TRASHFUTURE - Billion$ feat. James Meadway

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

We live in a blessed time, a truly wise era of human history in which Kylie Jenner’s cosmetics front company is somehow valued at $1 billion USD. Now, this is not a good thing, and special guest James Meadway (@meadwaj) -- an economist, writer, and former adviser to John McDonnell MP -- explains why this is just one symptom of the morass in which we find ourselves, and why recovering an oppositional style of politics is more important than ever. This episode features all of the Trash lads -- Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Nate (@inthesedeserts), and including James this makes for 5 dudes in one room. As Hussein explains during the episode, this is a crucial limit. Please bear in mind that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview — and if you do, you’ll gain access to our Discord server, where you can talk about soup with us all day. *COMEDY KLAXON*: On March 13 at 8pm, Milo will host another Smoke Comedy at the Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA). This show costs £5 and will feature all new material from Tania Edwards, Chloe Petts, Dimitri Bakanov, and Raph Wakefield. Get tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-with-tania-edwards-tickets-56285827425 Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Responding to an article where schools and staff are making parents pay for books, Jeremy Corbin had the following to say, austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity, and a generation of children are paying the price. Anyone have any reactions to that particular sentiment? That's true. Seems pretty obvious. I mean I have a few but I feel like I feel like someone smarter probably needs to take this on. He is leaving himself open to an own. You see this is what this is what we realize. This is why socialism has always failed every single time it's been

tried without exception and this is what James O'Brien points out is that really what Jeremy Corbin should have said is is paying the price. Damn. Looks like we lost another one fellas to author of How to Be Right James O'Brien. Got him. Oh and my grammar again. Surely Corbin will resign now. Surely have you no shame sir. Okay so the thing I was saying this earlier but the thing I love about this is that James O'Brien is trying to own him by correcting his grammar which in any case is like amazingly dumb but he's not even right. Like they're just both acceptable English leases. Like you can say a

generation is paying the price. You say a generation are paying the price because it's implying a generation of people. Like no one says the police is coming. Like there's not like that's not how people talk James O'Brien you fucking smooth-brained idiot. Like honestly like the reason he's on LBC is because he is the person who has like a brain size that most correlates with the kind of people who phone LBC. That's true. James O'Brien's idea of radical praxis seems to be changing the politics of Britain by condescending to one Dartford pensioner at a time. Dang represent.

Welcome to your free TF once again. We're back in the basement that doesn't smell bad this time. The new basement it's got a great record of smelling fine unlike the old basement which didn't. Which genuinely had an uncapped shit pipe. We recently found this out. The old basement was a mix of damp towel that weird smell that every kind of dude's apartment flat has and the shit smell from the sewer. This doesn't this is basically the same thing but without the shit smell. Yeah. Yeah. It's better. You can buy that in a candle. Right. The thing also that I think makes sense that we need to bring up is that remember we

basically got gas lit by the management. They're like no it's not. You know you're not smelling that. I'm like mate we're smelling fucking shit. We know what it smells like. They're like no no that's just that's just wafting in from the bathroom. You know it's serious when Nate goes British on them. I had to do it to him. And congratulations on the owners of our terrible building on becoming Tory ministers apparently. The National Landlords Association. Oh God. Our podcast donates to shelter. That's why they hate us. So we don't donate to shelter. Maybe we should. No let's do it

later. Let's discuss that. We don't need to sheltering me. The actual homeless person who does the podcast. Our Patreon is Radical Praxis. Yeah. And you know who else we can all say hello to is we can say hello to James Medway. James how you doing? I'm very well thank you. And can I say that the basement does indeed smell quite quite peachy and delightful. Exactly. I was warned about the shit smell earlier but this is this is good. Wait who warned you about the shit smell. You mentioned the shit cell. Oh yeah they still didn't manage to put me off. I was gonna well I would direct your attention to the flip chart where it says days since the last shit smell incident. 17 so we're doing good. So

James is until recently was an advisor to John McDonald and is now working on a book about Corbinomics. Yeah that's right. How to make an economy that works for the many not the few to coin a phrase. That's my one sentence elevator pitch for the thing. Oh interest ads. I mean I'm sure. No hang on. I was gonna say I'm sure it'll work this time. I'm sure it'll work this time. For some reason the term Corbinomics to me just conjures the idea of like Corbin in a sort of like jumpsuit taking aerobics class. That's chapter five. Yeah. That's a key part of the revolution. That's quite essential actually. I think he's got to be planted into it somewhere. It says that a revolution eats its own but it needs to also

have caloric caloric output so it can stay toned and lean. A revolution eats its own ass. The official trashage position. Revolutions in Ouroboros. I don't know maybe. Anyway moving swiftly ever so swiftly on. We have yet again a boatload of content today. I'm just saying if Jeremy Corbin is doing aerobics class he's going to be dressed like this. Yo can we have that as the album art please. Of course. Of course. Episode art. Yes. Of course. Awesome. 100 percent. So if you were wondering why the episode art for this episode is different this conversation is why. Yeah. Anyway so folks folks folks. We have to ring the billionaire bell because a new billionaire it's officially joined the ranks. One of them

comes. It's amazing. It's like it's like the stewardess button on an airplane. At this very second Jeff Bezos has jizzed himself. So. That way. I think he meant summoning a billionaire but that works too. Yeah. Ring a bell and just ruin Elon Musk's meeting. Let's say I was playing with the syntactic ambiguity. You're not allowed to do that. There's one way to be right and James O'Brien knows what it is. Deal with it. He knows what it are. James O'Brien on comedy is certainly a book I would read. I mean like just before we continue I feel like what we really need is like James O'Brien because I realized what he's actually done. He's like done Ben Shapiro. You remember when Ben Shapiro was reviewing rap albums. So what we really do is destroy his

rapper. Yeah. Like that's literally what he called his video. Ben Shapiro is Eminem in eight mile. What we need. What we need. What we need is James O'Brien skewering future on his use of sentences. We need. Yeah. I am short. And I've never fucked your mom. That's the thing. James O'Brien's whole thing is like being a very smart liberal but who can also go beast mode. That's basically his entire shtick because most liberals can't go beast mode because they think it's unseemly to go beast mode. They need someone who is like half liberal, half shock jock. He's basically like F.B.P.E. Howard Stern is what I'm trying to say. Does he do beast mode? Is that what it is? When he sort of finds some random caller and sort of insults him for 10 minutes. That's

beast mode. Yeah. He's going beast. Punching down. Yeah. It's borderline sicko mode. You know James James O'Brien beast mode but it's time for us to go beast mode on billionaires yet again. I bet they're very worried that this podcast is about to go beast. But having just all come themselves. Well you did ring the damn bell. That's what most vulnerable. Ding ding motherfucker. Kylie Jenner is a billionaire now. She's been declared the youngest self-made billionaire. And might I say yes fucking queen. What could be bad about this? We'll find something. So Kylie Jenner's cosmetics revenue climbed 9% last year to an estimated estimated estimated. I hope James O'Brien doesn't hear me. $360 million a year. And that Forbes has estimated that her

cosmetics company is now worth at least $900 million which she owns all of. Add in the cash that she's already pulled in from this profitable business. And the 21 year old is now a billionaire with an estimated fortune of a billion. She's the youngest ever self-made billionaire reaching a 10 figure fortune at a younger age than even Mark Zuckerberg who was 23 when he hit that mark. Yeah. I love that Kylie Jenner's only a billionaire by the logic of like the discounted cash flow method of valuation. Which is something a word I'm sure Kylie Jenner has never heard in her entire life. I mean also I love when I occasionally reminded that you escaped reality at business school briefly. Yeah. I mean I couldn't do you one of those. I'm sorry. That was quite a

quite a polluting thing to throw in order a fucking genius. Very secretly. It's like it's so many levels down. It's like turtles like a hundred down and then at the bottom is a genius. Yeah. Yeah. Milo isn't homeless. This is just a really elaborate CEO brain think exercise. Yeah. That towel. That's decoration. That's the dead in the sound. All of my stuff is in the studio. In no way is that my towel because I don't have anywhere to live. Don't be getting that impression James. We're playing a far smarter game of chess than that here at Trash Future. It's all about branding. Right. So the business itself is basically a cosmetics business which fine people like cosmetics. It's fine to sell cosmetics.

