TRASHFUTURE - Capitalism Is Sucking Itself Off feat. Grace Blakeley

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

Why is it that there are so many billion-dollar startups that ultimately don’t do anything? Under normal circumstances, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Hussein (@HKesvani) would just make a joke about Yu-Gi-Oh dragon dick in order to describe it. However, this week we were lucky enough to get expert insight from Grace Blakeley (@graceblakeley), the New Statesman’s economics commentator. So, learn all about the inherent contradictions in the value-extraction approaches of this newer and dumber capitalism—explained of course through the usual genre of joke (we never, ever, ever change our format). If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second free episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be performing once again at the Star of Kings in Kings Cross (126 York Way, Kings Cross, London N1 0AX) on Thursday, May 30 at 7:30 pm. Get your tickets here and return to the podcasting basement! https://www.tickettext.co.uk/trashfuture-podcast/trashfuture-live-30052019/ *COMEDY KLAXON*: Come to Milo’s regular comedy night on May 8 at The Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA), This show also starts at 8 pm and features  Radu Isac and Phileo Huff. Tickets are £5—sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-featuring-radu-isac-and-phileo-huff-tickets-60314057971 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

So last night I was at this Russian film premiere in London with my friend Sasha who's a Russian film star and afterwards we had to go to this dinner where there were lots of people who I would describe as out of their fucking minds, including one guy who was ranting to us about he is quote unquote not a homophobe but is against what he refers to as quote unquote gay propaganda. Now what he regards as gay propaganda is the fact that he last summer took his children to Disneyland and there was a gay pride parade going on in Disney World and he was so outraged and he's like in Disney World and I suddenly realized this dude thinks that like Disney World is straight like this dude's been to Disney World and looked at all of that shit and been like what an incredibly

straight place for dudes for guys being to the last bastion of real men Disney World. So what was it like meeting Russian Jordan Peterson? I was about to talk in Russian at Jordan Peterson voice but I'm not prepared to go that far down there. Why don't we do the Jordan Peterson voice and the voice of the theme song instead? Hello and welcome to your free TF for the week. It's me Riley from every other episode of this show, joined in studio by Milo. It's me, your boy, a tender of bizarre Russian dinners. And from parts unknown, who's saying? South London. It's South London. It's like a little bit further out from London Bridge. Anyway, hello. I'm not from parts unknown. It's just a part of South

London that it's too difficult or it's too long but it's too long for people that want to come down here so they just refuse to come. Anthony Bourdain Kizvani over there. That was a reach. You know what? Something of a local Thamesme delicacies like sewer water and bacon butties which I've never had before so I don't actually know what that would taste like. Exactly as Haram as one another. And speaking of, we're also joined by returning champion Grace Blakely. Grace, how are you doing? I'm super good. I'm also from South London and I can RT the reference to sewer water and I can say that I have had sewer water and bacon butties and they are peng. That's the only source actually real Londoners will have on a bacon butty is sewer

water. When they say brown sauce, that's what they mean. They'll have fatberg on it. Exactly. If you want to make a lot of money, I'm pretty sure that Grace is easily tricked into like buying something like a raw water or whatever like she'll fall for that kind of scam. So there you go. You can get that BBC question time money. Basic. You are going to a yoga class immediately after this. Fuck you. I'm not going to get drunk this time. Is it a hot yoga class? No, it's just a normal yoga class. It's only hot when I go bitch. It's actually a pumpkin spice yoga class. Hot yoga is the basic thing. So like normal yoga is like it's fine. Hot yoga is like spiritual, it's like meditative, but hot yoga is basic. So I'm like

I'm like the deep end. Hot yoga is like when they play Diplo in the background while they ask you to send to yourself. I mean, this is sort of connected to the product actually. So I think we should just jump directly. Is it Diplo related? Yeah, the product is Diplo. No, we should just jump directly in because the product is deeply connected to basicness. Guys, what do you think the Peloton is? I think I actually know what this is. Then you're not allowed to say. Okay. Isn't a Peloton like encycling? Yes. Yes. But that's not this. Not literal. No, it's like a Peloton refers to a pack of cyclists in the center of a race, but no, this is not a pack of cyclists in the center of a race. I'm pretty sure I know what

