves and they love slop. And that's the thing. I think a lot of like the political culture is very much like, very much just, you know, there's a whole thing about like Twitter is not real life, but it's like, well, no, not only is it real life, but it's very much elevated and what we've kind of what is resulted in is like, you know, your daily males and your Telegraphs and stuff realizing that what the people want is slop and what is actually like politically, what can achieve political goals

in a faster period of time, especially when you're not making any sort of structural or material demands is to just kind of keep on producing slop until the government, until government ministers have to go up in parliament and talk about how, you know, until and talk very openly about penises. Yeah. Or that like the British equivalent of why is, you know, going on basically going before Congress and asking why cat turd to has been shadow banned. Like that seems ridiculous and American, but I feel as though like members of basically

every party in the UK that has, you know, members of parliament having to basically address idiotic completely fucking imaginary brain dead turf talking points in parliament because like, Yeah. And well, here's like the final thing I want to say because like this is a really interesting point because it's very much like it very much highlights what how much power like certain media organizations have over like what is allowed to sort of be part of political discourse and what isn't.

And like, you know, in such a way that like even like left-wing outlets are like have had to engage with that to some level, which I think is quite telling, right? But like where you have two political, like the two main political parties who are sort of being told that they can't really advocate for any kind of like material like change even because they don't want to or because like in, you know, in the case of the Labour Party, like, you know, being terrified to do that, then like what they're left with is like, okay, well, what do we talk about to advance our sort of like, you know, political goals, whatever they are, it is to sort of like go on these kind of like quote unquote

cultural issues that give us, you know, that give favourable profiles and like, you know, favourable headlines and stuff like that. Like it's very, very transparent. And then what's the most frustrating thing about which again, like I was watching the interview on like politics Joe with Robert Peston and it's just like you have these kind of journalists who are sort of just denying that that's that's the case, right? And so it becomes very, very frustrating and you end up checking out and this is like, well,

So in this case, right, what I think is the most telling view of the framing, bringing it back to the sort of Daily Mail hit piece. And by the way, like in this case, it doesn't appear that the Daily Mail made anything up. All they did was identify his, just identify this guy's like, like, like clearly tongue and cheek tweets about like, wow, Tori's sure pissed off about this and then telling their readers this one identifiable person with a name fucking hates you. You should be scared. You should be scared of him and continue like descending further into madness.

It says that the actual like wording here is the architect of the name change is a well separate Twitter troll who appears to have been primarily motivated by a desire to piss off Tori's. If you find this scandalous, you're not alone. And again, the idea is that the, there are certain standards that members of the public have to live up to and the British press will hold you to those standards as a member of the public, which is fucking insane. Yeah.

And it's like, it's like what they're basically saying is, you know, putting this out there and then you're supposed to read between the lines for the part that actually says Britain first death to traders. Like that's a hundred percent how it works. And it's like, I'm not saying that they are died directly ordering people to do things like what Thomas Mayer did to Joe Cox. But what I am saying is the mentality there is it's like, that's the logical endpoint is creating this fear, this otherization and basically telling people the reason why things

what, why our society, our culture, our country can't advance or can't get over the problems that are at this point undeniable is because the woke traders or whatever the fuck whatever that whatever the enemy is that like a non white person's face is enough normally for these people. But if it's a white person, then it has to be like they're a woke leftist trader or whatever the fuck they want to say. And yeah, it's, it's in a way also it's just, I mean, I can't, it's not like this doesn't work in other countries and other contexts, but it feels like it's a little bit like lower

effort here. It still works like they're there, you know, like the amount of energy expended to get the result they want seems far lower here than, for example, like the numbers of like Jesse's single you need in America to whip up a fucking trans panic. Like, Well, it's, it's just that that that kind of public conversation is so much more ingrained at a structural level here, because it's so centralized. And the thing I think is the best way to understand it is to imagine that all of these institutions

are so centralized in London among people who are friends that it is mostly who went to school together. So easy. And what always, so I was a huge Farside fan when I was a kid. I loved Gary Larson when I was a 12 year old. Respect. Yeah, respect. I had the two, the two like doorstopper books, right, that contain every Farside ever written.

And I've been, well, I've been just thinking about the, the, the Daily Mail's campaign against it, you know, this guy basically, just remembering one of my favorite Farside cartoons, which well, well, let's, let's see if we can make the episode art for this thumbnail for this episode, which is just the caption, the world was going down the tubes. They needed a scapegoat and found Wayne. And it's just people protesting outside this guy's house saying down with Wayne. And that seems to be the valence at which 50% of the British press operates whenever they go into local journalism mode is just identifying the scapegoat of the week.

And you know, this even like as, as far back in, in even in like sort of 2018, 19, right? Like you remember, there was, there were, you know, like people who worked at Momentum who would just like have their fucking like, you know, entire private lives scraped by Guido Fox, who again, how dare you participate in politics as a progressive, a doctor who's like says, I cannot work under these conditions again, like, has their fucking bins rifled through. And then... Well, it's like, it's like when, when, when the guy, the parent of a newborn who's being

treated and it's just hospital confronted Boris Johnson during like a fucking press meet and greet, and Laura Coonsburg found his Twitter profile and shared it and was like, this is him here. You know what I mean? Like all that stuff in 2019. It's basically like, it sounds like a glib sort of one liner to say that the British media sees its rule as holding the public to account, but that, that is fundamentally what they do.