Jenner founded it in 2015. It employs just seven full time staff. It is actually almost completely outsourced. She comes up with the ideas for styles but the products are made by seed beauty a private label producer and distributed by others and distributed in store fronts and what have you. And so basically she's like what if Wyatt Koch was really successful and did cosmetics. It's also like very Trump. It's very Trumpy. Right. Because isn't that the whole like Trump business model. He didn't actually build the hotels. He just licensed his name. Yeah. And also inherited a large amount of money and also about and also about too classic. Yeah. So yeah. So it's like step one to somebody who went to business school.

Step one to start a successful business. Have a huge amount of money. So it really is like the perfect billionaire story for the Trump era. Right. Of course. And the thing is the thing that sort of strikes me about this is the extent to which the business has been a couple of things. Number one to be a self made billionaire. You can't have inherited the money that's being counted for being a billionaire or a portion of the business that's kind of for being a billionaire in that billion. You have to have built it yourself. And you know credit that she more or less did do that. But what I what I also notice is that like this is the whole it's just a series of outsourcing

deals brought in under a single brand name. Basically her business acumen not withstanding if you weren't famous extremely famous and thereby able to trade on that fame in order to publicize whatever the product is the people who actually own the product and make the product wouldn't have bothered to get her to basically put her name on it. Yeah. Because all the fucking shit libs who all want like Beyonce to be president or whatever whatever the fuck it is this week like they try and make this like a women in business thing when it isn't a women in business thing at all. They've never met any women in business. They don't know anything about fucking business like Kylie Jenner is not in business. Kylie Jenner is just fucking famous

and people basically give her money on a plate to put her face on shit. That's not having a business like I would say exactly the same thing about fucking Mike the situation sorentino if he became a billionaire off of being a fucking shit head like all that fucking guy who goes around punching people when they take him to Nando's if he suddenly became a billionaire. It's nothing to do with there being a woman at all there being a fucking odious shit. Who's the guy who who's the guy who punches people when they go to Nando's. I was going to pretend I knew what that was. Wait, is that an independent group thing? Who's the guy who punches people when they go to Nando? He's talking about Andrew Tate. I am talking about Andrew Tate.

I am obsessed with this guy for like the weirdest reasons but his J.J. is made do you know the Andrew Tate story? Absolutely no. So he was like he was like a kickboxing champion and he's American he's like one parent was American one parent is British he's lived in both countries he lives here now and basically he's just like a Trump maga alt right guy and he kind of like sells himself as his personality of like this fit dude who like yells at you and tells you you're fat and you look like you're a disgusting piece of shit and people like gravitate towards him to just sort of like have him abuse them so that he's like he's like motivational abuse or something but not a couple

of months ago he posted a thing on Twitter where he said like I'm taking out 10,000 pounds in cash I wouldn't have a good time tonight in London because I hate London and it's a terrible city Show me a good time and I'll pay for everything but if it's not fun and I don't enjoy myself then I get to punch you at the end and someone took him up on it and it was just like this descent into hell they went down like fucking Romford or something they went to Anandos in Hemel Hempstead and they went to a series of clubs the guy just got really high on coke took them to a weird house party then he fell asleep in a bathtub and couldn't find him to punch because everyone had gone um but you've tried Xenophon's anabasis now read The Catabasis anyway yeah but I yeah

not anyway I want to talk more about Andrew Tate before we continue because like it's been on my list that we should we should really feature this guy on the show the reason why is because I am absolutely fascinated by this guy because like so he you know he lives in Luton so like him and Tommy Robbins right right he like that's the night out I would watch he he lives in Luton and he says that he lives in Luton because that's where all like the best fight gyms are which according to like fighters that I know and I've spoken to is like that's that's probably not true like you can like fight clubs in the UK are pretty like standard across the board but like if you were going to go to a place like he envisioned his life like a rocky movie where like you know

where Rocky has to like go to like the Siberian woodlands to um to train so that he in these very specific conditions so you can beat Ivan Drago um with Andrew Tate it's like I need to defeat my phantom enemies by going to Luton um and train and training in a basement he wants to beat up a version of Dolph Lundgren that's dressed up entirely from top man and is eating an extra hot chicken burger he doesn't he doesn't fight anymore now he like runs now he's like this online celebrity um who's been banned from Twitter so he's like made his own thing called the war room where it's because I'm only getting up to speed with this right why is he banned from Twitter oh because he was like he was harassing people yeah he's he's absolutely like a harasser he's a

bad guy he was he was harassing a cartoon I hadn't got that so far he was he was harassing a cartoonist who was trying to crowdsource for his John Rosenberg yeah to try to crowd source for his sick kid yeah because it's not alpha and Andrew Tate was like oh if you like say these words then I will give you all the money so that you can look after your kid and if you don't say these words and that must mean you're a shit father who doesn't care about the kids if you let me punch your kid in the fucking head right I mean that's also how he sounds he sounds like that too but like I wanted to go back because it kind of ties a little bit to the Kylie Jenner thing which is that I'm so interested to see how this is this is a guy who's basically like now trying to build a lifestyle

based on this very weird brand of like ultramasculine right wing rhetoric um the fact that like he looks slightly more human than like other people in the circles he now just hangs out with Paul Joseph Watson every day he looks like if the lead singer of Jamiroquois shaved his head and got ripped right like I want to see him in Paul Joseph Watson in a buddy film or like Paul Joseph Watson gets punched in the mouth and it stays exactly the same size um so but why you know it's basically this whole idea of like building like building something based on like personal branding and isn't that like what the whole like Kylie Jenner thing is about anyway like when when Kylie Jenner first started her cosmetics company one of the critiques that was made was that like she was

copying Rihanna because Rihanna had launched Fenty Beauty which was like this which is still like this really popular um popular uh cosmetics company which is designed for like black women and women of color um and Kylie Jenner like launched something that was pretty much an imitation of that um but it was all just literally based on like the Kardashian Jenner brand uh and when we I don't know enough about this so we really need someone who like knows more but like the whole like Kris Jenner um economy that she's basically built for her kids she takes 10 of everything they make as well it's like the the levels of exploitation because if you think about it wait hang on a minute they all kick up to Kris Jenner yes Kris Jenner's got like a philly atado guy

around beating the shit out of guy I go you cook up to Kris Jenner and no one else I mean I mean that's probably true she probably does have like she probably does have someone like that I've been kicking up to little Kendall who's like who's willing to fly all the way to Luton to like sort out you need to you understand everything in terms of like late season sopranos your perception of America is based on the sopranos and it's not always wrong yeah I mean basically right so here's the thing if we're going to say that um that she's that this is somehow somehow wrong then we might accidentally find ourselves agreeing with Piers Morgan who wrote oh no um who wrote in the Daily Mail uh um Kylie said her parents told her that she needed to make

her own money to learn how to save and spend your own money stuff like that so young Kylie just worked from the hard from the age of 15 in bingo within six years she's a billionaire what a load of disingenuous bull and then he asked to risk the rest of it out because Piers Morgan loves to offend but he doesn't like to swear not and here's here's where that here's the turn is Kylie Jenner didn't become a billionaire because of her work ethic and it's preposterous for anyone to say she did least of all Forbes who should and do no better she became a billionaire because her sister Kim starred in a sex tape now Colin disagree with his analysis Piers Morgan is it seems to me like he hates women more than he hates people who dislike capitalism and so like he's willing to kind of