this is because I saw it online, but for the sake of the show, I'm going to say that a Peloton is actually pronounced Peloton. And it's actually like a small French man in a little box. And when you open the box, it says racist things to you. Le politique. No. Here's the thing. I actually confirmed that Grace doesn't know what this is. So I'm going to continue this with her. A private indoor blank in your home. A private indoor blank in your home. What was previously only outdoor but plugs? I don't know. What's indoor? Indoor versions of things. Pool. Gardening. Experience the energy of a group blank at home by joining any one of our 14 daily live blanks

or select from our library of thousands. A group blank is a very strong energy. Indoor. Indoor porn. As opposed to outdoor porn. Well, I mean, that's just a loose shrubbery. That's just solo dogging. That's what I'm adapting to. Wait, so what's the deal with indoor porn? Is that what this is? No, no, no. Indoor, as we call it. Here's the thing. Like, because both of you sort of know what this is and Grace seems to be serious. Guys, come on, let's get serious. He said flipping his chair backwards. The Peloton Exercise Bike is this particular product. Is that like in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where Matt builds a bike that has a thick that comes out of the

thing. It's a different thing. For a private indoor blank. If you want to get a private indoor blank session going on or in a lay by, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. You can ride the bike there and then make it stationary. Yeah, I actually walked past their store in Spittlefields today. See, I didn't choose this for no reason, but we'll get to why I chose it. I'm still confused. What is it? I don't know what it's talking about yet. It's just an exercise bike. However, I'm sure you'll find it's so much more grace because it's a dumb. It's a dumb product made up by a tech company. It's so much more. Okay. We're dedicated to creating a cutting edge fitness experience that makes working out at home a viable option. Why was it not viable

before? Because it wasn't all those people too rich. Charles Bronson managed it. No, it was, it was, it just wasn't viable. It wasn't disrupted because the Peloton is more than just a class, a cycling studio and a bike. We deliver a fully engaging one of those things. Is it like an AI bike or some shit? AI VR bike. We deliver a fully engaging experience with technology to make every workout effective and the social connection to make every workout addicting. So basically, it's a stationary bike, but it has an iPad on it. And the iPad beams workouts to you that are being done by other people around the world. And it has an instructor who can see you and yell at you when you're not working hard enough. How long before someone hacks

this and uses it to spy on people? I mean, how long before someone hacks it and just uses it for like naked cycling and like other sexual related things? It would obviously, that's obviously what people are going to do on it. People, everything that you can imagine, people use for sex. So this is an exercise bike where you can be instructed by a small racist French man called Peloton. Is he racist? He'll just shout slurs at you until you cycle so fast that like he can't keep up. But the cool thing is, he's wearing a gilet jaune. Nothing underneath, but you can't see that because it's just like the top of his head. Oh, but he knows. He's got the dildo bike. That would be a better investment. Exactly. Someone needs to like commercialize that.

The more it makes me come. The great thing about this is that one of my favorite examples is like all of the people who talk about how if we do mild social democracy, it'll be in 1984, are many of the same people who are very excited about getting a telescreen in your house that watches you while you work out and yells at you if you're not working hard enough. That's a very good point. No, we can't do a 1984 or we won't get enough pelotons in people's houses, which is again a workout bike that yells at you if it's not working hard enough. No, we live in a society. It turns out we do. We live in a society. Yeah, the joker. What if the joker got swole? Jokers on it. So my question to everyone here, how much do you think it costs to purchase and

then subscribe to the workout programs of because it's a walled garden. You can't just use your own workout videos. You can't replicate this experience simply by buying an exercise bike and sticking an iPad on the front and skyping your nan. Yes, you could. Well, then presumably it can conceivably cost no more than an exercise bike and an iPad. You're laughing at me right now. Is this like a vebbling good? This is like a good that people will pay more money for. Okay, I don't know. I'm going to say, you know, like five grand. They make a four thousand dollar treadmill, but no, it's like people don't be thinking at the margin. I think it's like fifteen hundred quid. Yeah, they're about. Now, what's funny is I

actually I pulled a quote from an article about Peloton and its interesting model. Peloton's popular one thousand nine hundred ninety five dollars stationary bike has now sold to over one million subscribers across thirty two show rooms in the United States alone. It plans to further appeal to more income levels with the addition of a new monthly financing program at fifty six pounds per month for thirty six months, zero percent APR rent to own your ninety eighty four exercise equipment. Amazing. That's right, everybody. We're not just investing in assets. We're investing in vebbling goods. Yeah, in all worlds, the fucking the oppression was free. It goes back to what we were saying the other week about how like capitalism has become

