TRASHFUTURE - BULBFUTURE ft. India Block

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

Riley, Milo, and Nate talk housing, living, and building with Dezeen's own India Block (@indiablock). We start with a start up, then go through Help to Buy and the enormous ponzi schemes the Tory government keeps setting up to provide us with basic human needs (instead of, you know, just providing for the needs), and conclude talking about the only kind of thing left we can build, which is some stupid ass tulip that nobody asked for but I guess we're getting anyway because a billionaire wanted it? If you live in the UK, register to vote in the upcoming May 2 local elections using this link: https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote *COMEDY KLAXON*: On April 10 at The Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA), two of the most profoundly funny voices in British comedy (and members of the Balthasar Speedboat cast), Pierre Novellie and Alex Kealy, will perform at Smoke Comedy. The show starts at 8 pm; tickets are £5 and can be purchased here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-featuring-pierre-novellie-and-alex-kealy-tickets-58849486398?aff=erelexpmlt 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

It's me, Riley, recording from back in time on the... That's how every podcast works, Riley. You do realise this? They're recorded in the past and listened to in the present. I'm recording from further back in time than usual, because this is... It's still now, now. Okay. There's too much going on here.

Yeah, there's a lot going on here. This is the third layer of inception and we haven't even started. We are recording second episode of the day, same day as the Eleanor Penny bonus episode, if you're for listeners who are keeping score at home. So basically, if the world has collapsed since then, there's a reason we don't know about it yet. Yes. You've got to get your mother to fuck your father, Riley, or you'll never be born.

Anyway. But they're my step-parents. You've got to fuck your step-mother or you'll never be born. Anyway. Fun. I don't know how that would make sense. Back to the future. Born would be a very funny genre.

Bang bros. If you're listening, please make it. The brothers bang. And it's me, Milo, and Nate in studio. Yo. Hello. And we have India Block, writer for Dazeen, Hammond High, and other various architectural and design digests and general knower of all things design, architecture, and urbanism.

India, how are you doing? Hi. I'm great. Thanks. I mean, time is a flat circle. So. That is true. So for the rest of this, of this episode, we're actually going to be reading the label of

a Dr. Bronner soap, which talks about his insane theories about God, history, and this different stuff that happened to his family. But that is a very good soap. I think that's one. Are you familiar with Dr. Bronner's? No. Oh, man. I'm familiar.

I knew it was Dr. Brass. This is my friend and friend in the photography industry. So Dr. Bronner is a soap maker based in the States. That's like incredibly good. But for some reason. It's great soap, folks. Yeah. Some of the best soap.

For some reason on every bottle of the soap is written a manifesto. Hang on. I'm just going to bring it up quickly. Is it the same? Is it the same manifesto each time? Or is it just like there's a stream on each bottle? Yep. It's all...

Hang on. Well, only the important stuff first. Is it like fancy soap? Is this like the A-Sope? Extremely nice. Level. Okay. It's a really nice soap, but it wants to proselytize about something.

What is it? I actually only get my soap in a sort of huge stone monolith with sensible controls and immigration chiseled on the outside. Okay. Hang on. Here we go. I found it. All right.

Here is the text for the main part of the label. Always dilute for shaved shampoo, massage, dental soap bath. The mildest plain pure baby castile soap made. Health is our greatest wealth. All one. Don't drink soap. Keep out of eye. Dilute.

Dilute. Okay. If you dilute it, you can put it in your eye. The second coming of God's law, Muhammad's Arabs, 1948, found Israel, dead sea scrolls in Einstein's Hillel prove that as certain as no six year old can grow up free without the ABC, so certain can no 12 year old survive free without the moral ABC mason, tent and sandal maker Rabbi Hillel taught carpenter Jesus to unite all mankind free and our eternal fathers great all one God faith for we're all one or none listen children eternal father

eternally one exceptions none and it's great soap. This isn't a manifesto. This is sleep talking. Yeah. This so year years ago I was on on vacation in Hawaii and I picked my friend and I ran into a dude who was handing out what he called as his artwork and it was basically a pamphlet about how he wanted to build a floating city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean powered by the nuclear effluent from the Fukushima disaster and also how the Holocaust wasn't

real and this pamphlet sounds like what you just read. I mean like it sounds almost for baby again crazy is always have to be like and has a footnote the Holocaust wasn't really. It's not really relevant to the kind of like weird Kevin Costner's water well build the water world city but also yes but also here's this other thing. Yeah. No. So that's Dr. Bronner's very good soap and I've honestly a very interesting political

tendency. I was going to say if there's a fancy product that involves politics in some weird way Riley is on it. I mean I don't think you could really call it political. It's buy a suit. Right. It is sleep talking. Illinois the tankies.

If you buy a suit. So look I'm not here to fuck around with soap right now. I'm here. But it's okay if you dilute it first wash and talk politics and I'm all out of soap. So look I've got a start I've got a start up for everybody. Love it. A very fun start up. It's called hearth.

Oh. H.A.R.F. That sounds like a fucking sci-fi planet. I got the letters of T.H. and I said F. H.A.R.T.H. So like if somebody you know like if a child missing his front teeth was trying to pronounce the 80s rock band heart. That's the start up. That does that.

It does that. That's what you think the start up does. It's a start up that's a child without his front teeth trying to pronounce the name of the 80s rock band heart. Do anything get funding these days as long as it's run by white people I swear to God. What are you I mean I think you might already know what this is but what do you think this is. I mean yeah I think that's cheating but let's you know work backwards from the next

name that's missing an E so that we know that it's like a trendy start up. It's something to do with your home where your hearth is and I mean I don't know who here owns a home and who even owns the furniture to put in this home. Maybe this is a you know a solution to that problem that none of us can really commit to ownership. It's just not like my vibe. Yeah I'm not really into owning things but I also want to partake in capitalism. Yeah.

Is it a Wi-Fi connected shrine to the household gods? Like the Panates and Laras but they don't have the second E in them so it's like Panats and Lars. That sounds like Lars Panats would be the owner of this particular store. C.O.O. Lars Panats. Is it like one of those experience pop-up restaurant things where it's actually like a kind of Viking dining hall where you toast to Valhalla? Not yet but I bet it will be soon.

So of everyone of like I don't know who was right here, spoiler alert it was probably India the first time. I'm sure you're also right about the second time though because I'm just going to copyright that idea now. Then maybe you can find maybe you won't be so into not committing to a house. Harth brings true flexibility to blank by making it possible to change any blank in whatever way we like for as long as we like quickly and easily with complete peace of mind. Is this gender reassignment surgery but with your phone?

Is this like sex toy rental at this point? I'm going to guess. All the worst thing to rent. Buy for God's sake you swine just buy they're not that expensive. It's rubber. I'm going to guess that it's like a it's like a thing to furnish your flat with but that like you can redecorate your flat because you're paying rent to own and you're just constantly paying a subscription fee on your own furniture minus to own and that's correct.

That's what this company does. I did not read the notes. You know me. I would never read the notes before a show. I just I just feel like I just feel like given how much they want to squeeze people despite the fact that people don't have money to own their own furniture or homes in this country. It wouldn't surprise me. They found a way to monetize the insecurity of having to effectively depend on your landlord

to furnish your flat for you. I mean that's what the problem with this game is that you guys are getting very good at it. Yeah. Just just find the most dystopian thing you can imagine and you're like it's capitalism in Britain. Yes. But it's this it's not you know being unable to buy furniture it's the sharing economy

actually. Yeah. I think you'll find. You don't want to own things. Yeah. I mean I was going to say having bed bugs is the ultimate sharing economy experience when you get down to it. I always find that weird when people talk about like well like as they like socialists don't

believe you should own anything and like you should rent a house and it's like but someone has to own the house like so. We had to say that like poor people shouldn't own houses is that you can't say no one should own a house. Like it has to be owned by someone and therefore why shouldn't you own it if you live in it. No that would be that would be an animal farm. Oh sorry. Yeah.