toe that line as long as he can like attack women I think you're you're missing the trick here which is that she didn't become a she's not a real self-made billionaire which assumes that there are self-made billionaires like Piers Morgan's uh old friend Donald Trump uh this is like striking the it's it's it's it's Kylie Jenner that he goes for Rob and Trump right and it's not the bloody point to make here why Piers Morgan might be doing that the the biggie with this is that I mean like what she's created is is almost the perfect neoliberal company right there is like there's an entirety of the brand out the front that you use because you've got a wacking great Instagram following you've got social media presence like through the roof somewhere that then

delivers something it's completely outsourced you don't actually make anything yourself at all really right it's just a series of deals to stitch whole thing together and then you become fabulously wealthy out of it she personally kisses each box maybe that's maybe that's a secret to it but the big thing here is that like it's completely evacuated what you might want upon a time for what the company is doing which is actually making stuff uh you've just entirely front loaded the thing onto the brand and then turn that into a huge pile of cash so Piers Morgan probably ought to be congratulating her you know we don't even make this podcast we just slap our names on it at the end this is a bunch of actors yeah we could easily say that we don't actually

make this podcast at all we outsource it to fiverr in fact you think that's night that's a model made of light I'm just interested though because there's a detail on it I don't know if you're going to get to it but the James I thought we want to talk about too is is uh there's only seven employees yeah there's only seven employees this company and it's like yeah like you said I mean it's basically it's a front company for an already established cosmetics business this is this is genius right this is quite spectacular that you can do this right this this is this is what we've got to in capitalism this is the best it's ever going to get so it is literally possible to become a billionaire on the basis of seven employees an Instagram presence and some lipstick right

there's somebody else is making oh my god it's Barone Sanitation like Kylie you've got an office of Barone Sanitation gold and a feds are looking into this Milo all that is solid melts into the Sopranos it does I mean show me the lie this is literally Barone Sanitation if it was a billion dollar company yeah all the money comes from uh business I'm in the lip management business yeah you only make ten dollars a year from actually disposing of waste yeah don't worry about it right and so I mean you get this is it seems like it's this this is the result of everything falling further and further into what you might call a service economy where there is nothing anymore there are just services that can be provided right kind of I mean the the issue there is like

let's not get carried away with like oh if only she was like making cars or something proper and manly like that I mean I don't want to get in that sort of thing but there is something weird to having like a company that barely exists like a thin existence of this thing the thin sort of presence of anything that's actually doing and yet somehow it's it's incredibly spectacularly valuable all right that's what we got to equally like don't like Donald Trump doesn't make hotels just as in fact most car manufacturers actually don't make cars most car manufacturers are just organizing the logistics of bringing other of bringing lots of standard parts together that they buy from other people well here you go into the dangerous Marxist thing of who's making a

lipstick anyway right so so you know this is this is a terrible path to end on when you start thinking about who is actually doing the work at any point in any of this uh set of relationships and who owns the company and who owns the brand and all the rest right where where are the lips where is the lipstick made I really feel like I should have looked myself yeah I don't know but I took a look at it not red das makyaj volume three I just think it's funny because there are different permutations of this and some of them are sinister than others I don't know if you're familiar with this but azalea banks also has a cosmetics line it's an asshole bleaching cream yo that's actually very funny that's cool I'm not making that up I guess in this case that can't

not getting eaten azalea azalea banks for billionaire she's the she is the only billionaire I want to see it gets to be one billionaire and we like them every year yeah it's ban margera every year every single year no it's ban margera's simpleton friend from Connecticut please oh yes right but the other thing Gotham deserves the other thing I think and a lot of these and a lot of these debates sort of is almost risk falling down on like does she deserve to be a billionaire or not because has she put in enough work but it's crap no one can ever put in enough work to be a billionaire it's insane I mean it's just ludicrous the idea this is the whole thing that's self-made how the hell are you gonna be self-made to be a billionaire all right I mean

it's a spectacular amount of money right obviously it's standing bleeding obvious at this point it is so far beyond what any of us in this room I'm gonna hazard a guess here we'll ever earn in our entire lifetime in fact everyone in this building which understands for the start I mean I have a lot of faith in my music career I have a lot of faith I have a lot of faith in the mix tape I think it's gonna go far it sounds like you're talking Britain down because actually if we just deregulated the market enough and allowed the free market to like really work and let people succeed then everyone could be a billionaire obviously and maybe if everyone lived in polycules there would be more billion yeah if everyone stopped like buying nice things and like we

just reduced all health and safety regulation to nothing and dropped all tariffs then of course the free market would make everyone a billionaire obviously I was just checking this I remember the statistic so a billion seconds is 31 years so if you were making like a dollar a second for like pretty much your entire working life you'd become a billionaire yeah so that's how hard you'd have to work to actually yeah well how hard like that's you need to take a you need to like listen to a lot of audiobooks on double speed to be able to work that hard you really would and you have to be being paid to listen to them somehow a dollar a second for your entire life whether or not you're asleep or awake or actually doing anything yeah and the comparison between a million and a

billion I think that is interesting on that one too is that a million seconds is 11 days and a billion seconds is like 31 years it's just like yeah just the content but then you hear somebody is worth 20 billion dollars or 10 billion dollars you're like oh yeah that's just a part of our economy somehow yeah like just like more money than a person could could even conceive of like it's like the thing with when people are talking about the AOC like 70 tax rate above 10 million dollars a year and I'm like I don't it's like hard to imagine how anyone could object that on the base of like what can't you do with 10 million dollars a year and you can still earn more than 10 million dollars a year you couldn't buy Kylie Jenner's company in terms of life if I was on your

aims in life I'm like damn but something that I'm interested too James is the idea that like this can't be worth a billion dollars like this this this valuation is inflated like beyond just like the accounting method used like the idea that it's actually worth that much money seems like that's just another trick of this economy that we have invented I don't know credulity in this kind of number and be like oh yes a an instagram star who is related to a reality tv personality has a company that's basically a front and that's somehow worth a billion dollars well it's sort of I mean again it's this is like what capitalism does this is how the thing operates right the for its entire existence it depends on an enormous amount of overvaluation

of bullshit yeah various points in its existence so so you know from from tulip mania right tulip bolts worth the equivalent of several million dollars back in the 1650s all the way all because Kylie Jenner was promoting this and this continues right the dot com boom it's the same thing companies have never produced or done anything whatsoever getting spectacular value the question of the minute is are we in the middle of of something like that as of now and is there some weird creepy interaction with social media that's going to sort of blow up in our face in a hilarious fashion somewhere down the line what's it's basically at this point it's just it's all just effective now it is essentially like we've we've got we have monetized we monetize the

future with financialization that crashed we monopolize we monetize like just the growth in the economy and then in the great depression that crashed you know essentially what are we doing except now that the monetize this podcast most of the donate to the patreon most of the economy now seems to be based on targeted advertising which basically means we're monetizing identity and emotion more or less so you run out you run out once you've kind of colonized one bit of it the dynamic is if you want to make more money out of something you have to find something else to go and sell to people it doesn't really matter what it is it's almost like what monetized getting tattoos and eating cheese because it's a guy's born in July

thing but the other thing I think to remember like is like this never occurs in a vacuum right because it's not as though Kylie Jenner has just kind of through her incredible instagram feed and not even necessarily Kylie Jenner just any billionaire like Bezos or Tim Cook or Tim Apple as he's now known like they didn't just sort of magic a billion dollars into existence or many billions it all has to come from somewhere and one of the things the other things I think we can see is that it is that we might not we but we as at least electorates seem to be sort of willfully funneling this money from places it's actually useful into an extra ivory backscratcher for Kylie Jenner so I noticed something I found was recently it's been released that the Bureau of