the Soviet Union, but just shitty and expensive. Yeah, so that's that's the thing is a lot of their sales are being driven by people taking out loans to buy exercise bikes. Fuck me. Amazing. Oh, wow. Now, here's the thing. As we all know, every good magic tech, every good magic trick has three parts. The setup, the turn and the prestige. Financing. The fact that this is a company that like arrested development, wasn't it? Oh, almost certainly the financing part. That's the that's the turn. Here's the prestige in 2017 series e financing value the company at one point two five billion dollars making it a unicorn and it's getting ready for an IPO. They also make a bike called the unicorn within the unicorn,

which is the dildo bike. That is why this is what they gave their valuation from. They told this guy we've got the dildo bike coming out. That's going to be our big. That's the prestige. They fucked you there. That's not the prestige. Well, I haven't gotten one yet, so they haven't quite. Well, yeah, that's true. They will. Once we get enough Patreon subscribers, I'm getting a dildo Peloton. Have you ever have you ever dreamed of being fucked and getting interval training at the same time? Oh, yeah, there are definitely people that have dreamed of that. So 100%. This is what we're talking about. We're talking about tech IPOs and the next recession, because as soon as I saw that Peloton was not only a unicorn, but has been one for several years and is now making an IPO

on the basis of people with 20 pounds to their name, taking out a loan to get an exercise bike. Stop passing me, Riley. You sure were doomed. Is there actually a technical definition of a unicorn? It's a million-dollar valuation startup. Oh, right. Okay. So that's just one of those. Actually, yeah, it should really have been adjusted for inflation because it's going to get easier and easier, which is really, because that was stupid of those people. It's just like every corner shop. So look, there is this wave of tech IPOs that have been going on right now. Uber, WeWork, all of our favorites, our best friends, Lyft, whatever, and money is pouring into them. But

talking about this, I kind of want to go back to the very basic contradiction of capitalism. Why is it so crisis-prone? That is a very good question. Okay. So let's just go back. Let's go right back to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, shall we? It's my favorite. My favorite tendency. That always gets my dick hard. Okay. So I mean, capitalism, every kind of adaption of capitalism tends towards a certain form of crisis. So contradictions will build up in the model as it develops based on economic actors attempting to pursue their own interests. And at some point, that creates accumulations of shit that build up in the system and lead

to big crises. And Marx says there's a secular tendency of capitalism over the kind of long term for the rate of profit to fall. And that's basically based on what Marx conceives of as profit, which is the difference between the value that a worker creates for a capitalist and obviously the profits that they gain from that. And Marx basically thinks that as more labor is kind of removed from the production process, then the difference between the amount that is extracted from the worker and the amount that can be sold, obviously, because you have less labor in the production process, means that you have a secular tendency for the rate of profit to fall. That crucially doesn't mean that profits consistently fall. It just means that the kind of

well, it just means that the rate of profit that the capitalists are able to make. And so what that means is that it gets harder to invest money profitably. And you have to go further and further to chase returns. This was the tendency that created imperialism because England is full of already invested capital. No one really has any money left to buy anything. I need to invest something. Oh, I'm going to buy a mine and have the government protect it for me, et cetera, et cetera, Hobson. And then that's how we get like debt fund. That's how we got like financialization. We take that forward. So if we have that in the background as like a kind of general tendency of capitalism, I think, you know, it's important to bring out the fact that

then because this like theory has been critiqued a lot, right? And partly by people who just like, but profits are rising. So the rates of profit are falling. But partly you don't tell you to Google Venezuela. Escaped and critiqued by Yerda. But I mean, it is also because capitalism has, because there are institutions, political, social and economic institutions that have been built up around capitalism as a system. So capitalism is not just an economic system. It also is, you know, it has associated with the form of politics, with picking forms of sociology. And like those institutions have facilitated fixes that have emerged at different points in capitalist history. So that, you know, like, for example,

you've had spatio temporal fixes. So like imperialism, as Riley was just said, was a kind of spatial fix expansion into new territories, like, you know, the frontier in America, and then obviously actual imperialism in the rest of the world. And more recently, like there was a lot of works been done looking at, well, there's a lot of Marx literature that looks at financialization all the way back to kind of Hilfiding, that looks at how as kind of businesses accumulate large pools of capital, there is a tendency in capitalist systems towards growing power of the finance sector. And that's basically because those profits need to go somewhere, they need to be invested somewhere. And that is done, you know, at the nexus between the corporate sector and the