If you do the animal farm of 1984. Yeah that's a 1984 if you do that one the 1984 Olympics which were held out animal farm. So yes you can rent furniture accessories and artworks from the world's best interior design brands makers artist galleries and dealers lend and borrow pieces to and from other members allowing you to own less stuff and surround yourself with things that inspire you everything I want to fucking do please please Riley tell me how much does this stuff cost like can you give me some sample thinking costs and borrowing to and it's still be being funded so I don't think it's live yet but I think it's going to be all sort of luxury

stuff mostly I think so to have loads of money but I still want to rent everything instead of owning it for some weird reason because I like believe in I'd had like an ayahuasca experience during which I decided that owning things was like impossible whether it's purely down to economic necessity smart technology ease of use or a byproduct of ethical thinking about the environment and sustainability or all of the above it seems we're all borrowers now I live in the scouting board please go ahead was that just all I know was that was just smart technology as a reason yes okay yeah village people science technology maybe also like that's the other thing like a lot of these this is only I've noticed as a pattern

where a lot of these companies will start will start up and they'll be we're disrupting and it's like uber initially was going to be like look you're on a day off you're bored why don't you turn your car into cash by taking people for rides and then you can just turn off the app and go about your normal life really it was taking you for a ride and so you it's a the whole thing is sort of is pitched at sort of comfortably middle class people who just want a little more variety and so it's like yeah I want to have a fancy table but I can't settle on which one so I'd rather consistently rent different fancy tables but in fact the way it always plays out every single time any one of these platforms goes

big is that it immediately becomes a way to like strip away more or ownership from like working class people so it's like all of a sudden owning a table becomes something that table lords do and no one really owns tables and I assume that if this stuff is like high end things though I mean are they giving you new things every time that you know it's so I own a thing let's say it's like a library it's like you must be joking books yeah so I own a sofa and thereby I'm going to rent my sofa out to people who don't own furniture as like an Uber for my my couch yes you'll rent out your second best sofa to someone but I would never want to even see that fucking sofa again much less repossess it

God I mean like this this reminds me of when I had it I had it one of my the room I lived in in second year at Cambridge the year after I lived in it they decided that the room was too nice and they were going to give it over as a fellow's office but I know that my college was like we're really cheap and won't change the name of the furniture and I was like lol I had sex on that desk so many times and there was going to be some dude like fucking reading about proofs on it being like what the fuck are these mocks I assume that you can pay extra for like a full steam clean or something probably but my college would not have done no no but for this for this startup you can rent a steam clean so in in in fact this is in an interview with

Dazeen and said essentially it was once the expectation that you'd get married move into a family house furnish it probably with your wedding gifts and live there forever reupholstering the sofa several times but modern life doesn't really work that way like it did for previous generations because everything's terrible relationships jobs travel growing families finances today our circumstances change more regularly renting your wife they accidentally invent prostitution do they come with their own like wedding cutlery because this seems to be you know knives and forks so expensive right why not rent them industry's answer is to force a choice you buy long-term investment pieces which is why beige gray and neutral designs for its

best sellers or you buy cheap fund disposable pieces knowing you can change it without too much stress or costs now we're back at butt plugs again I'm not sure how well this might the situation so it's you know but plug will age I can always change it for a Kylie Jenner one like that if I so desire oh lord modern life doesn't really work doesn't work in the way that you can just buy a couch no who wants to buy a couch that's I love are I love these things where they ascribe it does just like people's changing tastes and not the fact that houses are worth like 30 times what they ought to be worth in this country and people's wages have been not just stagnant but actually shrinking since 2010 and it's just like oh young people they just

you know they just want to live free it's like they'd love to buy their own fucking furniture but I mean if you if you make you know something like the median income and you actually want to buy nice furniture that's not IKEA or cheaper than IKEA like you wind up spending such a huge amount of your income that is just absurd to do that like I don't think anybody's like man you know I feel so liberated by the fact that I move flats every six months it's amazing I love it like it's it's it's forced by the market by the the market not as a natural force but by basically the modern version of a bunch of dudes in top hats coming up with new ways to fuck people over yeah like that is just it's shocking to me that this stuff gets written in this breezy language

I mean it feels like the kind of thing like like the computer should have like a clippy pop-up on screen like you're saying some disingenuous bullshit right now are you sure you want to proceed isn't it isn't it an amazing coincidence how everyone poor loves renting where they live and no one rich does it's such a weird divide between those two groups of people you think they would have the same taste and yet they don't it's a cultural thing yeah yeah it's just such glib magazine bullshit like they know full well what they're doing and they're pitching it as some kind of like oh the millennials are killing the diamonds industry you know the millennials have killed owning tables it's like that's like table lord can now really be a thing that someone

can be millennials saving money on cutlery with this one weird trick eating out of the same bowl with their hands becoming dogs drinking everything like soup we love to rent stuff we can't get over how much we love it also what I love is I really want to know if they got this idea from the fact that if you are super super wealthy and there are some like properties in London on billionaire's row that have the facility if you don't have enough wall for all of your like prices art collection you can buy a system where you kind of like store your art inside this kind of like little shuffler thing that will kind of just rotate your art round so you can kind of like be seasonal with your art god as a playlist but for your art yeah basically that so if you're rich you can just

have all the art and then you can just like rotate it when it rolls and then if you just love to rent you can just rent other people's art occasionally even the rich have had to scale down before you used to have one of those like rotating fireplace walls with artworks on either side and then it allowed you through into your secret Nazi dungeon and now they just get to have a sort of like art shuffle play dam rip the rich it's so tough for them in 2019 but okay the transformation of everything into a service into either a service so all of a sudden you're you know you you you don't cook anything anymore you just have the service of delivery or the sharing economy where you don't have a car anymore you just sort of call Ubers or you rent your table or whatever is really just it's

it's a way to use an app to get a table whenever you need one why have this table 24 hours a day sitting there doing nothing it's a way of just disconnecting you from everything in your life like you don't really know where you're going to live because or what work you're going to do because you have a zero hours contract which is supposed to be flexible and enable you to you and your boss to work out a system that works for you or you're not you have to worry about having this musty old table because with the new table rental program you can have you can have different tables daily or with you don't have to worry about about owning your own car because you can just or making your own trip somewhere because now it's all uberized it's

nothing you're not connected to anything it's just this you're being provided enough services just sort of keep ticking over but every but you're never building up anything on your own it keeps you so dependent and so bewildered and just unable to grasp on to anything around you it really is twirling twirling twirling towards freedom at this point what happens if you forget to pay your subscription or you can't your account gets frozen do they just like turn off and take your furniture every night to come get your furniture well it's the it's it's this thing where it's they all of this also assumes that we constantly want to be making optimize economic optimizing decisions where it's like i never want to just not think about my table

i want to be thinking about my table constantly wondering if it's the best table that expresses what i feel or tells the right story my table really understand me so so part of me wonders like if this would be marketed to people who feel some anxiety about wanting to have like well designed things in their homes or because they're part of me sees this is like a kind of blue apron style marketing thing where they're like you know doing like the high end package meals where you cook yourself i don't know if they have that here but like i think in the u.s i think they have something like that yeah we're like they send ingredients with a pod save america guys like haha we never cook and we hate the post office so uh but another way i could see this being turned

around to be like full dystopia is what if if you rented a flat and the landlord was like you were not going to supply furniture but you can just sign up for furniture on this app and like that's the way you got furniture but like you weren't allowed to bring your own furniture in i mean like that sounds insane but i mean that that could be a means of four you know it's like i'm just wondering like who's going to be marketed to because part of me is like i mean having existed having existed in the world where like you know you find a table outside of a building you're like sweet it's my new fucking table and you keep it for years i just i just can't see anybody who wasn't forced into this using it unless like they had some kind of anxiety about