And I was also going to make the joke that, yeah, you're right, 50% of the time it's down with Wayne and the other 50% of the time in British media, it's sharing pictures of local delicacies that are fundamentally indistinguishable from the cow tools cartoon. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'll never get over putting eels in Jell-O. That seems fucked. I realize that stargazing pie is not actually a common thing. Like it's, it's, it's a specific regional thing and it's pretty rare and most people

in this country will not have seen it or had it. But I gotta be honest with you, when you see, it's like, oh, a pie with fish head sticking out of it. It just kind of looks, I don't know, Lovecraftian. It looks like the kind of thing that someone eats on a dare. Yeah, yeah, for, for Americans, there is a real British food that has, it's a pie that has pilchards sticking out of it head first for some reason. Just look up stargazing pie.

It's real. It's a real thing. It's a real thing. So are jelly deals. There's a jelly deals place down the street from where I live in South London, like it's real. There's one last little bit of sort of current events I wanted to talk about. This is something actually that I saw well on the way into the studio this morning, which

completely floored me, which is that the labor, like, cause your kids, like labor has to now keep offering sort of what they would, they have to Monday morning quarterback, Monday night quarterback, whatever, Monday quarterback, all of the things that the Tories are doing. But of course they can't do it, you know, too much because the whole thing. It's typically Monday morning quarterback because football is played typically on either Sunday, Sunday afternoons or Monday nights. Basically. The, and you have to come up with a solution to the housing crisis that, you know, is not

going to do anything because doing things, as we all know, has been sort of ruled out of the political options. And so Lisa Nandy, labor's sort of shadow housing and leveling up minister and whatever their fucking fake job title is, has said that we are going to have a state backed mortgage insurer, which if you under, if you know the hits, let's say, of the recent housing crisis in 2007 and eight, you mean like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Yeah. The only difference, of course, is those were sort of semi private institutions.

The bailout was to bring them under state control, but to essentially say, look, we need to get more people into housing. The price of housing can never be allowed to go down. And also we can't spend any money on it. What we are going to do is this strange financial trick where people are just going to be able to get into more debt, essentially, it's going to be ways to make higher debt loads possible. One of those things is mortgage insurance. And the idea that in 2023 that we are looking at creating a kind of pre bailed out Fannie

Mae and Freddie Mac is astonishing to me because the casino, the casino must continue. Yeah. Because I mean, there were talks about making 40 year mortgages, for example. One thing that you'll see quite commonly in, in, in, in or London is shared ownership where you can buy a place and your mortgage is effectively half price because there's another person buying half of the deed and you, that's typically an institutional investor as I understand it. And so you pay your mortgage, but then also like you, I believe have to pay rent to the

other owner. And so, and, and, and bear in mind the context of this that like, we won't even talk about individual houses because they're so expensive in, in, in or London and even quite frankly in, in, in, in Outer London, like within the M25, the, the ring road, it's so incredibly expensive and wages are so low in this country that like all of the kind of chicanery we're talking about here is basically to try to create a sort of patch for the fact that most people don't earn enough money to get a mortgage or to save for a mortgage. And even in some situations where there's relatively low percentage deposits required,

that's still an onerous amount of money when you look at the prices. And also like there's just, I don't know, like the one other thing I'd say too, and Riley and Hussain, you both know this really well also, is that by and large, housing quality in this country is dog shit at any price point, it's dog shit, it's badly made, it's badly maintained, if it's old, it's shit and drafty, if it's new, it will literally fall apart in five years. There's kind of a sweet spot for stuff like that's decently insulated that was built, let's say between like 1960, 1950, 1960 and 1980.

Back when they did a good job by accident. By accident. No, no, actually that's back when they, when Britain was trying to do a good job for the people, at least some of the people who lived here. Like, like, like some old, it really depends because of like that, it's not a guarantee because a lot of, for example, panel built system housing from that era is dog shit because it's super leaky and as a result, like, you know, 50 to 70 years of it just not being watertight has caused huge problems with mold and damp and stuff like that.

But there are examples of stuff that's well built. But by and large, housing shit here, new housing sucks, old housing sucks and also probably has been through like successive iterations of bad remodels like done on the cheap. And so there's this disconnect, like on multiple levels, there's the disconnect of people don't make enough money in this country to afford housing in this country. Obviously, there's the thing that people in fucking right wing papers love to say, which is like, well, then I don't know, move to Carlisle or move to Preston or move to somewhere where there's cheap housing.

It's like, right, but if you don't have a job there, that's a challenge. And also, for better or worse, jobs in London pay more. They just don't pay near enough. Also, houses there are still shit. And they're still shit. Yeah, they're dog shit. They're just cheaper. Like, you can get a dog shit house for 100,000 pounds instead of 500,000 pounds.

But like, you won't... I think this is, yeah. But every time, like, housing, I think, like, is sort of the real, every time you want to learn how you are being gaslit by every institution in this country, I think the best way to think about it is like, in terms of how am I going to find somewhere to live, right? Because I think at the core of it, when we try to understand what British housing is like, it is fundamentally what if you lived in a place where nobody actually felt like houses should be places that you should live in.