Investigative Journalism compiling data on 12,000 public spaces disposed of by councils since 2014-15 found that councils have been forced to raise and essentially give away 9.1 billion pounds from just selling off their property yeah I mean this is the monster this is the colonization if you run out of ways to make money doing the things that we sort of tend to think capitalism should do but really very rarely actually does which is actually making stuff and selling it right actual things that exist and that includes services then after a while you end up trying to chase those profits elsewhere and the mechanism over the last 30 40 years looks exactly like you find it hard to make profits in the let's invest in something let's make something end of the economy so you go chasing off

can you privatize something that already exists and sell it somewhere can you make a profit out of that can you get councils as has happened over exactly where the figures you quote over the period since 2010 can you get them to sell off things they're actually public assets everyone's put their money into because you paid taxes for these things can you do that can you do the same thing with the NHS can you chop off bits of it in one way or another hand over to a private company so they can make money out of it this is kind of colonization process right which reaches a really really bizarre point when you get a social media and a sort of impression of value and impression of a brand and like you know your million 10 million followers wherever it is that

has a monetized value that you can then try and leverage into into actual money elsewhere it's a really peculiar kind of capitalism eating itself sort of moment you get to on this and it has it has a weird sort of side effect remember reading last year it was these guys calling themselves the walls of instagram right and it's like people basically trying to flog binary options which is a ludicrously simple like really it's not it's not really an option it's just a bet and whether if you like a share will go up in price if it goes up and you say it's going to go up you win if it goes down you lose right simple as that and they sell it all as like trading and they sell it all as your route to riches and obviously the wolf of wall street is like your big example of how to

make loads of money from nowhere and it trades entirely on this kind of bullshit to lure people into what is effectively a big old pyramid scheme that everybody because they don't actually make money out of the binary options they have to go out and frantically sell the things to other suckers basically somewhere down the line you know and that's the kind of a low-level version sorry you can buy them from Kylie Jenner now well that's the thing this is kind of the low level this is the way this is this is eating into every part of everybody's life that you can start to see what financialization looks like that you end up with that kind of mechanism where people are sort of on this treadmill at the bottom and then there's a more successful version of it

somewhere up at the top and interesting you just as you say this a guy someone called True Hustle just followed me on Instagram oh nice I love buying a load of buying a load of futures in the Azerbaijani oil industry because Dr. Alex from Love Island told me to do it I mean how long how long until like they're gonna be like Instagram influencer trips to like Saudi Arabia I mean they're surely there already have been um I think Dubai yeah not quite Saudi yeah Kylie Jenner posted wow I've never been to a real beheading before right it's um but it feels as though additionally like there is a connection between between the sort of rampant sort of looting of the public coffers and that money sort of

being redirected elsewhere even if the public coffers are being looted so that we can pay we can basically just keep covering services kicking the can a little bit down the road while we frantically just shovel money into like Richard Branson's plane exactly uh exactly but this is this is reaching a sort of ludicrous point by now I think that there's a a serious sort of like lights have just gone out the serious crisis of it's not so much a crisis of profitability it's a crisis of investment a crisis of productivity a crisis of your bare essentials of what should capitalism be doing deliver I mean you know the best form of capitalism you get is probably something like just after the Second

World War and into 40s 50s 60s 70s that kind of period where growth is very high people's wages are rising you have a real sort of transformation the economy that actually delivers loads of stuff for lots of people at least in the the global north right so here France America North America that sort of thing and that's the best version of capitalism you ever get and what you get afterwards is the sort of same principles like chasing profits all over the place but you you don't really care where it happens and it's incredibly short term and a lot of it is just shuffling money around him this is late stage capitalism basically everyone's like oh late stage capitalism damn I was late for my bus late stage capitalism strikes again but this is actually what that is

kind of but it's also I'm I'm worried about going at late stage because it's like people are talking about late capitalism at least since the sort of 70s right I'm probably predating that and you kind of wait for it you know you can let him talk about a final stage of capitalism whatever and that's in the 1910 so you can't wait to finish exactly but no there's a sort of another there's a cliffhanger and then the damn thing carries on for another season you know that's that's that's the mechanism here the danger I think is that what you had like that best bit of capitalism oh wow it's making loads of stuff oh wow it's a post war boom everybody's wages are going up you've got the NHS you've got welfare state it's all looking really good

that is the exception what capitalism is really like what it really does is just sell stuff and it doesn't care at all whether this is morally good morally bad it's just going to sell some stuff and that's how it's going to make money right so in that sense the perfection of it is when you can basically sell stuff based entirely on a brand that barely exists right on a company that barely exists right this is the most perfect form of capitalism you can have James you've really put me off capitalism it's it's it's it's not great uh that's that's my hot take hang on shit fuck oh damn we're gonna have to go back and change every previous episode of this show we're gonna have to and I've spent the whole day googling Venezuela yeah it's one of

those things that really that that always shocks when you see the same metrics that are applied to sort of like the thing that always reminds me is like when you had the collateralized debt obligations right before the last financial crisis and all of the ratings agencies were assigning these things you know AAA ratings that they were like these were like pension grade investments that you could make and everybody involved knew like everybody who was involved with with with securitizing these things knew that there were certain tranches that were absolutely risky and some that weren't but the entire system was built on this sort of like I can't fail it can't go wrong the smartest people in the world have said that this you know that this is a foolproof investment

but it's the same sort of concept the same kind of people are saying this shell company this artificial sort of non-energy that's just been amplified by social media this has the same value as a thing like I don't know another billion dollar company a billion dollar company like like that makes things or even worse you could look at someone like amazon which is a business that does things but like is jeff bezos really truly worth 120 billion dollars is their business that valuable like those kisses man it just seems valuable it just seems like the the inflated value it seems to coincide with a period of like crushing deflation for people who are not in the investor class I also fucking loved the whole collateralized debt obligation thing because

they were all like uh yeah no sure these mortgage brokers seem very trustworthy we're sure they've lent good mortgages and their names were all like joey fraudi amyglio and they were like a former bodybuilder who's like selling houses on top of a swamp in the Everglades it really it's a really you could see like Kylie Jenner is just the highest expression of that where it's like it's again I feel I'm doing the defense of Kylie Jenner she is actually selling lipstick right so so there is something here that's being sold that people want nobody wants to collateralize debt obligation right speak for yourself I put they look they make me look great Santa baby but it's um but one of my questions that I sort of I always ask right is right now if these are

our billion dollar companies if like the the financial the financial industry it's over it's old hat it's 10 years ago the tech industry it's already kind of it's it's sort of faltering but our billion dollar companies now are our influencers there are futile devotion to our living gods you know what what do you yeah it's it's the keemstar economy welcome to the keemst welcome to keemstar capitalism damn billionaires we're just clout chasing um where well if we seize the means of production what do we seize at this point if we seize the means of production what do we seize at this point all right there's a I mean this is like life becomes difficult right when you start to try and think through what it means to have capitalism there's created this this huge

infrastructure because there is something real going on here right behind a company that looks like what Kylie Jenner is doing and actually a whole bunch of other people behind all of that there is a massive technological infrastructure to get the internet to work to have companies that can provide things like an instagram or facebook or twitter or whatever right these things do exist it has changed how the economy operates all of that stuff pretty much is held in kind of private hands right and companies allow you access to it in return for a payment the payment that you make is not really like in terms of money the payment you make is in terms of the data that you're handing over uh now that is a challenge to how most people on the left sort of think about things

because what is the means of production here how you're going to seize it you sometimes get people saying you know let's let's nationalize facebook right which is it's a flippant thing to say because one facebook's in the us so you can't sit in britain nationalize it and two I mean to be to be honest made this point before but like do you really want the us government to have access to all that lovely facebook data I mean they can kind of get anyway if they really want it but why make life easy for them right so there is actually a challenge to anybody who thinks on the left which is like what do you do instead of saying okay we're just going to take this thing if there is an actual factory actually producing something if there's a coal mine producing coal you want to