having well designed furniture or something and i think it is it's the instagram influencer model because you have all of these especially kind of young women who have built entire careers out of pretending that they have the sort of life where they own like vast amounts of designer handbags and dresses and it's a you know fairly badly kept industry secret that a lot of them are renting them from these services that exist where you can rent dresses or handbags and pretending that they're theirs or they've been sent them by pr and it's only now that you're just having to be like hashtag ad so this is definitely poised to kind of you know i imagine the first thing they'll do is get all the kind of homes bloggers to user service and it is that

yeah that kind of anxiety or that whole the trends change so far so like you can commit to millennial pink because you can just like rent it but then is there going to be a second tier for the people that get the like furniture after the instagram fad is over so russia because it of course always has the darkest possible version of whatever is going on in the west they started doing this service which they advertised on instagram which is how i came across it and basically it was like a car like the basically the service what they would do is they would go to like girls houses and deliver you for like 10 minutes empty boxes from like gucci and chanel and stuff and also like and or like a bouquet of a hundred roses so that you could take pictures with it for

your instagram and pretend that you had a rich boyfriend so they're just down there watching you were you like poured over some of that guy who's even poorer than you are is watching you take picked you've paid for this to take pictures with empty gucci and chanel boxes and like a bouquet of a hundred roses um in order to convince your like 200 followers that you have a rich boyfriend amazing is the most insane country on earth that is entrepreneurial spirit because that's you know i mean the that is what the influencers are doing here i mean yeah this is essentially paying a fee for the removal man to turn up at your house and make you look super rich and like you can afford to have furniture to move this is why i love russian startups because they just say the

quiet part loud like it's so good they're like the donald trump of startups just everything they're like we've worked out what the point of this is let's just not fuck around with making it sound good it's like yeah you're lonely and the world is terrible and you want to like pretend that you have a nice boyfriend but actually you don't leave the house that's what our business is called without any of the vowels yeah god russian doesn't love a vowel oh boy yeah that's no that's the thing you can now rent your place in the spectacle it won't be that's it like gita board if gita board would have known what was coming he would just i don't know what he would have done he might have just like gita bird he might he might he may have like

tried to turn himself into like a radioactive monster he might have tried to make the spectacle a side of the spectacle into a film but like honestly this is this is next level a gita board app that tells you exactly what gita board would have said about all the dystopian elements of your life but i mean i also feel like instagram influencer is notwithstanding the reason why this immediately strikes us as dystopian is because we all know that it's impossible for us to ever be able to afford a home yeah like and that's if this was just a thing that people did out of like a vanity project so they didn't have to like buy new furniture get it whatever fine i mean i don't care but because this is coupled with living in a country where it's it's to live in places where

jobs exist that pay above you know basically median income or like some industries just you know don't exist outside you have to live in an area where like you know a house that was sold in the 80s the old council house that was sold for 15,000 20,000 pounds is now worth 500 600 700 pounds and you'll never be able to afford it like and so to me the fact that an entire generation of people is locked in permanent rent this idea of sort of like making all the other life stages that are supposed to take place under capitalism also be rent friendly and app friendly it seems dystopian and even if like the morons who founded this who probably are rich don't see it that way it's going to be used that way of course but for us that's the first thing we think of because

it's like oh another way to not own something another way to like have this like ersatz adulthood that will never be able to like be fulfilled new table new table arrived i can adult like a boss for four days the only thing we can own is the libs so speaking of uh an impossible an impossible dream of home ownership home ownership almost like i did that on purpose stop segway i didn't pay the tax i paid home tax okay so moving on to why we'll never own homes the government policy edition wow reading a little bit of an older article here from from last year but this is a subject we've not covered yet and it's one upon which you have written india so i figured this was appropriate enough i'm martin vander wire one of the spectator editors who's

like ensconced enough in spectator world that he does have a pen portrait of him looking just fucking yeah he looks like yeah to paraphrase that trump tweet he looks like the villain from the movie where the hero is a dog in defense of the 110 million pound bonus for the boss of persimmon home builders that's the name of the article it's very cool also why does like every company have a stupid name like why would a construction company be named after like an obscure asian fruit like why again i don't know just call it like i'm calling construction or whatever i don't like something that's really unthreatening middle fruit isn't it right it is yeah but makes your mouth very dry much like destruction industry very stringent isn't it it is right so uh the article goes i

haven't even editorialized this article because it's so incredible it's also quite short new years eve was by the way i love that the spectator as soon as it right it writes this whole article genre in defense of if soon as the spectator has written an article about you saying in defense of you know that something went wrong because other things they've written in defense of include the vermarked Mussolini um and like i don't know probably some other Mussolini construction limited uh or then toby young wrote in defense of toby young by toby young like just just really just extra just means that you are going to defend the indefensible indeed that is what it's time posting it's well time for toby young heard a prophecy that his most dangerous enemy would

be the man who defends him on the spectator and he was like well i know how to thwart that wait no no it cannot be yeah it's that it's that you it's it's like 10 am i've had my third tequila shot it's time to write for the spectator in defense of um and it's that all of the indefense articles are always the same it's like the guy who's entering the world's biggest dick contest for the tenth time because he thinks he's finally put in enough practice that he might be able to win it it never actually works he's got a tiny little medieval torture rack that he's been getting a mouse to use on his dick she's a mouse that's dressed up as a medieval executioner with like the hood on we've been talking about this all day did he rent it from an app

do you have to buy well the name's chute little but they should call you chute bigger you should apply to y combinator that is an idea right there oh yeah renting out dick extension racks so you don't want to admit that you own what you're like well i don't technically own it i rented i just how are you talking about it's this sharing economy for dick extension racks so please tell me this is wipe clean so here is is as follows the defense of the 110 million pound bonus for persimmon's boss new year's eve was certainly a day for celebration in the household of 53 year old jeff fairburn chief executive house builder persimmon he was due to receive the first 50 million pound tranche of shares under a bonus scheme that won him entitlements of 110 million

he must have done a terrific job you'll be thinking if shareholders value him so highly famously i think people think but in fact his winnings plus 400 million pounds winnings i like that winnings plus he's the lottery yeah exactly it it is exactly like the water it's almost as like capitalism is a lottery all you would think so yeah other when they accidentally make good points about capitalism that they're completely unaware of wow it's almost as if people who have massive financial success are completely arbitrarily designated because the system doesn't work no it's a different thing yeah it's not that sorry guys it's like a lottery but for hard work yeah yeah exactly yeah we'll be we'll beep that all out it's fine it's like all it's like business

school is is actually just like a scratch like someone selling a scratch card lottery system like that someone's selling a system that if you follow my number picking system you too can win so he said but the fact that his his winnings are the freak outcome of a 2012 scheme that was tied to the company's share price in 2012 and dividend record but failed to include a cap on how high rewards might go so can you explain help to buy okay so help to buy is a scheme that the government set up where because you can't afford to buy your own home you can get the government to help you so they'll kind of pay some of the upfront costs and you'll take on this like super helpful loan that will give you like five five years i think interest free mortgages and it's

only for first-time buyers and it's for anything that's kind of under i think it's 500 000 pounds i don't know it's new builds only right it's new builds only which are famously don't suck in the UK yeah so it's kind of encouraging you to get on the property ladder and then locking you into an absolute nightmare because you will be stuck in this shitty new build you will have taken on way more debt than you should have because as soon as they put this kind of scheme into action it was similar to when they like raised the fees caps on universities and they were like oh it's not like all of the university is gonna suddenly start charging like the upper limit it's like it's it's not like all of the new builds are suddenly going to be like 499 000 pounds and obviously

they all were so you're paying like wow that's so much cheaper than 500 000 and you're just like oh yeah you know like five years interest free like what could possibly go wrong and then you're all buying at the same time in the same location the same product and these are not like the houses that you are going to live in and raise your children in and grow old they are like one bed's minimum that is rented baby and that came on an app and so everyone will buy and then at some point try and move up the ladder at the same time which is not going to happen because you're all going to be trying to sell your new build flat which will have decreased in value because like considerably because there are a lot of them are terribly built they're really surely built um and also