And what I mean is that... It's a wild idea, of course. Yeah, so it's a way to have a non-leaky roof. Well, again, because there was, again, there was that other tweet. I don't know who said it, but it was like, I thought it was a joke initially because of the way it was written, but it was literally just like, oh, when we, when I was growing up, like, you know, we had loads of condensation in the house and we had to mop it up every hour, but we survived.

And I was like, no, this has to be a bit, but no, he was being genuine about it, or at least like, if they didn't appear to be a joke and it was like, okay. So that's either boomer nostalgia or the people who work at the community leisure center in my neighborhood where they have like a millennium style building, but the roof isn't insulated and the center of the building is a pool. And so all of that warm, humid air hits the cold roof and winter and causes condensation everywhere in the leather center. It rains inside.

It rains inside. That's so funny. I love this country. In the gym part, like the fucking drop ceiling panels look like dirty diapers. They're just sagging. Oh, no. Yeah. Well, this is also the thing.

You can go into like even loads of public buildings, like in the UK and you can just sort of see like, you know, either they haven't been like updated since, you know, the 1980s or if they have, it's been done in such a way where it just kind of degrades like really fast and it just like, it's kind of, it adds to just like the experience of misery, even like going to like a job center, like the local job center around here basically looks so dilapidated and there's kind of like, you know, yeah, it's nuts to watch. But I think when we talk about housing, I think, you know, especially, I think I imagine this would probably date to around like the 80s, but possibly before, but a genuine situation

where it's like, well, the market works in such a way where like houses are still referred to basically as assets. And so even when you talk about like, even like during the period of time when I was sort, when we were sort of being told, like in this country about, oh, you know, you should be getting on the housing ladder, the idea would be that like, you would move into a house and then you would sell it a few years later when the price would go up and then move to another house and you move to another house and you move to another house and like the ultimate question that you were to ask is like, why, why, why don't you just stay

in one house? Like, why don't you buy one house for a decent price and afford it and stay because that could be your home. And also if you want to buy or rather if you want to rent a place, like, yeah, it basically the way it's set up now, it's like, oh, you can rent if you want to be a baby forever and be a mug and get fucked over forever, but like the only way to have any real semblance of control in terms of like, yeah, the price, your price of housing and your stability of housing in this country like is to, is to, oh, I mean, I'm not saying it's the only way,

but the way that it's framed, the way it's talked about is implied that the only way you can actually count yourself as being successful sort of in gaming, the housing system is owning a place, but that becomes more and more challenging. And this is the other thing because it's also like, you know, and we, we've joked about this multiple times. It's like, well, in living in the UK, the only aspiration you're really allowed to have is to be a landlord of some or some capacity to be a landlord, whether a commercial landlord or like, you know, a retail landlord.

And so like some kind of like, you know, if you, your success is really being able to rent something out to someone and forcing them to give you money. And so you have like lots of these kind of, you have a, you have a political system that is built on that. And you know, obviously in the post-corvin period, you have a labor party and clearly like a policy like this is very much one of like, you know, we value homeowners because homeowners represent a certain kind of politics that we find desirable. And so you end up in a situation where it's like so obvious that like, no, the crisis

around here and the crisis that feeds into so much stuff, wherever we're talking about like mental health, whether we're talking about physical health, whether we're talking about like well-being, you know, I, you know, there are different elements to this, but like if you're talking about like people who want families for like, or who are looking to have families, for example, right? Like housing is such a fundamental, so he's like the core of that. And mentioning this at any capacity will end, will end with you being on the Daily Mail front page list and being called a nonce.

Right? I would also say too that fundamentally what Riley brought up in the beginning of this segment, the idea of doing like you said up like a pre-bailed out, it's like state-backed mortgage insurer, that's got nothing to do with people getting their, getting on the housing ladder, getting their first property. Like that's an ancillary benefit to what its actual purpose is, which is ensuring that there is some way for people who are selling to continue selling their houses at inflated prices.

Ceno has to keep going. Yeah, this is, and this is why I was, yeah. Homeowners, pensioners, all of the fucking, basically the people who won the generational lottery in this country, that they're insanely inflated housing value, you know, the value of their, of their home, their asset, doesn't go down. And this is kind of, yeah. Because I'm going to be real with you, there is no fucking way that these dog shit houses are worth 800, 900,000 pounds, a million pounds, 1.5 million pounds.

You'll see insane prices for places that literally look like someone was like, oh, I won a contest for, can you turn a garden shed into a house and a fucking council recognizing. Like we're talking stuff that just, like, it looks as though they got a special like, like to research new kinds of mold. Like everything looks like shit. And like they're not well built and they're drafty by design. And yet, because like, and it's like the thing I'll end on with saying this is that it's not just international money laundering being, you know, washed through the property market.

But that's part of it. It's not a shortage of housing, but that's part of it. It's not just lack of density in most places in the United Kingdom. But that's part of it. It's not just terrible fucking transit outside of London to include like greater London exerbs and stuff like that, where you're in a situation where if you move out to save money on either a mortgage or rent, you spend way more on transit that's unreliable to the point where your only option is either drive everywhere or basically pay thousands of pounds more

per year for British rail. Like it's not just that, but that's part of it. But I think the thing about it is that the thing, the one thing that I was to say is that all of these things are treated as though they're just like the fucking writ of God and that none of them are alterable. And it's like, I think it's just, I don't want to be glib about it, but you see some of the problems, they're just kind of compounding. And then it'll just be like, best neighborhoods within a three hour, like best villages within

a three hour drive of zone one for, you can get a house for under 700,000 pounds. And it's like, great, but that's fucking insane. And to bring that back, right? To bring that back around, the idea that the way that these problems are going to be tackled is by enabling a constantly growing debt load in an era, and we're going to get to this next, the main sort of meat and potatoes topic of today is going to be about that, of forcing people to take on more and more personal debt and just creating these financial chicaneries to allow them to do that.