nationalize it you can go and take the coal mine and nationalize it that happened in this country it's every railway so if you want to like do something about what the internet is doing and potentially producing value life becomes very very difficult right and I think the issue there is thinking through a couple of things one what is data anyway which is not not an easy conceptual thing the other part is is what does it mean to have some sort of collective or democratic control over this stuff what is the form of property ownership that you want to get to right uh my reading of this is not absolutely not the sort of old school the state will own it it's all going to be good right that that isn't going to work here for a whole list of reasons one of them obviously

the state simply can't take these things too it's kind of undesirable to just have the state doing these things so we have to think through what a kind of collective version of the internet collectively produced virtually internet might start to look like that's a very very long-winded way of saying not very interesting I was just reminded because um it's funny we you worked for john mcdonnell and we've talked a lot about uh john mcdonnell recently wrote an essay for that was a new socialist I think where he talked about he referenced red balonia which he was referencing in the 70s which is really interesting and I remember reading that the the version that I've read at the end had an interview with the mayor of balonia in the 70s and he made the point

he said like we could if we really wanted to fight to have every ice cream cart be owned by the city but that just doesn't make sense we don't really there's no need to and it's the idea that like there are things that to me it seems like there are things that state ownership or public ownership will make a difference and it's like it seems like the difference between owning everything versus for the point of not having there be commerce versus owning certain things so that if there is commerce it's not this artificial skewed thing that's creating I feel like I'm harping on it but overvaluation and one thing that I think of is you mentioned housing for example houses are going to have value but does where I live in an area I live in peckham and like there are houses

that they certainly have value they're not worth 600 000 pounds they're there they're worth something but not that the reason why they're assigned that value is because of this massive inflation that's happened like the sort of between I don't know real estate investment trusts and just the fact that people want to live in London has created this artificial value if you want to talk about foreign investment in fucking London property just as an aside today one of the many really dumb things that I do for money is I do some work for like a russian fixer who does a lot of work for like really wealthy russians in London and today it's obviously it's international women's day on the day we're recording this and in russia that's a big holiday not because they're in any way feminist but because

in russia it's women's day well you give your brother a nice time you buy out a bunch of flowers it's like it's very weird and so I was like delivering various gifts from like people who are in russia to like russian women who live in London and I went to this apartment block in Kensington and Chelsea now you may not be aware there are a few russians around and I went into this apartment block and I was not the only russian speaking courier delivering fucking eighth of march gifts in that building at the same time like literally during the 32nd period I was in the building there was another guy going to a different apartment also speaking russian to the person in there see that's that's a market economy operating at perfect efficiency Milo exactly you've got the skills

they've got the money see there's nothing wrong with it clearly and soon Kylie Jenner will own 100% of the distribution but we'll just sort of have an ownership title over all of the companies that actually execute it but look we talk about like overvaluation right and nothing's overvalued or things don't tend to be overvalued unless there is some kind of money flowing into them and taking this sort of slightly back to back to councils being funded there was there's this quote that I found that I really sort of wanted to pull out where county councils network Simon Edwards the director says put bluntly these are some of the most difficult decisions facing councils every day and this is talking about selling off pools leisure centers youth centers just parks

every single thing that makes life livable and these are difficult decisions local politicians not going to public service to slash and burn or make valued staff redundant let alone sell assets to do this but this is the financial reality of years of funding reductions in rising demand and yet funding reduction it's it's it's it's like I feel like people haven't yet put together that this money all of this money that in these resources that are basically designed to make our lives livable are being channeled into making Kylie Jenner's life ultra livable the one because the council's cutting its funding because council funding has been cut Kylie Jenner gets rich there is there is there is an element of truth to that right if you have capitalism which

basically doesn't look like it it's certainly not growing like it used to right and Kylie Jenner in particular yeah let's just represent this sort of there's a category of people who incredibly well for you're doing all right and everybody else isn't if you have capitalism in general which is growing but not growing in a way that most people's wages are rising so take this country right um real wages now are lower than they were in 2010 so it's and this is unprecedented this just really hasn't happened for for less of 200 years that kind of period of time where most people haven't got better off I heard it's because of the Romanians uh it's it's it's well you you heard wrong no I heard it from a very reputable guy that I met on the street who was drinking a can of

tenants I'm pretty sure uh we can come back to we can come back to it to the the the impact of living in a zero sum game economy right so you have growth the economy is growing not particularly well is growing most people are not better off right so somebody's doing all right and and the issue you have at that point is it looks like a zero sum game in other words the fact that you are being made worse off means that somebody else is getting better off right and and all of our politics starts to look like variants after a while of dealing with that so one progressive version of this is to say in order for me or you or everybody in this room most people live around here to be uh better off somebody else has to be made worse off it'll put the top

not very progressive version that Milo uh helpfully indicated is to say actually the people are going to be made worse off uh migrants right so and you get variants of this sort of politics all over the place so so the challenge I think for anybody again back to like what the left should be doing it's thinking about what are the implications that zero sum game because the sort of old school argument the old school left argument is is you can present everything as a win-win you can go hey it's it's great we're going to invest some money the economy is going to grow I'm better off people at the top are better off it's win-win for everybody I think there's a deep cynicism about that like everyone kind of knows that isn't going to work with the state of

the world as it is that I'm being made worse off because somebody else is being made better off so if I want to be better off and have the things that the local authority can provide uh have actually you know my living standards going up not the the extraordinary falls in in pay in real terms that we've seen over the last few years if you want that to happen somebody else has to be made worse off right and that's the understanding that people have and broadly the economy we live in does kind of look a bit like that right so so there is this thing where it is no longer capitalism producing the goods for everybody and we're all living happily ever after things become quite brutal but something that I'm wondering though is looking at that

I feel like when you show people the disparities when you show people the disparity between I remember I want to say it was it was Grace Blakely shared that chart on Twitter where it was like the difference in the EU 27 countries like what uh what the difference between the poorest region and the wealthiest region in those countries was and in the United Kingdom it was a different like 600 it was by far it wasn't just the largest it was the largest by an enormous margin it's like when you can show people like these people it's not the billionaires are going to be destitute they're just not going to be making money as much hand over fist as they are now and that that incremental decrease of their wealth I don't know a cruel is going to make an

exponential difference in the lives of basically everybody else yeah because when you explain it that way it's not it doesn't it doesn't seem like we're like oh we're gonna we're gonna burn their mansions down and you know exile them to st Helena like I mean I mean now that I wouldn't does it does it have to not mean that but you know what I mean like that's the shit that they get on tv and say all the time and it's like but when you look at it you say no it's just the fact that they have they have they've suctioned up so much of the money in the economy that even what's going to be like a 10 decrease in their rate of return not in their overall wealth is going to make an exponential difference for everyone else because they get so little yeah well I mean as we all

know the billionaires are actually going to burn the rest of the planet down and move themselves in New Zealand but like yeah I always think this is weird because I think particularly in the UK we have like this is why I thought a case of Cortez is saying about the 10 million dollars a year thing was so helpful because in the UK I think politics gets really bogged down in talking about different shades of people who are still on the normal income spectrum like we talk about taxes at 150k a year who gives a fuck about people earning 150k a year talk about people earning 10 million quid a year 20 million quid a year 30 million because those people exist and they make an exponentially bigger difference than like pissing off a bunch of people who just like work

in a law firm and do 16-hour days or whatever like why are we not talking about higher taxes at like way higher thresholds yeah or I completely agree with you um and this is this has become like a slightly sort of dumb argument that flares up and it comes from a particular version of like what the left politics should look like and what the Labour Party should be doing and saying which is is that an associated with Blairism or even Brownism which is that you know it's sort of hard to go after the people right at the top you know that that's kind of a difficult thing to get the taxes and do if you want to run the NHS and pay for all sorts of things you end up squeezing this is what new Labour did in office you end up taking from people aren't

actually that well off right you still squeeze people a bit lower down and then you kind of redistribute it to everyone else and you you let that not even the top 1% if you want to be top 1% in this country you need to earn about 150,000 a year it's the top 0.1% which people learning over about a million pounds a year let that lot zoom off into the distance and don't touch them you're intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich because you end up squeezing lower down scale now if you want to actually build a coalition that wins something like an election and gets a government that can make a difference to this it's sure like if you're on 50, 60, 70, 80,000 pounds a year you're rich on the average you're a fair bit rich on the average by the time

you get to 60, 70,000 a year right you're about twice at least more than that uh average earnings but you know in near the people at the top like that 0.1% who have the money in the wealth and that is the bit you need to start turning into sort of almost like demigods at that point because at that point they're famous they're famous for being rich but they're also sort of famous as these dynamos of the economy who tend to be moving things forward you uh i feel like this is something you could bring up is that when you go specifically try to antagonize people who are in that sort of like that that that spectrum you're describing like from say 60, 70,000 pounds a year up to like 250,000 pounds a year you wind up with i mean think about this