there will be another like block of newer builds around the corner that will be like the same price and be like nice and chewing nice and shiny and not have that like gross rented vibe like someone's you know been in there before ew um wait so it's like herber life but for housing so like you you bought you bought all of this fucking like stock and it's all decreasing in value and now we have to do is find some other sucker to like help to buy your apartment yeah it's like everyone's getting the experience of all the Battersea Park property flippers who are now losing money but you too can get in on it and the government will will help and you know George Ross will manage to kind of sell this as a kind of this is like getting the construction industry moving and buying the

the homes that we're building the homes we all need and of course we couldn't regulate the construction industry so that they didn't build shitty housing we couldn't possibly do that no then they wouldn't build housing if we if we forced them to build good housing they wouldn't build it they'd throw in the towel and discuss they'd be like if we can't build houses that are almost impossible to live in and will fall down in 20 years then what is even the fucking point of building houses I was gonna say the best thing the thing is we have to remember is that if you were living in say the USSR in the 1980s then you would be allocated a really sort of formless ugly block of into a block of flats that was probably really not really built to last along

with everybody else and more or less the same flats and you wouldn't be able to own any of your own furniture if you were in the USSR in the 1980s yeah so basically we live in the ridiculously like comedy clown car version of terrible state capitalism yes that's kind of what I this is actually what I was saying on the episode the other day that like they were like oh yeah history ended in 1991 because Russia became capitalist but then what they didn't realize was then the west became so capitalist that it became the Soviet Union it's just like a shitty version of the Soviet Union where it's like it's as bad as the Soviet Union but it's also expensive somehow at least the Soviet Union was cheap yeah damn and you could smoke on the train

so basically what you're saying is to our great shock that a policy that George Osborne cooked up well in coalition to solve one social problem which is a lack of housing but in a very market friendly way basically ended up screwing over everybody in different ways at different times except for like one guy who made 110 million pounds yeah it's like they've kind of managed to make this great work around where it's like they've been saying for years that the market will provide in terms of housing and it's clearly fucking not so instead they're like oh no no we can we can force the market to provide and it will definitely work out great for everyone I love it we can encourage the market to provide don't the market works in mysterious ways but it

has your best interests here's the weird thing that kind of comes up later in this article I realize every time I say I turn to you Milo and say here's the weird thing it always means that something incredibly stupid is about to happen but we'll get there so the resulting scale of bonuses is so embarrassing that both chairman Nicholas Wrigley and senior non-executive director Jonathan Davy have resigned both are ex-bankers marinated in city megabucks but with a pr disaster looming they could not persuade fairburn either to refuse part of the bay out or surrender it to charity he then he did promise to to set up a charitable foundation but as far as i'm aware all recent reporting has said that all he's the only major thing he's

done publicly so far is purchase a local pub amazing all the shambles a charity again not joking that's what it's called holy fucking shit yeah writers are a bit on the nose huh they are the riders of reality really they're like getting lazy in my opinion so it's like this is like the latest season of house of cards where it's just like no one cares anymore honestly like he's bought a pub called the poorly devised housebuilding program yeah so the bonus was tied just i'm understanding it correctly the bonus was tied based on the share valuation or or a share price target that was set in 2012 and because of their sort of like weird totally not nepotistic relationship with the government and because of help to buy they've

made their price target but it's it's it's effectively made the housing crisis worse i mean they helped too many people to buy yeah exactly it was a freak accident that caused this bonus oh no no one could ever have predicted too many people were helped even among us look man those those tulips had a lot of intrinsic fucking value it's just too many people got greedy okay tulip coin um and yeah it's that it's basically it's like what if i one of the defenses are that that are our friend and the our spectator friend writes is that firstly these bonuses are not a skimming off of taxpayer funded interest subsidies they're actually being paid for by other shareholders whose holdings have been diluted and it's like okay number one fuck off number two

no it's yeah the we pumped a lot of money into persimmon and now he has this much stop trying to like confuse stop trying to confuse the issue with technicalities it's clear what happened don't worry this isn't taxpayers money it's profiteering off of a waste of taxpayers and also exploiting young people who've been tricked into buying houses that are like way too expensive so in fact that's the first mitigation where he says this so this story has basically been a gift to the left whose cheerleaders have been dancing all over it that being the case that's such a confusing metaphor but it is dancing all over it cheerleaders dancing on a gift whatever somebody gives me a gift i make it for to dance on it in the mouth

so who are the left cheerleaders do we get outputs yeah i mean i don't know owen jones ash sarkar every every time he dresses up for the housing project i was going to say john mcdonnell is just dancing all over it john mcdonnell and like a like a ruffle skirt and a tied up man shirt matt zarp cousin well i i look at it too just a bunch of cheerleaders dancing on a gift because the whole the whole logic of this is it's somehow going to deliver better outcomes if the private market does it but otherwise it's Stalinism exactly and it's like it's like no we can't have it be state-owned because then it'll lack dynamism it'll lack whatever the fuck they want to ascribe to like you know the quality that you somehow can't be achieved

with a state-owned item but also what they seem to admit is that also any profit would also go back into a state ownership as opposed to just going off to this fucking guy and it's like you could make that argument if anything it delivered actually delivered but it says like no the housing fucking sucks and we're pumping up 50 billion pounds 50 million pounds of this guy it's just sort of like at what point does it stop like just because you dressed it up in mba language like at what point does it stop being a government plan to start being like open racketeering i think i got it i think i understood what the social purpose is this is part of a campaign to save britain's pubs enriching someone like fairburn so much that he goes on that's maybe

that's what he's doing that he just buys pubs so that's the whole runs them unprofitably the government has decided they need to deliver the financial sector's role in the economy and the way you do that is slowly but surely buying out bankers by giving them huge bonuses to become publicans yes they can just like take up their hobbies full time and they'll just you know the whole process the whole program is basically a national program to personally enrich jeff fairburn it's like retraining it's like those um those hiring boards where they're just like do you want to escape your like sad stressy city job like maybe you could go and like run a school in peru it's just you know a retraining scheme for all these people pints in this pub

yeah you have to like rent the glasses so yeah second you better drink up bitch because time is ticking like there's a queue for that glass yeah you'll get a penalty if you're not finished with your pint in the next five you could say not everyone in the pub is drinking at all times so we could just have a system where different pints are passed around to people and then you can experience a range of pints and herpes yeah it's like herd immunity you don't even need to vaccinate your children anymore we're going to de-stigmatize herpes by giving everyone it the app herpes second to build a number of new homes that might ease the current house building crisis we need a profitable fast expanding private house building sector led by talented and

suitably incentivized executives and fairburns bonanza aside sure they're talented but are they suitably incentivized the questions on all of our lips and fairburns bonanza aside a scheme that awards 150 managers is really quite democratic anyone want to touch that i mean i fairburns bonanza sounds like a bad film from the early 19 i was thinking of like like a like a 60s tv sitcom that boomers would be nostalgic for yo just yo you're thinking of just the show bonanza yeah but hey maybe the surviving can we call splice in the simpsons clip where they say and the surviving members of the cast of bonanza fine no we can't we'll leave in you saying that right also yeah we need a profitable fast expanding private house building sector

why does it have to be private well because the councils can't build their own places anymore because we put the debt cap on because they can't just so good they have to be selling off the council has to sell off all of their land to the developers who can then turn it into help to buy properties yeah the end result mess with that perfect system is flawless the fiscal end result of all of this is again the personal enrichment of one guy isn't it true also that they some councils are forbidden from re acquiring former council homes that were sold off under right to buy like that's like a contentious thing that some councils have been buying they're trying to buy them back but some places they've literally passed laws like not only can they not build new council

homes the council owns but like they can't even buy back the old ones that they sold off in the 80s so good and normal yeah i mean the whole point as the government has been like not even secretly just like full on balls out like encouraging councils to make up for the fact that they have to cut all their stuff by selling off their assets and you can't buy it back like you're meant to be really sensible selling off the assets that's definitely a good long-term decision because they know because the problem with socialism is you run out of people's money versus capitalism where you run out of people's assets and we'll just close the libraries and then everyone who go to this app to run their books the council can go to the idea store and fucking white travel