I mean, it's worth bearing in mind how mortgage insurance works because there's another country that has a state-backed mortgage insurer whose housing market is doing just amazing. And that of course is Canada. Oh, God, yeah, because it's actually, this is a really worthwhile, I think, cross-country comparison to make. So how mortgage insurance works generally as a product is that the bank will give you a higher rate if the mortgage is insured. And so Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will say, okay, we assess, right, that we think you're

a good risk. And so we'll write your bank a mortgage insurance premium. And therefore, if you stop making payments on your house, we'll basically step in and indemnify the bank from a loss. So it's not like a mortgage protection payment that you take out that covers you in the case that you lose your job. It's essentially the protection that the bank takes out. And so Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created in the mid-20th century in order to basically

facilitate the financialization of the US housing market because you need to, because that's when asset prices and stuff start hugely outstripping wages, return to capital starts hugely outstripping wage growth. And so in order to keep that going, in order to keep people bought into capitalism basically as asset holders, small asset holders, but asset holders, you need to make sure the price always goes up despite the fact that wages are pretty stagnant. That's where mortgage insurance comes in because it enables that risk taking. So one of the main, I'd say some of the main bailout terms of TARP in the US was essentially

look that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, these created by the government, but private institutions that then basically went bankrupt because they had to pay right out too many losses all at once. They had to pay out too many losses all at once. That's what happens in insurance. It's one of the risks of being an insurer is that then they had to basically get bailed out so that all of those banks could keep going because otherwise the banks wouldn't get the mortgage insurance payments and everything would fall apart.

What happened in Canada is that we had this thing called the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the CMHC, which before Cretan's liberal government in the early 90s used to be the federal body that built social housing. Of course we had to do away with that because that didn't allow the casinoification of housing because then housing is decommodified of its social housing. We all know this. The reason that Canadian house prices are so high or one of them is that the CMHC switched over to being a mortgage insurer, but it is already connected to the big money printer

in Ottawa. It's pre-bailed out with the CMHC. That's why in the US, if you look at house prices, especially outside of major cities, you'll see that there was a slope change in 2008, and it took a long fucking time to recover from. House prices took a long time to recover properly. Stock prices, no, they were right back up, but if you look at house prices in the US, there is actually a disturbance.

There's an alpha coefficient. There's an alpha change. The slope coefficient stays the same, but we get a jolt down in price. In Canada, because we didn't have to do a bailout because the bailout was already legislated in. That meant that Canada has of all of the global north as the fastest growing house prices in the entire, at least until the higher interest rates started putting a dent in it. We had the most casino-fied housing economy because the CMHC kept on changing its own

rules to allow more and more risk-taking, to allow private mortgage insurance in, and eventually deposits are getting smaller, interest rates are getting higher, and every single generation gets saddled with more debt than the last one, which I assume can go on forever because that's just a fucking pyramid scheme. I'd also say too that Canada's absolutely, it's been going on for such an incredibly long time. As Riley pointed out, you can go back and look at commentary about Canada is emerging into a dangerous housing bubble situation from like 09, 10, 11, and I remember reading a

blog post maybe last year from a guy talking about an analyzing, specifically the greater Toronto area, but just in general, Canada's housing market, and one of the points he made was what it would take to bring it down to reasonable levels would require year-on-year depreciation in housing prices that would be greater each year than the greatest ever for depreciation in housing prices in Canadian history, and he's like, say for example a hypothetical situation where you had like 3% decline year-on-year five years in a row, which has never happened, and I may be wrong on that 3% thing, but it's something like a single digit.

You would need to have the Great Recession about five times in order to just get back to bubble territory. You'd be like, that would bring us down to the safe levels of 2014 when people were like, this is an unsustainable bubble and it's the worst in the world. It's genuinely that bad. Canada has done things because Canada really, really didn't have any kind of like valve to stop insane speculation when people, like speculating from abroad, and it's one of those things where it becomes hairy territory because you don't want it to be like, oh, fucking immigrants

buying our houses, but these weren't immigrants. These were such a good Canadian accent. These were investors in other countries with millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, flipping a fucking shed in Vancouver four times in a week, like that kind of thing happening. Canada didn't have any controls on that until relatively recently. It's bad for a variety of reasons that in some ways can mirror Britons, but one thing Canada has, I'm going to be honest with you, it sucks, but it does have a lot of space. One thing that is a valve for, for example, the Creator Toronto area is just continuing

to expand out fucking suburbs further and further out, increasing people's commutes horribly, but building new housing that way. There are people in Toronto now who fully have four-hour commutes because that's the only place they can afford. You can drive until you qualify thing, like, yeah, keep going fucking further and further out until you can find a place that you can afford. Like Britain, the thing about it is Britain is you drive three hours out and that house is still fucking insanely expensive and also shit.