finance sector and the finance sector works, rather than based on the logic of MCM, so money commodity money, just MM, so money, money. And yeah, kind of Hilfiding building on the work of Lenin says that the kind of emergence of big pools of capital. And what we would now refer to as kind of institutional investors that are able to like move money all around the world is something that naturally emerges from the operations or operation of a kind of capitalist system. And that's something that we really saw. So we saw it in the kind of interwar period, and it leads up to the Wall Street crash, because when you get these big pools of capital, there are even more kind of, well, not even more deep-seated, but kind of quite deep-seated

contradictions that emerge from those big pools being invested. And that has to do with kind of overinvestment and underconsumption dynamics analyzed by Marx, as well as like Keynes Minsky and other post Keynesian economists. And that tendency is obviously ends up in the war and then the Wall Street crash and then the war. And after the war, you have this period of relative stability in the form of like the post-Walking census, where all these institutions that are built up around capitalism under the kind of realm of social democracy, right? So what we were talking about a bit earlier, contain some of its contradictions. But then those kind of institutions have their own contradictions. And these are analyzed by Kaletsky, where basically

what like work has become too powerful relative to capital, which threatens the latter's profits and therefore leads to kind of political contradictions rather than economic ones. And then, although it has its roots earlier, but kind of in the 1980s, you get the reemergence of financialization as a kind of big trend in capitalism. And that's actually kind of at the time also, you know, it comes at a time where everyone's talking about the end of history. You have like the fall of the Soviet Union, the big debates between like left and right are kind of like over. So for those people that have like a gay alien view of history, history is over. There are no more ideas to be debated. There's no more

debates. There are giant houses to buy. And banks are being very nice by giving us unlimited money with which to buy them. And there's a bigger supply of cocaine than ever before. You can start all the small plates restaurants you want. And so essentially, I think, and so it's my understanding always was that that's the continuation of that process. Yes, exactly. And so like it was at that point that people start saying, Oh, actually, no, Marx is completely wrong. There isn't any, you know, capitalism doesn't have any contradictions. It's one, everyone's getting better off. Everyone's houses are going up in value.

Everyone's getting richer. You know, the global south is gradually converging with the rest of the world. And it's all driven by the temporal fix, right? Which is rather than the extraction of profit from the rest of the world, you get the extraction of profit from the future via like the creation of huge amounts of debt. And the kind of crises and the contradictions that build up in that model eventually culminate in the crash of 2007, after which we have this lost decade where we have, you know, in the UK, we have a decade of wage stagnation in America in the UK. Productivity is stagnant. Productivity is supposed to be the driving force of growth under capitalism. How do you use like the resources that you have available to you

better? You increase productivity, that's now dead. And you have all sorts of, like we can go into it a bit later, like all the problems that have been created by the crash and the kind of those fixes that have been attempted to be found as a result. So if we had the spatial fix, which is imperialism, it ran out of space, we had the temporal fix, but that's no longer credible because we seem to have run out of time. There's no more time. Time is over now. It seems now that, and this is now what we're getting into with all of these insane tech IPOs of like exercise bikes for millennials or whatever. But this is also a temporal fix. And I don't see it so much as a temporal fix,

as just like a credulity fix of them being like, fuck it, fine. It's a bike you subscribe to, or it's a car company that doesn't make money. But it's a temporal fix in the sense that, so when you say like there's a bubble in a particular market, so say we say there's a mobile and then tech sector, right? People will come back and you say, no, there's no bubble because the net present value of the future profits of this corporation extrapolated however many years can reliably are reliably related to the stock price of this thing. Basically, these things are going to make so much money over the course of their existence that actually the valuation that they have now is justified. So that seems that they're ever going to make money.