high road which is what they renamed the library because the calling it the library was like too gay and the one would go it's a gate like books like girls deep down you're reading the thoughts of another dude it's a dude telling me about his feelings so wait councils are millennials because they don't want to own anything councils just want to rent stuff anyway councils are millennials so they're trying to be more flexible by just do just divesting themselves of everything and we're going to save the pubs i guess by personally enriching jeff fairburn and that's a better britain how do they how do they work out how talented he is like is there some sort of like x-factor for housebuilders like how do we know that he is

talented i mean we know he's incentivized i'm just laughing about the idea that like him getting a 50 million pound bonus is like 110 110 million pound bonus is is like is he suitably incentivized like would he if it was 50 million pounds would that be only be like 95 percent incentivized jeff fairburn does knocking out a bed for less than 90 million pounds because jeff fairburn is a gamer and he wants to get to 100 on incentive and so it's like he's got to be able to play it all the way to 100 which means over 100 million pounds in bonus he got it he got it he got a million pounds for every percent of effort he put into defrauding the entire country well it's a lot of just like all of the people in like the like the instagram tory part of the

world are all like they they kind of they start having a thought and then they just get narcolepsy halfway through so they'll be like oh yeah councils should be run more like a business which means that councils should obviously be prevented from making sensible medium to long term investments you'd never catch a business doing that councils much like businesses should never own any assets and they should deplete all of the assets they have for way less than their worth because that's what businesses do yes businesses famously sell off all of their long-term profitable assets which bring them yearly returns for like next to nothing because it's better not to own stuff that's definitely a key tenet of business oh oh yeah because when you

when you buy these help to buy properties you're not often buying the bit of land that it sits on oh so it's a leasehold as well yeah oh awesome oh my god india i've got an asset even owning is rentable that's the real galaxy brain for harm at all a solid chunk of our audience is american probably about 45 percent and the whole concept of like leaseholding doesn't exist in the u.s would you mind giving a little bit of a summary of that basically um this dates back to like fucking henry the eighth times most of the land as in the uk was kind of originally owned by landowners um now you can kind of uh you can either buy the plot of land outright and build your property on it or you can buy a house and it will come with uh the

freehold which means that like you also own the land that it's built on or you'll buy at leasehold which means that someone somewhere like maybe the crown uh owns it and they will lease it out to you for like up to up to a hundred years the sometimes it's 999 years some of them are like a thousand years yes some of them are longer but you still have to pay rent on those yeah but the rent the ground rents often like not very much oh not on new builds great fucking great so effectively you don't actually own your home in this situation no and it's you own the building but you don't own the land i mean this is like a massive boomer problem but if you like are trying to sell your house and it's only got like 10 20 years left on the lease you're kind of fucked because uh the

person who buys it even if they buy it really cheap is at some point kind of need to like renew that when you're legally you're legally entitled to renew the lease like they can't stop you renewing it but it can be very expensive so so basically your landlord might go up on you on rent on the land your house that you own is built on so basically what the thing to think about in the uk is most people have two landlords you have the landlord who probably owns the lease hold of your flat and then you'll have his landlord who's probably the duke of groverner basically the landlord yeah that's usually what i i rent i rent a i rent a flat from someone who bought a flat under right to buy and so they're the leaseholder and that's really confusing to me

because i have a lease on the apartment but i'm leasing it from the leaseholder who owns it who bought it from southern council and that just like that concept in in america it would be like a condo and you own that condo they're like they're like no mr bathe you don't even rent this flat you rent from the guy who rents this flat yeah you're so many levels down um so this feels like as good a time as any to go into um our spectator friends third point third capitalism never distributes its benefits in a transparently fair basis in scare quotes but it is still the best engine of economic progress we've got so we should overlook the occasional misallocations like this one and certainly not encourage governments to interfere with them i mean yeah tough titties life

isn't fair like although i love that he's written this whole piece like he's obviously hoping that this guy is going to be like oh well he like wrote a defense of me and the spectator so maybe i'll just like chuck him a few million from back i love the amazing political manifesto they have at the spectator of like yeah everything sucks but we can't make it better that would be ridiculous and also how like they're all like oh yeah well um obviously like we couldn't possibly have an even slightly more left-wing system than we have now because that would be Stalinism it's like bitch we had a system that was like far more left-wing than this in like the 1950s that famously woke period of time when we used to hang like mentally disabled people because they were near

a cop that got shot and like and when Stalin was actually in power yeah literally even when we were terrified of the soviet union we were like so much more socialist than we are now i just love it's like you know we can't let the government be even more involved even though it's government involvement that fucking caused this yeah like that's the right kind of government involvement whereas government involvement is selling or giving to people who already own stuff being fin domed by guys who want to buy pubs guys just like the government's subscribing to their private snap they're ordering them stuff off their amazon wishlist because that's what doing business is they're selling off the

library so that they can rename it the idea store and they're buying the guy like some lingerie that he wants off of his amazon wishlist and we haven't even got to the point where we're at the like five-year mark where it's going to be the bank's turn to like rake in all of the interest when that finally comes through like when is the interest coming uh so i think so it's five years when did the scheme start i think the scheme started in i keep saying they're gonna finish it because it sucked and then wait wait wait wait hang on so this is this is exactly what caused the financial crisis also because like literally it was all of the it was all of the subprime loans that were like that were like really low interest and then after like five or ten years the interest

was going to like spike because the cap was removed and then that's when all the loans defaulted and suddenly all of the banks were like oh we thought this was going to be fine but actually now everyone has gone bankrupt and our whole balance sheet is fucked so we're going to have to sell all of these broken assets to our own customers yeah so it launched on the first of april 2013 so i think yeah that is the first year of people having to pay back with with interest wicked all right excited for this oh capitalism it's the best system we have we literally we've never i mean i assume all the council flats that were like sort of sold off or all the council lands that were given away for right to buy from between right to buy and help to buy those just

occurred naturally we don't know how they got there yeah we certainly didn't build them but we can't do anything other than this it's like that natural um uh you know nuclear reactor in africa no one really understands exactly how it happens but it just kind of does and all that Hancock can do is go jeez it's a great way to learn about your body although my favorite bit about right to buy is that i live in a council flat that has been bought at some point uh on right to buy and the council came around to like renew my landlord's license to rent it and they measured my bedroom and they were like uh yeah this is uh legally uninhabitable this room is too small that she looked the councilman down the aisle i was like but you built this

and she was like oh yeah but like now it's being rented out privately it's too small to live in oh i uh i love it we live we live my wife and i live in a place that's also former council society was built in in in the 70s and uh i for i managed to look up the historical sales price and it was sold for 11 000 pounds in 1981 uh our landlord was trying to sell before we started renting and he he was trying to sell for 325 000 pounds i also saw some old sales photos from like 10 15 years ago and it's a single bedroom with like a lounge they at one point had subdivided the lounge to make it into three shipping container bedrooms basically and i was like you had three adults living in this place it was insane but it's like i've been in nates flat many

times that lounge is fucking small it's smaller than this room so the idea of it being two bedrooms and basically it was like they had they had somehow managed to leave i don't know if it was legal or not but they subdivided it into like a hellish rooming house and now somebody had the bright idea to knock that wall down but it's like that was that was the logical result like no family was living there that place was bought and refurbished so it could be like a bitolette landlord no one is doing more to make romanian immigrants go back to romania than british landlords like anyway so i also i'd now like to move on to the second kind of building that it's possible to build because we know we can't build public buildings we can't build like try we can't