And so just the idea, right, as sort of an observer of the housing market in general and as a Canadian, the idea that we are looking at some combination of either the CMHC or fucking Fannie Mae with a straight face to solve the, all of the elements, Nate, you described of the housing crisis, to just do, hey, you know what? We never had this element in our housing crisis. What if, what if we take that powder keg from over there and put it amongst our explosives? Maybe it will be like some, get some kind of like Mr. Burns syndrome crisis stabilization, where they're all happening at once and so it stays stable.

I didn't fucking, the bind fucking boggles. I gotta be honest with you, in a way, you have to almost begrudgingly admire how much they get away with. By they, I mean the Tories and just the British establishment and the sort of financial institutions that are keeping this moving because Britain has not exactly been premium good investment territory for a very long time and it's certainly gotten a lot worse in the last five years. And it's because of me. I moved here and I ruined everything.

If it weren't for me, if I had just stayed in America, then we would have, you know, we would have luxury Corbinism and everything would work great. There would be no problems. However, I came here and I ruined it for everyone, so now you have to basically live in Tory fuckhole for the rest of your life. It definitely wasn't that way before. And but the thing I would say is that like, this has not been a particularly wise investment for a while.

And so in a way, like I don't know, I don't want to speculate too much, but I don't know if it's just the fact that Britain basically made money laundering legal that like that's one of the things that keeps it rolling. But the degree to which like it keeps ticking on where like, you know, you can see these fundamentals getting worse and worse, you can see like this disconnect between housing prices for new bills or resale and, you know, wages in this country. And it's like, and yet I know you're joking, but making money laundering legal sort of is what we did in the 70s because something, are you familiar with Euro dollar markets?

To some extent. So it's basically because of commodities, right? That like commodities bought in dollars, but then they have a lot of basically dollars in cash in European banks. Yeah. And what happened, the thing that London had, which it again, really no longer does have like the thing that made it London, the thing that create that the big bang of deregulation was also kind of designed to facilitate was oddly enough connected to the Saudis cutting

oil production, oil prices skyrocketing, all oil production, all oil purchases being denominated in dollars. And so third party, so third nation transactions, so like Senegal buying oil from Saudi Arabia at a hugely inflated price would be, would then happen in London. And then the idea was what London offered was that American banks that were set up in London that could that were transacting into and British banks as well that were transacting in dollars would then be able to say, we are going to be able to have a dollar economy outside the US regulatory umbrella.

And so we are going to, and then, you know, the Tories happily facilitated it, but the problem is like number one, that was facilitated, like that ended up like when, when that sort of particular flow, let's say, changed, right, that ended up sort of stopping. And then one of the things we had was we were, okay, well, at least we're a dollar clearing house for Europe. We're no longer that. So yeah, it's pretty much, you know, and one of the, one of the sort of, you know, one of the things that you might like about Marx's writing is his use of sort of ghoulish, ghoulish

imagery and the sort of the macabre as many in the 19th century were fond of doing, talking about capital as dead labor. Well, I mean, if you want to look at any place that is more, a bigger fucking mummy, right, a dead fucking corpse, you would look probably at a rentier economy that doesn't even have the money laundering anymore. It's fucking neon. I mean, I will say, I don't want to go so far out on a limb to say the United Kingdom doesn't have money laundering anymore, but it's just because it absolutely does.

But I think that, yeah, the dynamics have definitely changed. I just think that it's strange to me in a way that like, and you know, maybe referencing what we talked about in the beginning, the kind of captive press that's whose job it is to sort of crack the whip on anyone who questions, you know, that the government is in control or that the government is always, you know, solving the problem or about to solve the problem if the enemy of the state just didn't fucking pull their dastardly roadrunner cartoon tricks on them. So I guess I was just thinking about this, yeah, like it just seems very, very strange

that the music hasn't stopped yet, and like, all right, famous last words in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but like, yeah, it is nice to me when you look at the fundamentals of things getting worse, and I know you said you were going to talk about some elements of some things that happened in the last five years that are making things worse. Well, so the, I mean, this is actually, it's worth bringing this in, I sort of listened to, I listened, I enjoy sort of lots of the fine podcasting on the Bloomberg network, and some of it because it's good, others of it because it's stuff like what I'm about

to talk about, but you know, there's Nick Candy, one of the sort of poster children, I think, of the number, he has a funny name. It's ridiculous. I was going to say, yeah, yeah, my love voice, inventor of the gumdrop. Yes, Nick Candy, inventor of the gumdrop, so he's known for basically creating the ultra luxury high end Westminster based property that's mostly there for like, you know, like Saudi princes, right? He's the developer, he and his brother are behind one Hyde Park, like the most expensive

block of flats ever sold. And he's now basically saying like, yeah, the music is up for London, but he can't see it in that way. So I actually, I transcribed some of the podcast. Candy said, the flow of capital to Dubai has changed. People are going because they're fed up with the crime in the countries they live in. It's not just London, it's other countries around Europe and the West. Some of the values we once cherished in Western countries are not the same values you've

got today. And that value system actually is sometimes better in the Middle East than here. So I think that the UAE is going to attract that money, which may not be the cleanest money, but every city in the world has got that. It's like, I saw a Moorlach, so I'm going to move to the United Arab Emirates. I assume I'll be Eloy there. And you know, this is a witch housing developer who developed houses for the rich, who is saying, in, who's echoing the same point that we're making, right, which is the unique