Well, yeah. But it also like this is what this is like Keynes's point about uncertainty. This is why uncertainty matters in the economies. Uncertainty is what drives the business cycle. Uncertainty is what drives massive over-investment booms and then under-investment busts because you can like reliably assess the risks that you can quantify that a company is going to grow or collapse or whatever based on the state of the economy right now. What you cannot like predictably do is say in 10 years time, we will not be going through an environmental crisis like there won't have been a meteorite that hits the planet. There wouldn't have been, I don't know, some sort of epidemic or like new innovation that completely transforms the market. Like uncertainty

means that over the longer period of time of which you try and predict something, the less reliable shit's going to be. So by saying that like these things are so valuable because they'll be making billions of dollars, 10 years in the future, it's kind of getting rid of that idea of uncertainty. Imagine if a meteorite was going to hit the planet now, we would be so fucked. Like literally, there has never been a time when like we've been led by bigger idiots who are less able to form a consensus to be like, actually, I think the meteorite, very good guy. Okay, if the Democrats have been saying a lot of very bad things about the meteorite, that meteorite always been very fair to me, okay? You just want an opportunity to do that.

But this is like Fermi's paradox, right? It's like, why are we here? I mean, we're getting to the point shortly where we're like, we've reached intelligence just about, like it's only a matter of time before we get wiped out. Exactly. The following numbers have proven to me that the journey of humanity towards intelligence is parabolic, and we've just gone beyond the arc. Intelligence was like 96. Lift the rideshare company, raised $2.3 billion in its IPO last month, soared 20% in the first moments of trading, and then is down like eight from its peak, I believe. 200 other companies, largely in tech, are trying to raise over $100 billion between them in the next like 10 months, and that's more money than was raised in like 2000 by the like pets.com,

and the other companies that like drove our economy into the ground two times ago. Pinterest went public recently. You're saying that all that money I have in pets.com is going to come good because I was relying on that for a time. I own so many Neopets. Neopets were so good. Let's invest in Neopets. Uber lost $1.8 billion. Would you like to buy some Neopets? We work lost $1.9 billion. You might as well buy Neopets rather than buying these. Airbnb is valued over $35 billion, but it doesn't make anything. Snapchat has been losing money forever, and despite being public for two years, continues to lose money, having lost $7.7 billion this year after several years of straight losses. If we know anything about like the dynamics of equity

valuations under finance-led growth, it's the like economic fundamentals matter less and less. Look at fucking Bitcoin like seriously. At least you could get porn with that. At least you can get escorts and heroin with it. Yeah, exactly. That's true. You can't get escorts and heroin with a lift share. At least I don't think you can. You can pick up escorts in a lift. In a lift. That's true. They should pick that a bigger part. I'm probably heroin. Look, if Lyft wants to learn the lessons of Bitcoin, it should get more into the like escorting and heroin game. That's where all the money is. Yeah, but also it's that like where else is where else is capital going to go?

Exactly. It's where the future profits are going to come from, and that's like the really big question, right? Because let's just look at all the... I don't want to talk too theoretically, so let's just look like empirically at all the like problems that are escalating all around the world. We've had like a period during which like global growth has been driven largely by consumption by people in the global north. They've been importing billions and millions of dollars worth of goods. That is increasingly going to come to an end because we're seeing wages stagnate. We're seeing all sorts of issues emerging around productivity in those economies, and a large part of the reason that those consumers were able to afford so much was basically

down to the dynamics of a debt-fuelled boom that is now over. If you look at like China, which is supposed to be the new rising power in the world, it's got like debts relative to... Three times the size of its economy. So total debt in China is three times the size of the Chinese economy. That shouldn't be too much of an issue because mainly it's like owed domestically, so there's not too much foreign debt, but like there is definitely a debt bubble that's going to have to be deflated at some point, which means that's going to reduce demand in China. You have all these stories about how opening up their markets to the great western enlightened rational countries was supposed to lead the global south out of poverty. That has increasingly

been shown to be bullshit, and actually all those economies when you get interest rates starting to rise are probably going to experience a renewed debt crisis that's already happening in places like Ghana and Mozambique today and Turkey and Argentina. If you think about all the kind of technologies that were making money for the private sector in the 1990s that sparked that new wave of globalization, that new boom, most of them came from state investment that was driven either by the need to invest in technological shit during the Cold War or stuff before that, and you just don't have that anymore. States are not investing in this kind of stuff. Then we've got the environmental crisis. We've got 10 years

to save the world from actual collapse. I feel like I'm hearing all these problems and there's only really one solution, which we've talked about on this show before, which is that we have to build a Gundam. He has to become prime minister, and he has to invest, he has to put state funding into building a Gundam. What's a Gundam for the Saj? It's a fighting robot. It's like a giant Japanese flying robot. There's an easy fix to that problem, which is if we could somehow, because we are still growing. It's just all that growth is going to like four guys. Yeah, this isn't like an inherent problem with the world. Let me just say, the economy's made some gains. If we raised wages, like if people's wages were on average higher and they could consume,