really build anything new we can't build social housing no i can definitely use the second kind of thing that's that's allowed to be built i mean this is the story of what happens when you do own the land that your building is on and you can do anything you want with it and the sky is indeed the limit very nice foreshadowing damn better segways and we're ever capable of the tulip is going up between the gherkin and the cheese grater and the rest of the kitchen implement named monuments to sort of financial largesse not largesse financial you might say impunity not to forget my personal favorite building in london the walkie-talkie which is to melt people's expensive cars practice focusing the sun on them so yet that are comedies in the syrian fleet or whatever the

fuck to our american listeners that's actually true this did happen because there was a building with a weird kind of surface and it literally reflected the sun into like a natural curling laser that was melting people's car and it was a new jaguar he'd bought it like the day before this is sort of for the benefit of the american listeners the city of love the square mile city of london like the sort of the financial district our version of downtown manhattan basically is a medieval city and it's full of these weird buildings okay so this is the eastern cluster which is a great name basically there's there's still rules about where you can build the really tall towers because you can't block the view of st. paul's that's like the rule so

there's this really really weird shape where you're allowed to build really fucking tall buildings um and uh yeah it's produced some of the most like strange looking things and the gherkin was one of the first ones so when it was built it was like 180 meters tall and it was one of the tallest ones there um everyone's like oh my god wow look at this where's it gone taller i just like the image of that the gherkin was like sneakily this is like our cue and on this is this is the whole point of the tulip okay is to make the gherkin taller so now the walkie-talkie is up there the cheese grouch is up there they're building the second cheese grater um which is like a kind of slightly differently shaped cheese grater and in the process like a parmesan one

yeah like one of those little fancy microplanes um but when you get the press releases for these things now there is like a whole page of like we've done loads and loads of testing with like the wind and the sunlight different kinds of cheese just to kind of like make sure that it's not going to melt anymore people's cars um so they test for that also good yeah that's good yeah yeah they just got that now i wonder i wonder what the next because they always test for the previous thing that happened i wonder what the next thing's gonna be that they'll have to start testing for yeah don't worry we've tested we've tested to see if this will make the Thames flood its banks again i love the idea because there's one thing we talk about hostile architecture like

putting up like homeless barriers and things like that like in new york you see that and i think you've seen it here too where they have like little little cow traps on buildings like the so you can't lie down on the side of buildings but i love the idea of of hostile architecture as like no it shoots death rays in people we've just you know we tested that night we made sure the building won't shoot death rays like the last one did yeah i think who could have foreseen this problem with poison gas the tulip does literally look like the plot for a movie where the villain is like building a new attraction for the city that will actually like open and like release a death ray americans in america with this lovely argentinian architect whose uh whose ancestors

were uh kernels in the swiss army so uh he seems like a nice guy anyway but but one of things i want to know is why are they built because american city skyscrapers are they're just very large boxes usually it's just here's a box it's really big it's really tall it's square go about your day but in the the skyscrapers in in london in the city of london in particular the canary wharf they're all just big boxes they're it's skyscrapers americans would understand them but the city of london all the skyscrapers concept even americans could compare i look over canary wharf in the distance i'd be like now that's a city i don't know what the fuck this is it's all weird it's like a video that's what i call a fucking broad it's so weird looking because

you can't block the view of st paul's so it's kind of like a game of twister but for skyscrapers and then you can't like block each other's sunlight either so all of these buildings are just trying to like shimmy into like the right position it's just me when i'm trying to like plug my phone in behind the tv while my dad's watching the football and it's like don't stand in front of the tv and you're just doing that weird lean thing where you're trying to yeah it's like when you're trying to like edge in front of people like the cinema or like getting out of the you know you're trying to like get out into the aisle and so you're like do i go like butt first or groin first that is what the walkie talkie is doing so um so what this means is it also has

unleashed a flowering of creativity among celebrity architects so the tulip uh is designed by norman foster the same guy that did the guardian and funded by this billionaire uh mr safra who's the same guy that the guardian the gherkin the same guy that funded the gherkin no no no he did so i mean this is kind of not to like stan for norman foster but he does have a great instagram account he built the gherkin for someone else and it was meant to be this kind of like super futuristic exciting experiment on building interestingly vegetable slash butt plug shaped skyscrapers and it won the reba sterling prize so this was like a recognized like you know the architecture establishment was like we like this building because it was like very sustainable wasn't it

when it first came out because i remember i it was for what swiss re and i remember seeing an autograph i was like in high school but seeing an article about it when it came out and there was like it collects rainwater has like passive heating and has like all these weird things that like buildings weren't doing at that point but now like they seem to be it seems to be more common and in some of the certification it opens a portal to hell no that's the shard that's the shard we've established that they did originally want i think the like top deck to be some kind of like cool revolving restaurant but they didn't have the technology for that at the time so it was built i mean not with the best intentions and obviously with a lot of money thrown at it

but it was bought by joseph safra in like 2014 and he was basically like okay cool i built i bought this and it's it's not the tallest building anymore and what does it even do it's not even that exciting it doesn't revolve it doesn't like open a portal to hell on a bi-weekly basis so basically went back to foster and partners and was like can you make it sexier because that's what when they bought it they promised they were going to like make it more desirable and more attractive so it's like paying for your mistress to get a boob job so hang on yeah yeah they were just like or to get like a penis extension it's a little dick measuring contest it is the most building oh my god yeah so they're just gonna build up um so i mean this is podcast but like

google the pitch of the tulip because um they're just gonna build a big concrete shaft all the way to the top of the eastern cluster and then they're just gonna put this bulbous eight-story viewing platform up there so it will be the tallest building in the city and then they're gonna stick on three sides of this of this tulip this beautiful flower uh the rotating gondolas so it's like it's like three london eyes but like in miniature and kind of 300 meters above and everyone's looking at you and so you can just like rotate and like look at the bankers in all of the other skyscrapers um earning the earning their bonuses uh so uh and it's also gonna have some slides in there there's gonna be a restaurant and um there's gonna be classrooms and if you look down here

you can see the kraken which is being summoned by one of the other buildings this is definitely part of a of a cult right like as soon as they complete the tulip then like the sequence will normally when they tell people their children are going to go to school in the sky they mean they're going to kill them in a cult ceremony with kool-aid but instead they've actually built a school in the side in the sky it's like the da Vinci code but for architects so um so the gla has submitted a strongly worded objection to the 305 meter tower um raising significant concerns over its impact on the city's skyline and its provision of free to enter public viewing areas and the fact that it's obviously just fucking stupid yeah it's it's is that not enough of a

reason to like not grant permission to this like what like you've played too much final fantasy clearly like just please stop building this utter shite but it it's not yet being approved um in fact we'll find out if it was approved probably before this episode comes out so hey future nate so what the tulip process has it bloomed on tuesday april second the city of london corporation voted 18 to 7 in order to approve the planning permission for the tulip so yes of course it's getting built fascinating back to us here in the past um so the it continues to go forward like it keeps it doesn't sort of get approved but it keeps continuing to be in contention for being approved yeah i mean it's got like a lot of stages to go to and the gla which just kind of

like the mayor's office look at this shit this is i hearing you guys described it made it sound insane but this is so i mean it looks like a giant literally does it like a sex toy or some kind and i i'm kind of looking forward to the like norman foster sex toy set where you can buy like a gherkin butt plug and look at this this little this literally looks like something out of like aliens colonized the city and made it weird like that looks like an alien dick yeah that looks like a huge dick yeah i uh look that's a it's a it's a it's a different thing here we go this is the headline from the sun you think plans for the tulip tower abad london always had a giant dildo on its scale now so it continues to keep getting waved through further and further stages on the

basis that the damage it does to london by looking like shit and being useless will be offset by boosted tourism and a quote classroom in the sky education center that will be made available to 40 000 states the untapped market ridicule tourism when people come to your city to laugh at how fucking stupid it is like ha ha hands can you imagine these people used to run the whole fucking world who is this it looks like a giant alien sex toy also because they educate children inside this and yet they won't teach you about gay people also also it's only it's apparently it's three feet smaller three feet shorter than the shard if you're gonna build this monstrosity why would you not just build it three feet higher to be taller than the shard or is there some law