selling point of this place is disappearing. It's kind of going, but he's only able to see it in terms of, again, daily mail headlines, right? London has fallen kind of shit. Yeah. He actually, he says, he said, and this is, I, my jaw dropped when he said this because I was like, I cannot believe that this is what, that this is going to drive billions of dollars of investment decisions, and it's mostly, I think, to be honest, is like guys

like Candy, their job is to go where the rest of the money is so that they can then be like handmade into the capital, to capital and then be made billionaires themselves for it. But just the fact that he said this as a pull factor, a push factor away from London and towards somewhere like Dubai, he said, I'm also sorry to say that's the case and people might not like it, but when young kids in schools are being taught transgender, I just don't think it's right. Alice, can you please stop facilitating the decline of the United Kingdom and forcing people to move to Dubai, a very sane place?

Yeah. He says, you know, he says, and there's once in a generation where a new city or country will evolve, and once in a children's generation, new city or country will evolve, and this time it's Dubai. And look, the thing is, anything that any, anytime you're talking to a VC or a property developer, you need to understand that the only thing they ever do is pump their bags. Sure. That's all they're ever doing.

If he is invested in Dubai, then of course he's going to say that Dubai is the future. That's like, you're going to go on Bloomberg, say that, and hopefully maybe someone else buys one of his like luxury flats, like actual luxury flats, right? The kind of places with the servants' corners. And I mean, to be honest, that's every fucking apartment in the United Arab Emirates, but Roger, unless it's the one that servants live in when they're not living in servant quarters, which are dormitories, but yeah. And so, but then, you know, even though he's repeating all of the usual like lines about

knife crime, he's just, he's not able or it's not in his interest to see that actually what has happened is that Dubai has taken over that role. It has taken over that role of the international dodgy money clearinghouse. Obviously, I don't want to say it's ironic because I think it's like just very, very obvious. But what he's effectively saying is that like, you know, because I, I was wondering where I heard this guy, where I heard this guy's name is the number one, because he's Holly of the Lancers, who had like very some interesting opinions about COVID vaccines here, her husband,

but also, yeah, all the sort of like property development that he was kind of in charge of when London was really trying to, or when London would basically facilitate that type of like, you know, it was, it was a very good market for building these types of properties that no one could afford primarily because they were speculative assets, right? And like what Dubai has done is basically kind of expanded that on a much larger scale and provided and they've opened, they openly say this, right? So Dubai right now is on a very big push to try get as many wealthy boys, like people with money to come in to like, basically buy up speculative assets, right?

That's kind of like what it is designed for. When we went to Dubai for a few days for our honeymoon last year, what was really telling was that like, yeah, in those types of places that he is advertising as being like, you know, to buy like sort of the city of the future, these are all just kind of places where like tourists, expats, like very wealthy expats are moved to in order to basically like continue doing speculative work and the kind of domestic labor sort of live right in the outskirts. Like Dubai has built this, built this like public transportation network.

And if you go right to the end of it, that's sort of where, and like, you know, so this is like an hour and a half journey right at the end of it is sort of where the, where all the sort of like migrant labor lives. And they don't live in dormitories, they don't live in rooms, they like, they rent beds, right? If you go, if you go all the way there, you will see stickers advertising beds where you can pay to just have a bed to sleep in for like a few hours, you can like a bed to sleep in for the night, a bed to sleep in for the day.

So like the conditions there are like really, really not good unless you are someone who has a shit ton of money, largely in speculative property. And like what he seems to be saying is that like, London just isn't kind of the space to do that anymore because it isn't really, and you know, I was, I was, I was wondering how much of this also just comes back to the fact for like, while London is definitely still kind of well, you know, while the only kind of, I was going to say this earlier in the episode, but perhaps the reason why there's so much protection or like the desire to kind of protect homeowners, landlords and stuff is really just because like the kind of pretense

that Britain, the fantasy that Britain has allowed itself to kind of engage with, which is like, we're a wealthy country because people own assets and these assets are worth like loads of money. And then, you know, when you realize that actually, especially like at this time, where it's like, oh, actually, we're like, you know, the inflation rate means that we're really not that wealthy and these assets aren't really worth anything and we really don't earn that much. Maybe the reality is also sort of sinking in for them, which is like, they would much rather go to a place where they can at least kind of have the, you know, the, the luxury,

the accessible luxuries that can convince themselves that they are rich and wealthy, which we just simply can't do over here. And so if maybe for him, um, the kind of appeal in Dubai is basically like, it is a much more accommodating place to basically like be a rich guy and you just can't redo that here because even if you're like a kind of somewhat well off middle class person over here, your living conditions have declined and like you can sort of see that in like, you know, your every, you know, in your just like daily life. Again, it's like that thing where it's like, well, you can have like a nice like Porsche or Bentley, but if you still have to use like roads that are covered in

potholes and they're constantly broken, then like, you know, you're not really living. You're still living with the consequences of all that. Yeah. And in Dubai, it's designed in such a way where like you basically, if you have money, you don't have to have, you know, you don't get, you don't need, like you, you there are no consequences. They designed in such a way where like you can basically live the easiest life in the world and less and less in any way whatsoever. You, you come into contact in a negative way with an Emirati citizen, in which case, like then you realize that you have zero rights and the whole system is built on that.