this would be less of a problem. Yeah, if a tiny elite wasn't monopolizing the gains from growth, then we would be living in a very different system. But of course, you always have to be able- How do I have my money swimming pool right now? I'm literally, it's kind of disorientating. You've got a big cutout of Elon Musk, and it's just staring me down. And it's actually made out of pulped 50-pound notes, because we could. That's what we spent the Patreon money on. Yeah, that's right, bitch. You guys are really excited about the fact that you earn money now, aren't you? Yeah, it's not enough. At least subscribe to the Patreon. Well, it's the thing, it's like, instead of having anyone's wages be higher instead,

we're saying, well, no, we can't do that. But capital still needs to find returns, but it can't do A to C. It can't give back some of itself to then get redistributed back up. We tried that in the 70s, and it was like, no, the worker's got to uppity. And so it has to go A to B and just pour a bunch of money into a bunch of shit that doesn't do anything or make anything. But then I also noticed, like, I'm seeing more and more of this trend of like, okay, do you read Wolfgang Streak? How will capitalism end? I sure as fuck did. I love that book. People don't like Wolfgang Streak very much. Yeah, but I like his book. No, it was a good book. And he was talking about the transition from like,

public Keynesianism in the 70s, where we sort of managed demand by giving people money and so on to private Keynesianism, where it was like, no, your demand management is like contingent on you continuing to perform. We've got dumb investors who will subsidize your taxi rides. We're now having venture capital driven or like individualized stupidity Keynesianism, where it's like, no, you have a dozen different microloans to like, to different disruptive companies. Like you've got a microloan to Instacart, you've got a microloan to Peloton. So now you have been invested in by a bunch of venture capital backed, you know, subscription based companies. And so Netflix kind of owns you

for a little bit of the while, but at least you get to watch the one movie that we get every year that's seven days long and contains every character. It's a beat to board Keynesianism. That was an exceptionally good pre-C. I think so the two ways in which capitalism is eating itself at the moment, and which we're kind of creating and unsustainable. Not in a cool too rich moves kind of way. Not in a suck your own dick kind of way. Title. Episode title. Capitalism Sucking Its Own Dick. CapitalismGettingIt'sDickSuck.com. CapitalismSuckingIt'sOwnDick.com.

Are we done with the dick stuff now? No, I can't talk about the two ways then. Well, just we'll carry on with the dick stuff now. No, we actually done with the dick stuff. Yes, we actually asked Tom Cubasi, our dick correspondent. As I was saying, the two ways in which capitalism is eating itself are by, so the like wage depression and rentierism. The wage depression is like the classic problem is that, you know, an increasing share of profits is going to capital rather than labor. And that's happening as productivity is stagnating. So, you basically got a problem of like capital needs to

embiggen itself. And it is struggling to. So, rather than kind of creating new shit, you just get a transfer of resources from workers to owners. And then there's another issue, which is that because, well, I mean, because of this productivity crisis, because of that issue around like where is future growth coming from? And because of that secular tendency that's always operating in the background, there's this need to find ways to create returns now with that, you know, alongside the reduction in the wage share, right? Because you can only push down wages so far. Well, you can carry on pushing down wages so far, but like, you know, there needs to be other sources of, well, economic rents, basically.

And so, what the kind of increasing strategy that the owners of capital are using is to rent out their assets to people that need to use them. So, whether that's in the form of like, you know, renting out property, you also see it in the extent to which like social security is increasingly becoming privatized, risk is becoming individualized, people are having to take on you know, paying for their own care, health costs. Their own pelotons. Pelotons, etc. And in the form of financial rents. So, like, charges for the use of capital. So, interest payments, like, well, capital gains can be considered a form of economic rent.