Milo if you asked your parents about like labor in the 70s i bet you that what i can't remember the line it was one of the chancellors under labor who said like we're going to squeeze property or until the pipsqueak like they'll still remember that shit because they they fucking do my parents specifically remember that shit that's still fucking enraged about it that specific quote and it's like what you i feel like i'm i'm agreeing with your point but i feel like that's that not only do you not actually get as much value out of it but you also in a way are antagonizing a although not as powerful a much larger group of people who then if they're antagonized together if they have any kind of which many of whom are ideologically minded to support you like people

like my parents are like natural labor voters if you actually ask them what they think but they vote Tory because they associate labor with like 98% tax like 100 grand a year or whatever Jeremy Corbyn needs to go and do a magic trick for my parents while wearing a feather in his fedora and ask them if they'd like to kiss him before like walking off horrifying talking to their fat friend so many so many ways but um no you're right it was it was denny's healing in the 70s it was a chance of the exchequer when he said it we're going to tax the rich until the pipsqueak which you know that that gets repeated he didn't do this he was on the rise of the party at the time right um so the issue i think you're absolutely right the issue is and probably what

would be one of the best or most important things we did with the 2017 election manifesto was to make that promise that we're absolutely going to stick to um the that we would not be increasing income tax vat and national insurance contributions or anyone earning less than 80,000 a year now 80,000 a year puts you on the top 5% right and over that we'd ask you to pay a bit more right now that is that is setting up that very important argument about who do you want to be on your side what is the actual problem the actual problem here is not yes it's a fair bit of money it's more than average no this is not the target of all that is bad in the world and therefore we're going to rinse them no that's not the case the problem is whacking great corporations avoiding taxes

and extremely wealthy people doing something similar right that is where the problem is so you target that the second bit i mean the more blunt electoral thing is that if you go around saying hey everybody's wages have fallen most people's wages have fallen for last seven years at the time under the Tories you can't really turn around and say guess what we're going to do first thing we're going to put your taxes up because like you've been made poorer by the Tories so Labour's going to do that as well right it's a total non-starter if you have a rhetoric that says you've been made poorer under the Tories you can't also say to people most people we're going to make you poorer too because we're going to put your taxes up right so it's a simple electoral coalition

calculation about why you need to do this but the deeper thing is because we need to transform how the entire economy works not sort of piss about chasing people who have a bit more money but not the spectacular kind of pools of wealth we see towards the top end if you're in that spectrum like when you say the not 0.1% like that's still the low end of that spectrum above a million pounds like we're talking people like the super what is it the ultra high net worth individual where it's like they make i don't know they have 100 million pounds or 500 million pounds or a billion pounds like those people exist i mean most of their wealth is offshore but like they absolutely exist yeah i mean because you get like people are earning 100 000 pounds a year

might buy themselves a nice flat or a nice car but people who are like that rich are buying themselves a nice age of consent loophole plane it's not illegal if it's in international losses absolutely i'm sorry who's saying epstein i didn't know you joined us i i i did two law classes i did two law classes and now i'm jeffrey epstein's lawyer i only i only bought these classes over here business what a week on a business studies course that was me yeah that's good it's good yeah we're a business podcast about like dudes doing business james you know what's really embarrassing is i did a whole i did a whole year of a business degree at cambridge after i finished my main degree and i learnt fucking nothing business school is

such a joke you know what that's what that's literally what andrew tate says as well there's a video where he's just like he actually taught me a business school in his weird voice he's just like fuck school man it's so weird because that's how he sounds but um sorry he lives in lutan and that's he lives in lutan yeah he lives in america he lives in lutan because lutan's the only place where you can train for big fights but he also accidentally he uses british slang word so he pure actually sounds like me when i'm trying to make myself understood he's like i don't want to hear about your dodgy mate and your fucking mobiles okay i don't want to hear about nanos like it just sounds weird i don't want to hear about the bins in blue so really what we need to do

andrew andrew tate is scaring off the capital from britain andrew tate has made all of the i've made all of the pools of capital afraid to come back to britain and that's what we need austerity 2020 manifesto promise um andrew tate will personally punch the juke of westminster outside oceana whatford it's going down anyone who voted labor can watch well speaking of in fact um this is this is now the government starting to contravene its its own logic right where they've begun they've they've now begun to say well we actually we can find some of this money even though the ultra high net worth are basically untouchable because we decided we don't want to go after them or because we don't want to remove the motivation to invent the next

dyson um they've now we actually been able to find this money to bribe labor voters not with the ability not with the chance to see andrew tate and the duke of westminster do a bare knuckle boxing match but rather uh she at tereza may appears to have found another 1.6 billion pounds so you know kylie jenner found her billion um councils lost about a billion and then tereza may found about another billion i got councils have lost more than that which is part of the problem with like 1.6 billion this is 1.6 billion after you know uh what is it 30 40 years of massive under investment across most of the country outside of london bits of the southeast well that's it's not even sticking plus it's a joke right and it's and it's seen as a joke and it seems to have gone

down like the proverbial lead balloon so it's just it's fast it's so bad you almost wonder whether she'd set it up to be that bad i mean if you're going to be serious about she had said here's 16 billion has 160 billion like here's actual like large sums of cash that's going to make a difference it's just in order to get that what would we really have to do especially because um it's so easy for capital to go on strike uh is it easy for capital to go on strike i mean it's it's it's it's easy because you can you can domicile most of your money outside the country it's easy to move the move money around in fact the fact that we're still in the european union means that you know you can always take your money from uh well your financialized capital

anyway you can always take it from britain and put it in you know germany or whatever if you're talking about investment right you're talking about let's go off and build some stuff not a lexate guy just think that's one of the main faults of the e you if um if we're talking about investment so let's go off and build some stuff so so whatever this stuff might be massively improving public transport uh big shifted blade don't uh so come just try some ideas in this one yeah there's not some not some things around yeah is it portsmouth that has an enormous spike or something that's that's the thing that's been fucking that weird building that looks like a sale yeah like that kind of thing so so only like doing it properly and doing it seriously yeah when the private when

the private sector does it they do do stuff like making a big like weird gergen or like a spike or a shard they make the dumbest buildings we know james dyson reckons he's going to make electric cars now um when people are saying that you know this is uh this is a bit of a departure from his usual business of making hoovers and they might be a bit arrogant thinking he can make an electric car just because both things are electric but i actually think to be fair to james dyson they probably will be quite similar to this here this and i'm sure this cars will fucking suck it's a lot of build up for us i just want to say that trash feature is a is a is a pro henry is a pro henry hoover podcast henry hoover that's so good i bought one so good i just want

to like i can okay let's talk about hoovers for a bit the hoover review i want to wait for the laze in the eye it's so good i need to know a bit more than just you say right a little phase it's got to it's a hoover it's a hoover with a personality it's like kylie janer you have an effective relationship with the henry hoover and that's why it's such a valuable company when you know that henry hoover keeps up that's why the henry hoover is the future of british industry right like this is what's going to make us relevant and muscular post post brexit hoovers with little faces on the yeah hoovers with faces and other cutesy shit like that they'll be like different faces because we want to represent a diverse happy international women's day we made a henry