but like a but like a fucking uh like christmas tree star on the top i mean i i don't know if you but to be fair when they rebuilt the world trade center in new york they actually made the antenna extra long at the top so it was exactly 1776 feet high because it had to be the most patriotic tower in america and they originally wanted to call it the freedom tower thankfully they changed their minds on that but uh freedom exactly sorry i can't hear you over my freedom so needless to say i mean like weirder things have been done when it comes to building dumb enormous phallus skyscrapers so here's a 1776 feet high is exactly six feet above a mile isn't it i i know it also is yeah so a mile a mile is like 5700 feet oh sorry i'm thinking of yards yeah i don't know anything

leave me alone that would be that would be an enormous dildo tower this is mile high tower this is mylo's third podcast this is steven pink building and second language a key feature it will be so here's what they've said basically because like that's like it's oh yeah well chuck a school in it is the most ad hoc weird poultry like justification it's not a school this is not gonna have like full-time staff they're basically saying there's gonna be a couple of rooms not even like classrooms just rooms that they can use so they're benefiting off the fact that they're already gonna have school trips full of children they're gonna be forced to go up this um to ride on the gondolas but before they get into the gondolas they're gonna be forced like sit in a

room and look at some kind of like weird futuristic display about london and london's history and there's gonna be like specially trained guides on hand and this is somehow going to benefit their education because if you learn an altitude yeah um you can't really grasp london's history unless you look down upon it it's training from great height you know you get less blood oxygen at altitude so once you get to the ground you're going to be so much smarter so watching a video up there that's like in the future you'll be able to rent your toaster so here's what they've said on their own press release this educational resource provided by the j safra group will deliver national curriculum topics using innovative tools to bring to life the history of the city and its

dynamism inspiring the creative young minds of tomorrow wait hang on a tag line it's just come to me j safra innovative tool well also i love the idea of like you have to get the children up there in the first place can you imagine getting an entire field trips worth of children up a building where there's like a 10 minute elevator ride and they can't all go at the same time it's going to be hell it's like the children that are terrified of heights are going to be puking everywhere all over the glass windows it's going to be a little hologram that's like london was originally called londinia because it's not going to teach about empire or slavery or of any of the bits of like british history that michael gove just like chucked out of the curriculum

it's going to be teaching about the blitz and henry the eighth because that's the only two subjects that we cover at well there was a time in london where there existed this thing called social housing we didn't keep all of the poor people who have a big x tattooed on their foreheads in a particular slum where they all make podcasts in basements meanwhile chinese and russian investors live at the tops of weird sex toys tape showers it's hard to imagine now since everyone lives like this well since the collapse of british manufacturing the entire economy runs on children's fear and so they just need to concentrate it all in one place they're just going to make them scream and bottle it we discovered the greatest power source was the children trauma this is historically

very important the british education system the height of about 300 meters visitors will enjoy stunning panoramic views across greater london gondola pod rides will transport you outside an exhilarating loop around the tulips glass petals inside the 12 floors the top it doesn't even look like a tulip it's like i mean it looks like it looks like an alien dick yeah like inside the 12 come on you know aliens wouldn't they would have had subject to different evolutionary pressures it might not even have sexual reproduction they might not even reproduce in any way we might understand read the book blind slide by peter watts but their dicks would definitely look like this even if they didn't use them to fuck they just use them to educate

children inside and that's a weirdly ancient greek point of view the best bit is is that we'll have a gift shop for all the children to like spend their money on because these are going to be the poor children as well there's a state school education children they're going to be like tiny pencils in the shape of the two definitely i'm not going to be used by the children to do awful things on the bus trip home god so i love this from inside the 12 floors at the top visitors can stroll across the scribe can stroll across the skybridge and enjoy the thrill of sliding between floors on slides the slides which is some sort of like wallace and grommet style it's like pimp my skyscraper they literally were like this you know because

saffron is the richest banker in the world according to forbes so there's no way we're going to be able to stop him doing this curated viewing spaces with interactive material plus talks from expert guides will bring the history of london alive because you know you couldn't just like read a book you had to go into the tallest building in london that has like a classroom that scares people and several different ferris wheels if you want to understand that london was originally called londinium it's the clockwork orange classroom i really hope that they have these expert guides dressed up in costumes like the london dungeon uh the tulip which would be this tallest building would attract an estimated 1.2 million visitors per year according to the

submitted planning application this would make it one of london's top 10 paid attractions and be a significant draw within the tourist industry both in the uk and internationally top 10 penetrations was a great slip I strongly agree with you myla though that if tourists did come to this it would just be to stand outside like wow that fucking sucks they want to see it with their own eyes because they can't believe we'd be dumb enough to build it it's like the mockery tour of england even that 1.2 million you commissioned a study that said that your your thing would be great astonishing that the study found that next on our tour we'll be going to milton keens which you will all find very amusing milton keens does have a new art gallery actually that is supposed

to be very nice but yes so i know unfortunately from the art gallery you can see the rest of milton keens the art gallery also suffers from being on the ground it does i could only just put it in the sky which is a milton keens if we haven't stressed that enough already um i was told that it's not just international tourism it's national tourism so everyone's going to come down to the north to see this on a brilliant day out fall to your knees and worship at the floor of the alien dick and it will spare your life so um before we wrap this up i've got the all the impacts that the report commissioned by um the people building this thing found it would be beneficial all the numbers like i said are very exact a lot of very exact numbers in how much

it's going to make our lives better considering it appears to just be an ad hoc thrown together excuse to build a slightly taller building than all the other buildings how many pubs will enable someone to buy untold untold pubs will be saved by how rich this will make like three different weirdos estimated economic impact boost the greater london economy by an additional 970 million pounds in total monetized value by 2045 this this will this this this big tulip is gonna somehow we're all gonna be rich lads we're all gonna be so rich it's gonna make everyone rich definitely not just this guy it's gonna make everyone rich and more specifically we're not gonna tell you sort of how but trust us they're literally like it's like the the kid

trying to get their mom to buy them a dog and he's like i'm gonna i'm gonna look after it i'm gonna take it for walks i'm gonna clean up after you're not gonna have to do anything i'm gonna buy the food like it's just it's just all nonsense provides a total positive impact to the uk economy of 1.6 billion pounds in monetized terms again where are you getting that from lads come on generates total tax revenues for the uk exchequer of 590 million 590 million pounds again even assuming all that other stuff was right all of these are stored all of these earnings would be stored offshore yeah i was gonna say like 500 590 million pounds basically earned by all the construction companies and finance years involved that will all go to like the cayman islands or

the Bahamas yeah yeah absolutely like start buying shares in concrete now because there's gonna be a lot of shaft there we need to get sponsored by one of those generic companies i hope you got shares in concrete because there's going to be a lot of shaft going up tonight oh boy 460 full-time jobs per year during construction okay that one's kind of reasonable you can see how they got to that at least that's grounded in something 650 additional permanent full-time jobs during 20 years of operations so it's going to create several jobs of being addressed up to her guide love it who points to various holograms also during 20 years of operations in 20 years like probably the base of that will be underwater well not only that but i'm just laughing it's like

they'll have they'll have janitorial staff but it'll just be one person whose job it is for the rest of their life to clean one floor and it's like every single person has to take a floor for like for 20 years you can think about it like imagine trying to clean something that's this non-standard like imagine trying to like deal with the normal functions of a building where everything is constructed in this nightmare lift shaft and then you have like he cleans the slide the head guy just has to dress up in a giant like microfiber cloth and just like go down they have one guy in a microfiber cloth another person who pushes him through you know like it's the guy from the sponge pub porn he just keeps the costume on 150,000

down that's why they have the school tours is just dressing up in in chenille cloth and throw them down why the fuck not everything about this is just i know why not they're going to take these children from state schools and they're going to be like guys if you work really hard in school then you could maybe get a job as the pipe cleaners to write a slide all day hope you don't have a fewer fines because then you'll fucking die 150,000 pounds per year on-site productivity per worker when operational three times higher than the okay average again wait who's are they going to sell a co-working space at the top are you going to be able to like rent the gondolas to