They've got, they got consultants in from the Queensland anti-hooning patrol in order to be able to meet out immediate consequences. I mean, it was really funny that you mentioned hooning because this is a really quick story, but a friend of mine worked temporarily in Abu Dhabi and one of his flatmates, because like it was a bunch of guys basically working for six months out of the year, nine months out of the year in jobs in the Emirates. And then they rotate back to America. One of his housemates was also like a guy in his forties or fifties working in one of these jobs. And this guy owned a car in Dubai and it was parked in the parking lot of their apartment building in, or not in Dubai in Abu Dhabi.

And one night he was asleep and his car was parked in the parking spot in it, you know, for the building and an Emirati who was hooning the fuck out of like a Ferrari or something crashed into his car in the parking lot. Now the car was stationary and parked and off and he wasn't in it. He was asleep in his bed. Guess who got found at fault for that accident? Look, you should have known that there was going to be an Emirati guy driving there. You should have known that this guy's car is so badass that you need to make sure you're always making way for it. And it's like, that's just one tiny anecdote. But I find it very

funny because it's like, it is strange the degree to which a zero tax environment will make people who basically under other circumstances would like absolutely lose their shit in the Facebook comments when they saw something about this kind of impunity being, you know, meted out by a non-white person or a non-Christian person. But like the siren song of paying no fucking taxes and the degree to which like you can, as Hussain was saying, kind of like met the trappings of, you know, ultra-wealthy conveniences, get erstats versions of those on the cheap. But it's not just that though, right? It's that Dubai has a value proposition. They provide

a service in ways that we sort of have lost except for rentierism. And this is actually what I want to go to before we close, which is that, you know, this comes back to, you know, Hugh Pyl's remark, Hugh Pyl being an economist in the Bank of England monetary market. You had a guy named Nick Candy and a guy named Hugh Pyl. Yes, why? Because it sounds like Hugh Pyl. It's like, it's just very, very... Yeah, Hugh Pyl. I'm fucking Hugh Pyl. I'm an extremely middle-class guy from England. Well, weirdly, I am, after seeing this speech, I am sort of slightly Hugh Pyl'd because he's,

to be honest, the whole sort of orchestra of media and politics for the last sort of, you know, since the financial crisis and since like the Big Bang, since whenever you want to start counting has been, while Britain has started the initially very profitable, but now stripping the copper wire out stage of unwinding itself as a going concern, everyone was being told and everyone was being made to feel, whether through like cheap fake credit, whether through things like, you know, help to buy constantly inflating, you know, house prices, whether through the just selling off of North Sea oil and the entire Social Security blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of that. They're made to feel wealthy. And the fact

that, you know, there's someone on the Monetary Policy Committee saying, you are not wealthy is kind of one of the first cracks in the veneer of that fake reality that that world that causes people to stop seeing, to start seeing the world for what it is around them because the problem is, that's true. Britain is less wealthy. And the fact that just this have this be acknowledged, right, is a huge difference. The problem is, of course, is that because this is the British monetary, the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee and they're British, they have to say, well, it's kind of everyone's fault. It's a laborers fault for demanding higher wages, but also it's like companies, especially grocery companies,

especially grocery companies fault for using this as an opportunity to jack up prices and then leave them high, even though gas prices are abating. I know we want to keep it succinct, but like I'm a little bit taken aback by the idea that anyone can say it's laborers fault for demanding higher wages when like inflation is so high that like, unless you have double digit wage increases, you are fundamentally getting poorer. You are earning less. And like the Bank of England in order to meet its mandate says everyone has to agree to be poorer or we're going to have inflation, which is going to go, that's their argument,

right, is that everyone has to agree to be poorer or we're going to have inflation that will cause you to be poorer anyway. And that the message is that everyone has to stop playing past the parcel by either demanding a higher wage or raising their prices and we just have to allow inflation to settle and everyone, companies and people have to concede to be poorer. That's the problem with, of course, what Pill is saying, obviously, but the other thing I noticed is that the Bank of England for the last five years has been saying again and again and again in lots of public statements that the idea that profit taking is a contributor to inflation is nonsense. It's bunk. And to see Pill go on. And again, in the context

of a bunch of other things that are wrong, right, like that, like there's anything that there's much of a relationship between wage growth and inflation at all at the moment in Britain, right, is regrettable. But to even just see the idea, the view that excess profit taking is inflationary, which used to like be a fringe crazy position at somewhere like the BOE, then we get laughed out of the room if you took that view. Yeah. Hue Pill has a brother named Theodore Pill. And so if you, instead of the Hue Pill, you take the Ted Pill, you just say, nah, it's Pollux. So, so, you know, like this is 17.3% food inflation, right? Like, you know, he's based

and the message from the BOE, and this has been pretty consistent is workers stop striking, stop changing jobs, just accept that you're poorer. And now they're also saying companies, stop hiking prices, everybody just fucking stop. That's, of course, that's ridiculous, right? Also, because a lot of this is kind of like, like, look, I'm not exactly Mr. Economics, but as I understand it, the overwhelming majority of what we have been dealing with post COVID has been due to supply chain issues because of all of the disruptions and then also energy prices, especially in Europe, and then also piss taking on the part of consumer prices, which is worse than America, but still a huge problem here of basically like opportunism

on the part of just raising prices, you know, Canada's Switzerland price now, it's fucking insane. America's Switzerland price, dude, I was back in, I was back in New York and this I don't want to derail too much, but like a thing of yogurt that would cost you fucking like a like a one liter tub of yogurt that would cost you like five pounds and fucking Sainsbury's was like $14 in Brooklyn. And this was not like a fucking whole foods. This was like in a regular, regular grocery store. I was just like, this is insane. Like I hadn't been back to America in so long since pre COVID. I was just like, it genuinely prices have doubled if not more on everything. So but what you say is basically correct, right?