keep calm and keep on sucking right but so the thing is like it's but that's my real question how do you get that how do you get that money how do you prevent the ultra wealthy from just taking it the the biggie there is is at this point in time if you're talking about investment and building things outside of london houses or whatever else it might be renewable energy also is actual stuff that you're going to do because it hasn't happened for a long period of time in most of the country at this point in time you can borrow money off wealthy people and big institutions for such a low rate of interest it's negative they'll pay you to borrow that money right that's the government's own borrowing rate the insanity of the last few years

is that government is insisting that it won't do this until fairly recently so the the thing about wealthy people moving their money elsewhere looks less of a problem if they're so desperate to have some safe investment they will hand over money to the government and get a negative rate of interest on it so that money can be borrowed and then you go off and spend and build the stuff and what's absurd is that in light of all of these facts in light of the and the only thing that explains the sort of immense concentration of wealth in the hands of the very wealthiest even at a negative rate of interest is quite simply that our government is ideologically opposed to doing anything that isn't like maintaining a nuclear arsenal i mean partly that partly also i

think that there's a sort of there's a kind of deep structural problem which is that they live in fear of another pretty this way there's sort of a generalized fear of another financial crisis right the last one was phenomenally expensive we're still being forced to pay for it through austerity now and that sort of stretches out for years and years well into the next decade on on sort of fairly optimistic government projections so it's phenomenally expensive at least a huge increase in in the government debt at least a massive opening up of the deficit if we face another financial crisis it could be that expensive but it could be simply like phenomenally expensive at a huge cost to everyone therefore the thing to do you might think thing to do is try and

avoid another financial crisis that would involve changing how finance operates right that's the kind of sensible thing to do yeah what the government has thought and the kind of the deep structure of this is to say no what we're actually going to do is shrink the public sector so in case there's another crash we have the space that we can deal with it right so present it with a choice between having an enormous you know very risky very very large financial system and having a public sector that actually does some stuff like local councils that can provide basic services the choice that has been forced on us through austerity is to say we are privileging that financial system that's basically what the thing comes down to so it's not just ideology

this is like how our economy operates right in a really fundamental sense i fucking love the British government they're just like no no no i'm pretty sure like i've not looked in too much to what they're doing over at barcap but like i was in jpg house with hugo and i'm pretty sure he's got it under control so let's not worry about whether we've learned any lessons whatsoever from the financial crisis i know it seems like nothing's changed but i'm sure they said they were sorry so i'm sure it's going to be fine okay great now how much are we getting for all of these council parks that we're selling i mean the problem is there's there's not really a joke that's just true that he's almost i mean you know you're taking a piss but like this is how the decisions play

out right that that is literally how that how the thing ends up working it's like what can we do to keep basically financial services pretty much exactly as they are and provide everything for them why is it you get big infrastructure decisions unlike you know let's build some stuff to make the economy work better for people okay fine let's do that what are the lists of priorities for this government over the last few years it is do as much as you can in in london and southeast like to a huge extent why because they it's good for the city and that's going to be good for the rest of us in some weird sense yeah maybe under new labor it sort of was good for the rest of us in the sense that you could tax what was happening in the city of london and spend some of that in

the rest of the country yeah what's happened the last like eight years or so is that this hasn't happened we're all paying for this because that's what austerity means so so in other words like this is this is how the decision-making process ends up working so it's not just like let's spend a bit more money if you want to like change how the economy operates you have to rewire how that decision-making process takes place you have to go to the treasury get hold of the green book which details how you're going to make investment decisions how you're going to make public spending decisions rewrite the damn thing i thought it detailed how a nice italian man learned that black people were okay after all no it was the third political theory of

of momar Gaddafi obviously oh okay um but that would be a hollywood film to watch but it's like we say these these rules are created have been created in such a way right where the recovery of from the um financial crisis has largely redounded to the benefit of the already super wealthy right because when you privatize things you privatize it in such a way that those who are able to capture it will capture it and so again at at the risk of almost forcing a circular structure on us this goes back to how someone can just sort of trip and fall into being the world's youngest billionaire but at the same time someone like jeff bezos can um can again sort of pounce on all of these existing public infrastructures that have been built up but

that they're no we're no longer interested in maintaining that can exist in this crisis of low pay and just take advantage of like weakening trade unions and stuff to just sort of also trip over their own dicks and make themselves a billionaire in just a much more ruthless and exploitative way right and so that it did all of this is basically connected we have made a series of choices that have said we'd rather um we'd rather like kylie janer gets rich enough that she can build her own space station um yes a national babe station baby i mean we kind of we kind of know that like the other conclusion of this is that one of these like zoella zoella is going to build an evan galleon right like i feel like that's the only conclusion that comes around this

all like cardi b like builds a Gundam like i don't know if something's gonna happen and everyone's gonna be like sophie's very pleased at that idea she's very unborn with cardi b having a gun i would like to welcome sophie to trash future actually thank you for the facts about plinth so you now have to take a shower with the communal towel what um which is this is how you get inaugurated into the trash future law right now you didn't tell me this that's what that's what the towels bear in mind you don't you don't dry yourself with the communal towel you take a shower with the communal towel it's important to stay wet right but so bringing it bringing it back down to what down to austerity right like it's just it's a clear set of choices with with clear winners

and losers and the winners are you know kylie and visa friend they're easy to see okay and donald trump and shit like this is just who we've decided we want to enrich at the expense of everyone so i'm gonna take it to one more just profoundly stupid conclusion about seeing the world this way i had to read this and i was really upset that i had to read it we know it's coming we all know it's coming unfortunately all of these things we've described like the actual workings of the real economy that are based on like you know politics and power and the decisions people make unfortunately none of them are actually okay to think i'm sorry guys is this going to be a quote from busy town as you have about the intellectual weight as a quote

from busy town it's from an article in the financial times by john mcternan about how to make a kick one of the one of the most in that's from lazy town not busy town oh well you got your wrong i also love the love the surname mcternan like his ancestor was an irish man who handed people over to the cops well again i mean he was one of the main strategists under blare like he probably was indirectly involved in the ruining of tons of people's lives i was going around both ass whoever any person i could hand over to the cops i mean they invented the asbo right like anyway um so john mcternan writes of seeing the economy in this way of having clear winners and losers and establishing enemies rhetoric about the one percent and economic inequality

have the same underlying theme a small group of very rich people who cleverly manipulate others to defend their interest so anti-capitalism masks and normalizes anti-semitism this is such a fucking normal opinion honestly i like i i lost my shitty mind like because literally what he's saying is oh like criticizing the wealthiest people in the world is the same as anti-semitism because i believe that all the richest people in the world are jews and somehow you are the anti-semite yes a very fucking normal man with very fucking normal ideas who's definitely not himself a massive closet anti-semite well it's like yeah it's like kylie yeah kylie jenner oh you can't criticize like you can't criticize the way in which he's become a billionaire because that

would be anti-semitic somehow she's stealing jewish valor by making money but it's it is it is complete nonsense that we are afraid to talk about the economy in oppositional terms right well it was i mean the levels of stupidity involved in in that john mcternan thing are quite intense so you have to be more specific because if you're saying the levels of stupidity involved in that john mcternan thing could be a bunch of things the the idea that anti-capitalism is in fact anti-semitism is particularly stupid and offensive for the reasons milo just gave because like the implied equation you're making between capitalism and jews here is massively anti-semitic and is not obviously something to be in any way sort of as a clever way to talk about

capitalism or any issue that was just a very british thing to like it's been like been a theme for this week hasn't it like british people who like have been so desperate to prove that they're not racist but i've ended up being even more racist doing so like amberud amberud what did amberud actually say so i was in brain prison i didn't actually see this one she called um diana abit colored oh no what she was doing is make a point about like sorry you're a professional politician damn you sounding like james like brian but you're sorry you you is a professional politician there was someone else as well who like was it andrea ledson andrea ledson had like made some comment about how like uh tori party islamophobia and she like referred to like musonton britain