So, because of Thatcher in the 80s, when you had the right to buy your own council dildo bike, and then they never produced any more. So, now all the dildo bikes are in private hands and it's not enough to go around. They're producing some new dildo bikes. That's why we need a labor government. Exactly. Dildo bikes for all. Just one shared dildo bike. And so, it's the, we're suppressing wages and we're seeking rents. And also, and it seems like, it seems like in the background of all of that, we are,

we're finding money either by finding monopolies, and we're creating these monopolies, or we're just inventing the value of companies. So, like, Uber's target value is $100 billion, but that target value is just conceptual until Uber owns and can rent out all transport. Yeah. And so, another form of rent is actually like monopoly rent. And rents, basically, theoretically, the way to understand rents, they always result from an imbalance of power. So, like, the reason that you can charge people over and above where it costs you to reproduce a house, to rent your house, is that you own the house that they want. You cannot create another house that is exactly the same as that house because, you know, there's

the land is fixed. There's only a certain amount of land. And the people that, obviously, originally, they just expropriated, you know, this was primitive accumulation, they just expropriated the people that, you know, didn't own in capitalist terms the land, but worked in it and used it for subsistence in order to enclose it, make it into an asset. And this is, like, what a lot of kind of economists today say, I mean, you need to be doing with the global south is like consolidating property rights, which basically means enclosing mission-head resources and stuff. Why did no one have that idea of showing up in the global south and being like,

I own this now? Damn. Must have been because we didn't have the right muskets or something. Well, apparently, like, the reason that the global south is poor is because people who live in their homes, so in slums and various other forms of land that aren't technically privately owned by them, is that they can't capitalise that land. That means they can't take a mortgage out on it, they can't use it as collateral for a loan, and that's the reason that they're poor. Oh, I love that. Tying up to a guy who literally lives in a hut and pisses in a bucket and being like, you see the problem here is you can't leverage your situation. Yeah. And also, it's like, yeah, it's- Sorry, I was going to come to the,

I went off on one of them, I said the problem is an imbalance of power, right? And it's always about whether or not you can kind of basically consolidate a set of resources to be completely yours. And that's what we're seeing now with the emergence of monopoly rents. You can't separate the problem monopolies from the massive IPO and venture financing of unprofitable firms and dumping money into there with the hope of receiving like massive returns because what you're trying to do is make a bet on owning everything, right? So Facebook is the social network, whether we like it or not. It's basically the only one, I mean, because it owns Instagram and WhatsApp, et cetera, et cetera. It's the thing.

And so they are a monopoly now. And so everyone who invested in them early on, congratulations, you now own a monopoly. If you invested in Bebo or Friendster, sorry, better luck next time. I actually own all the train stations. I still have like a lot of my stock in Pixel, and I think that's going to make a comeback soon. That's one that you don't ever pick. So no, oh my God, what a 2008 vibe. It was like, it was like a competitor to like Bebo and MySpace and all that shit. It was like, but it was like more customizable. You had like more of an HTML page and you could like make like crazy fucking like writing all over it, like WordArt shit. That's fun. So then this, what happens is,

is that in chasing these returns, we're sort of naturally creating monopolies in effect. Yeah. I mean, so you've got these big platforms, right? And the only way they can be profitable because their business model rests on oftentimes like the accumulation of massive amounts of data that they can use to get advertisers to target you with crazy dildo bikes. Don't worry, buy this bike that just records everything you do. Yeah. So that, you know, in order for their businesses to work, because they're essentially selling something, producing something at zero marginal cost. So it doesn't cost them any, basically means the price mechanism breaks down because under neoclassical economics,

price is supposed to equals the marginal cost. So the amount it costs you to produce an extra good is the amount you're supposed to charge for it. And if you charge anything above that amount, then that's considered a form of rent. And, you know, this is the same with land rents. It's the same with the rents that these guys are extracting because technically these things should be free, data should be free. A lot of the services they're providing should be free. And instead, they're monopolizing them and using their power over them to extract rents. That is one reason why they're super profitable. The other reason, well, not profitable, sorry, why they're super, you know, they're market capitalization is huge. The other reason why

they're market capitalization is huge is that there's shit loads of money looking for shit to go into. Free to a good home, $100 billion of venture capital fine-hitting. Literally. No, so like since the crash, we had QE, so we had over, now I think it's over $10 trillion worth of capital pumped into the financial system by the big four central banks, that's Bank of Japan, the Fed, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. And they used those to buy government bonds, which the bonds then obviously they exchanged for cash. That cash needed to find returns. And a lot of that money has now flooded into equity markets. You had a massive, but you really, I mean, in most equity markets in the US, up until