One of the major things driving inflation in Europe is is spikes in the gas price, which are heavily dependent on. And because all the big firms, the way that they buy, right, they buy the ones that didn't do this, by the way, the like the energy companies that were just started as a customer service like operation outside of someone's bedroom that then ends up like failing catastrophically like still gets access to energy at wholesale and then sells it to you to market. What they do is they don't they never the reason they went into business is they didn't buy ahead. They just bought spot spot price on the day. Also like Britain having high gas prices has nothing to do with with the European

gas prices other than the spot market because Britain's government refuses to intervene. Like we are we had like a 1% exposure to Russian gas. It's it's it's it's a bit more complicated than that. But suffice to say, right, is that these price reductions in natural gas don't work their way through right away, just because there's so much hedging on the part of the big firms just means that price changes happen slowly at the consumer level, whatever. That's fine. But it does mean that the that the inflation is inflation driven by energy prices is slowly coming down. But what you notice is that the actual price paid by people is not it's not coming down the price and what causes food inflation as well is the fact that the production

and shipping of all this food that you're getting if you're you're fucking orange in Britain is a hugely energy intensive process. And so, you know, the high gas prices kind of they touch everything, right? And so, and you know, the the the monitor. And so the idea I think that this is that there is some kind of wage price spiral is Abe and thoroughly disproven. And despite the fact that there is this crack in the armor of like, no, Britain is no longer prosperous coming from an official source that actually I think is politically useful. And I think the fact that they're acknowledging that profit taking is playing at least a part in this represents a huge fucking change in an institutional level.

But the ECB goes one step further. And they've said they see no relationship between wages and inflation, which I think is obviously, you know, you know, based ECB based druggy whatever it takes. Exactly. Everybody the five people who listen to this podcast in Greece are like, I'm fucking coming to London to murder Riley. But yeah, I understand what you mean. I understand the joke you're making and the point you're making. So basically, right? This is is that coming back around on it, there is it is increasingly impossible to ignore that the rentier economy only works if it's parasitical on something

else. And the something else is fucking leaving. It's going away. It's going to Dubai. That's why Nick Candy is looking at Dubai and not fucking Kensington, because that's where the money's going, because we had one job in the global economy, and we just sort of stopped doing it. Have you considered though, this the the emergency safety valve that will save Britain's economy, which is that there is a genre of rich person who is just simply too perverted to live in the United Arab Emirates, like they just they the kind of shit they're into, they just can't get away with.

Perfect. We're going to be Butler to the world sex party. Exactly. We are going to be like the wholesale kink supplier to rich people, but Butler in assless chaps to the world. I think that's probably as good a place as any to end this episode. Thank you very much everyone for listening to this this fine this fine episode of TF with a a new configuration and not the permanent fig configuration. Don't worry. Milo's on holiday after Melbourne comedy festival and Alice is very tired. I didn't mean fine in terms of just fine. I meant fine in terms of fine like wine.

Fine like wine and also acceptable. And don't forget, there is Patreon. We have Patreon that you can be a part of. Yes, this is the free episode. It's five bucks a month. It's a second episode every week. We've got writtenology. We've got writtenology. We've also got live shows on the 14th, 15th and 16th and 21st. So we will be in the middle of May touring the Midlands and North as well as one city in Scotland. But one major city in Scotland that we have never played before. So this is a pretty significant milestone for us. So we're going to be in Birmingham on the

14th of May. We are going to be in Leeds on the 15th and in Manchester on the 16th and then Sunday the 21st. We will be in Glasgow. So those tickets are on sale. I will link to them in the show notes as well. And yeah, we also have a Patreon. Like Riley said, $5 a month gets you almost all the bonus content. $10 a month gets you extra writtenology and writtenology because we are anything if not consistent. We had a name we liked and we just slightly changed it. We're just hammering that big ology button again and again and again. We also have a Twitch stream on Monday and Thursday nights. It runs from 9 to 11 p.m.

K time. It's Twitch.tv or just go to Slop.delivery and it will link you. It will forward you to our Twitch page. Our theme song is Here We Go by Jinseng. It is available on Spotify and basically everywhere and you should listen to it a lot because we have graciously used it as our theme music with Jinseng's permission for almost six years. For quite a while. For quite a long time. Yes. And yeah, listen to all the spin out shows, listen to 10K posts, listen to Masters of

Art Domain, listen to, well, there's your problem. The whole Napeth Extended Universe. Yeah, except the shows that I don't produce at all and never have. They're on the list that someone made for some reason. All that stuff. Is there anything we've forgotten to plug Riley? No, I think not. So we will see you in a couple of days on the bonus. Bye everyone. Bye.