as like referred to it to the foreign office and it's just like everyone's just doing really well today guys ledson pulled away from her phrenology textbook but it's like the most british thing to like try to prove you're not racist and end up becoming more racist than you were when you stopped before you started every british person has like a core of brendan o'neill somewhere in them that's just waiting to come out i was going around part of him and looking for it oh my god you really are milking the neeson thing yeah right but okay but the idea that it's impossibly good you know what this is this is this is pure third wayism this is just free based third wayism which is that whoa don't say anything bad about anyone the only way the the we can

actually sell upon a policy package is if we say it's going to make everybody better off including the richest person in history basically i think that's being generous to it the the issue here is is the thing i was sort of talking about earlier which is that zero sum game business right the economy isn't working very well it's really obviously not working well for most people and yet some people are doing doing very well out of it right this is what all the figures tell you and if people have an interpretation of that which is broadly i am not doing well because these people at the top like the top 1 percent the top 0.1 percent are doing really well indeed that interpretation is not completely wrong the issue for the left is to make sure that

interpretation is progressive it's not say don't have that interpretation at all right if you feel that the economy isn't working for you another it is working for the top 0.1 percent and that by the way is uh these are the very richest of the rich right right at the top of the society if you think that is the case you have broadly uh the correct understanding of society the issue for the left is to make sure that this is a progressive understanding because it's not like if we just say oh we're not going to talk about not liking capitalism we're not going to talk about any sort of meaningful oppositional politics the danger is that somebody else does turn up with another form of oppositional politics which would be blaming uh would be like nativism yeah exactly so you

blame migrants right you blame romanians bulgarians whatever it might be they're taking all this stuff that's why you're about romanians when you said when you made your joke earlier about that i literally thought you were saying the romanians like you're saying like the romanians like the like the people who voted romain have become their own nationality okay idea idea copyright copyright no one the same can take it can we do a parody episode called the the romaniacs and it's just about how much you like romaniac anyway so so what does what do so what do we think like the the best kind of progressive version of this politics looks like like you could say like this this politics of agonism that's a that's a another big word um the politics there i think is because

you have to get to this kind of systemic criticism systemic critique like simply saying there is a naught point one percent they're rich or not is some of the way but it's not all of it the systemic criticism criticism comes in and thinking through how we grab hold of the structure of society and change them and you need to find a way to talk about that in a way that makes sense to most people like the key bit for the left in this country is how do we get to the point where saying we want to change the structures of how the economy operates is actually something you can plausibly put in a manifesto and talk about in the doorstep right that that how do we make that happen so for instance the inclusive ownership fund is one version of that right this is the we're going to end up with

10 percent of large companies run by the people who work for them right that that is a thing that the next labor government will do that is a quite a deep criticism of how we own our companies and how we operate them big companies and it's a change in that pattern of ownership and control and it's something that will deliver directly to you as an employee of those companies something straight to your pocket which you get a share of the dividends out of it right so in other words you're taking a kind of structural criticism systemic criticism and making turn it into a policy and turning it into a direct thing you can talk about do you feel like that is an antidote to like the just bottomless bad faith that you encounter from the sort of centrist center right

media classes because it seems like whenever we talk about these sorts of ideas invariably it's like oh no there's just going to be hyperinflation like the 1970s like it's always these tropes over and over again but you describing that I feel like even somebody who's not necessarily politicized can hear that and say okay that sounds like it makes sense that's something that I want this is a bit that cuts through it right it's like we have a good story to tell about what's happened to the economy broadly in outline it's good you're going to have to beat harry potter that's what we're coming up against here yeah oh god I don't you know what I don't think I've ever actually read a harry potter but as you may have picked up I'm not entirely in touch with popular culture

it turns out what's the name andretate I don't know andretate I've never read it I would like us to replace harry potter in the order of the nowadays harry potter in treway please come on can we do a version of harry potter where six nine is the hero please I mean I guess yes we could do that relatable content the bit of the matter is right the bit of the matter isn't the story right it's funny you can tell whatever story you want in the end the bit that matters is what are you going to do yeah does that match up with everything else right which is why it's a slight aside but why if you say for instance let's make all universities free for everyone right this is a very simple very clear policy and everyone likes it I think the Tories always get wrong is always just a bribe

for for young people that's why they all go off and vote Labour it's nonsense most of the people voting wouldn't be affected by this directly right people voting for things yeah I know I know we live in a society that's I was on the side it is extraordinary that people might vote for things where it might actually benefit them but the real reason I think it's important is that it tells it tells itself a story about what kind of government you're going to be right it's a it's a it's a simple clear thing all universities going to be free this incredibly expensive 27 000 down there then some pounds in total to try and get a degree that's gone so you're going to get this thing for free and the kind of government will be is one where we think that's a good idea right so in

other words it tells the policy is going to do something and you fit into a wider story that's the sort of stuff we have to get to and the ultimate power I think of that narrative is that what we're saying is if we can sell that as we are keeping these things for ourselves rather than just constantly shoveling them away to billionaires because the Tories want to make us a society of subs then that is what's going to be powerful is that we are actually going to keep these things that we have built together and I think that is that's why there is so much momentum behind behind the left in this country now because we I think we have felt that this is something we want to keep a huge shout out to I think it was an analyst at Merrill Lynch who wrote in a report

at like last year analyzing the financial figures of I think American Airlines as ever labor is paid first and shareholders are left with the leftovers it's like fucking yeah like what the fuck damn damn fucking right like congratulations on radicalizing people who weed the raw street journal like you've managed no one has managed to fucking lay out a better critique of capitalism than some fucking roub who did it like it's literally like if you made if you made a film in the style of robin williams flubber about a guy who accidentally invents communism and it's still like somehow able to like you know play basketball really well damn fucking right is it my space damn white men can jump all right I think now it just falls to

me to say James thank you so much for coming on thanks for being on this is really great this is really informative and we are going to be at Bristol transformed along with James in fact maybe not the same stage separate rooms separate rooms yeah we're all gonna be masturbating definitely for sure we're gonna be no we're gonna be the the adults only bit of Bristol transformed after dark you can finally if you wanted to see that the trash boys all use the same towel in the shower you can no we're gonna be doing an episode live at Bristol transformed the location it's gonna be at eight o'clock on Friday the location is I don't remember but well when we do put this out we'll have it in the description tomorrow I have got a smoke comedy on at the secford the

headline is tanya edwards who's extremely good please come because so far I've sold not enough tickets so if you really like to watch me go off about shit like billionaires and people who work at Merrill Lynch come to that and we've got a patreon if you want a second episode of this per week you can subscribe to it it's five bucks a month and the links in the description otherwise buy a t-shirt buy a mug buy all that shit we want to be Kylie Jenner make us Kylie Jenner we all want to be one collective Kylie Jenner I have a trash future deodorant which is just really the smell of the the shit the shit smell at the old room it's the shit smell in the old room combined with the good dude musk in the new room you actually have slightly fewer employees there's

four of us here that's three fewer than Kylie Jenner's company yeah yeah we're more efficient that's just how it works exactly I know there's six of us in this room we're literally we're one below Kylie Jenner's company and then Olga just bursts in oh there's a these I think said there are never six of us in this room I was like behind you sorry there is six of us in this room more importantly there's five guys any more any more some weird shit could go down but there's what there's one girl to keep a lid on all of it right yeah right that's what we need that's my that's my passing like take for the listeners more than five guys some weird shit will go down stick to business stick to business five or fewer business school five yeah it's five or fewer

you make your quarter you know that's easy anyway our theme song is here we go by Jin saying it's on Spotify you can listen to it early you can listen to it often anyways enjoy your commuter wherever you're listening to this you