work in can you is there going to be a podcast studio just like how is that going to be us it's going to be us again twirling twirling twirling towards freedom recording trash basically that you rent out a gondolin if you don't make your target and you can't pay your rent they cut the cables and you fall so of course productivity is going to be through the roof yeah this thing remember you need the right incentives and motivation for people who don't own property it's getting your gondola cut for people who do own property it's getting 110 million pounds from the united states that's basically how it works nobody nobody could have known that 9-11-2 would have had such a devastating effect on podcasts the uk explained to put all the

podcasters in the united kingdom in one weird tower and then just like who could have who could have imagined that's more apply to it um and the pilot of that plane a mr. emstein but this time the children aren't on the plane educational benefits of 450 000 pounds per annum and nine million pounds over 20 years just find a fucking school this is like the section 106 which for american listeners is basically the way of like getting out of like having to actually build something useful when you build a development is you're like oh just like you know we'll we'll put in a new tube line or we'll put some like bus stops in and this they're just like yeah we'll just like put a school but

like not a real school just like some classrooms but you'll have to like pay to get up to like the Maltese academy or whatever it's the school with a crunchy center that we all love i wonder what they're gonna say about like you know like you know what they say about colonialism what will they say about like about you know like like the social like the socialist history of britain always say about trade unionism or like victorian labor conditions i bet not a lot because all the children will be chimney sweeps because everything will have reflected back to their experiential learning of victorian labor conditions or it'll be a kind of careers fair for all of the banks that work around there like but no they've calculated this as 450 pounds 450 thousand

pounds per annum of educational benefits it's that but because it's high up and is not a real school it's that good i mean this is like a wild new trend for everything in the city of london there's a a new concert hall that they're building that's going to cost like like 150 million because we need a new concert hall like we definitely like london needs another concert hall and one of the big ways that they're getting through this monstrosity is by being like um we will like livestream loads of the rehearsals and the concerts to other schools around the world and that is education i love all this like faux woke shit where they're like we're gonna educate girls at such a height that they'll be able to see the taliban while they do it and flip them off

while they learn about how j safra is good and has a huge dick actually 40 000 free places per year to london state state school children gives unique opportunity for learning to 800 000 children over 20 years free places that sounds like seats in a school but there's no it literally means just 40 000 kids get to go inside this nightmare fucking viewing gallery every year yes correct a school trip they've made school trips a reason to build so much to go on a school trip they've done is like the bit of your school trip where they sort of just they say okay you have two hours to walk around oxford street or whatever they've taken that bit of your school trip and they've reduced the amount of time you get to do it

because now you're going to spend time learning that london used to be called blendinium no one could have predicted that this giant glass alien dick egg would melt the children that went inside it looks could have known but we promise we're not going to do it the next time i also love like the idea that like school trips could go there as a plus point given that when i was a kid at a shitty state school we literally went on a school trip at one point to the like the fountain outside the local council building and we had to draw the statues in the fountain and that was a school trip it was possibly a 25 minute walk from where my primary school was they had to do this because norman foster did build that lovely water feature down from city hall

on the other side of the river but then they filled it in because too many people fell in while they were on their phones this is like the safe version it's like a kind of glass soft play for children like they won't be able to get out like i guess you can just like let them run riot and you're not gonna lose them they've not gone very far to go on that note this is a just a short fun story about how shit my hometown is the town of harlow and sx big shouts um which is that like so the the famous sculptor henry more is from like 15 miles away from my hometown my hometown was like close enough he's from here and um so they have a few henry more sculptures around the town which they've made way too big of a deal about because also like who gives a fuck about

henry more anyway it's not like he's not fucking Picasso he's not that famous there's a henry more right outside my council flat it's very nice exactly right and so but then they decided that harlow is a sculpture town and like this is our thing that we're a town with sculptures and so literally when you drive into the town every road sign says harlow sculpture town which doesn't even make grammatical sense and there aren't even that many sculptures in it and it has it's probably one of the ugliest towns in britain like it's 90% concrete well once once this goes up i'm sure it'll get a run for its money from the city well you'll be able to see it from there and and actually set fire to my entire hometown using a laser pointer

actually it's just going to like concentrate it down an entire like town is going to go up in flames like an ant under a microscope we're going to try not to do it again we've set asex on fire would that be so bad yeah well public realm enhanced public realm and impact on sustainability valued at nine million pounds with total green space increased by over a square kilometer they're going to build a park around it i think is one of the things so they're going to build a park altitude but here's the best one icon value 100 million pounds from quote-unquote existence value and increased choice for consumers because of the existence value you can't you can't rent that let's just remember let's go back to the third thing that our friend in the spectator said

about help to buy capitalism never distributes its benefits in a transparently fair basis but is still the best engine of economic progress we've got we should overlook occasional misallocations like this one and certainly not encourage governments to interfere with them so so in new york they built a bunch of new buildings you know in on the site of what used to be the world trade center and one of them was because the train one of the train stations got destroyed during the collapse they built a new transit hub and they built this like beautiful white building that says Santiago college rather than being a fucking asshole built this building that's like it looks like like a picked skeleton of a fish but it has like these like wings of the

thing it's really bright it's got polished white marble floors but it's a train station that only goes to new jersey it doesn't connect to any of the subway lines it's just the end of the the path train in from new jersey into Manhattan and so it's like a four billion dollar train station that's like white marble but it's it doesn't go anywhere that anyone would need and i saw uh it was a um like a a dialogue basically between two architects i can't remember who it was but like the guy was just like ripping on Santiago college for this and he said this in a way he's just like look at this fucking guy he takes four billion dollars he's like oh i'll build you this beautiful bird and now children don't have don't have erasers on their pencils and that's sort of how i feel

about this is because this is insane but also like this is going to siphon up resources that could do so many other things and i haven't even looked at what the price tag is but you had it up earlier wasn't it right wasn't like over a billion pounds to make this and did you know i don't but i will say the calatrava that train station leaks oh and excitingly there is a calatrava project coming oh no so not only oh yeah noise at leak but this is even crazier when i was living in new york somebody was walking like because of the the open gangway stairs in like the main hall slipped on a puddle of a leak and fell off the stairwell and died like straight up fell like two stories off the stairs and died like that's it's it's it's it's the white marble train

station from hell actually it's a shopping center as well yeah it's a huge mall inside it yeah yeah yeah they did that everywhere they built like a post 9 11 new construction thing like they also put a huge mall space in and it's just yeah but that but that um that death appeased the wrath of cthulhu which had originally been aroused by the building of the subway station and therefore allowed it to well it it to put a fine point on it that same subway station the one at um it's not fault in street i can't remember what it is anymore but it's um it's the end of the one train in Manhattan it flooded during hurricane sandy so just that it had been opened post 9 11 they're like oh wait we forgot to flood proof it and it's next to a river um amazing so it's just it's just next time next

time you know we'll learn from our lessons so we're going to evaporate the river using the magnifying glass building all right um i'm i'm i think i just need to i need to go have a minute at this point oh yeah this is an instant picture of this uh uh india thank you very much for coming on thanks for having me he sounds so no i sound like i was born here on a school trip when do i get to ride the gondola god damn it india we're very sorry that both of your legs were removed in an unforeseeable podcasting accident we'll learn about this when we build the next studio all right thanks everybody see you later ladies

thank you for listening to trash future this podcast was produced by me nat the fey and is a podcast about business and how crystals can help you do business better our theme song is here we go by jinsang it's on spotify and we strongly recommend you listen to it since he lets us use it for our podcast if you've enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more you can subscribe to our patreon for five dollars a month and receive an extra bonus episode once per week also tomorrow night wednesday the 10th milo is hosting smoke comedy at the seckford in king's cross get tickets at the link in the show notes and once again thank you for listening