recently where there's been a little bit more volatility and you're potentially starting to see a bit of a correction, they've been massively overvalued. So like the thing called, there's a thing called the market capitalization to GDP ratio, famously called the Buffett indicator because it was Warren Buffett's favorite recession indicator. When it gets to, I think it's when it gets over 100%, then Buffett says, that's, you know, a general recession. Yeah. And it's now something like 140%. Well, that's the other thing is that the party is over. And it would, but the thing is, like at least in previous decades, everyone was invited to the party, but the problem or at

least more people, not everyone, but more people were at least invited to like, have a cup of punch at the party. But now we, we have been completely shot out of this party because like since 2000, this is going on in our house and we've already, and we've already put on like an entire end the album to try and get these people to leave, but they're still like doing cocaine classic one, Tarquin. Because that's the thing we're saying, you know, we've, we, is that capitalism fixes itself each time it like patches itself up and keeps going. It gets the money from somewhere, whether it's imperialism or central banks or the future or

whatever. And then losses was lessons, baby. It's like capitalism is Mike, the situation's Argentina. That's why all the Tories are Instagram people now. Exactly. But it's like, it's that this money's basically, it's in decreasingly has it gone to us. It's all, the recoveries are increasingly privatized. And I found another, another interesting bit of the numbers, which is that as these recessions get worse and as it seems that like investment in tech is like taking up most of the money from this recession, this is from a paper called Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries. 88% of job losses in like routine occupations, so something easily automatisable, occur within 12 months of a recession. So in 1990, 1991,

2001 and 0809 recessions, routine jobs accounted for essentially all the jobs that got lost, but then they stay lost because in that time McDonald's and they were whatever invest cash in hand, like replacing workers with machines to stay profitable in a time of low consumption. And then those jobs never come back ever. So it's like every recession now is getting worse. And the thing driving the recession now is the thing that's going to make it impossible to recover from for most people. Yeah. Okay. So people are going to come back on you. Me too. Me too. Me too. People are going to come back on you now and say that actually, actually, actually, the rate of employment is actually higher now. It's the highest it's ever been on

record in the UK. And you've got similar trends in the US. Tell me about them wages though. So yeah, we've got, we have got really high levels of employment. A lot of it is like insecure, poorly paid and like temporary employment. So that's like, I don't know, that's not a, you know, Uber driving. Yeah. Well, kind of classic. That's the classic example. Literally my single largest source of income. I tell you what, folks, it's not enough for less than the price of cup of coffee a day. Milo lives. So yeah, I mean, you've got these, they're all like, they're mostly shitty jobs that are poorly paid. And that isn't that surprising because most of the jobs that are most automatable have

already been outsourced. So a lot of the jobs that were already, you know, in the UK are based, like especially in the UK, right? It's like finance and professional services and the associated cottage industries and like shitty other forms of service employment. That's like a really small share of employment in any form of manufacturing. So it's hard to, to automate that. And yeah, I mean, today, you know, you've got the majority of like, because less employment obviously in those big, highly paid sectors, you've got like a, what is called a, well, a long tail of highly unproductive firms, which pay workers very little. Which are also most think tanks. But like, this is, this is actually a really big problem for

the kind of development agenda, right? Because all the jobs that are most automatable have been outsourced to various parts of the global south. And the narrative was always going to be, as labor gets more expensive in China, the capitalist will move on to the next place where labor is cheap. But the people making this argument, don't they realize that there is a limited number of places? Well, then they would say that because the investment has moved out of places like the UK, then eventually labor will become cheap again in the UK and Europe. And then they'll come back. And it will just be this lovely, virtuous cycle based on nice equilibrium and all these sorts of lovely things. We'll just make new places. In the sea. We'll colonize the fucking

moon. This is literally like that, you know, the continuous need for fixes does imply, have you got, oh my God, I hate it when you call tech support and you get put through to the Nazi moon base. I wish there's really good sci-fi show called The X. And it was so fricking good. And the premise was that the earth was like all underwater and run by the UN. They'd sent a colony to Mars. You would never have that kind of authority. I know, I know, I know, I know, it sounds like a Mark Wahlberg movie. Mark Wahlberg has to get in a fight with Mars. Mars, you want to fucking fight me? Yeah. Actually, Mars is a part of Boston.

You guys, I like that. I mean, tell you, Mars did the Boston bombing. I'm going to go to Mars. I'm going to punch you in the fucking face. Your Wahlberg converges with Trump. Too powerful, too powerful. We're going to go to fucking Mars. We're going to fucking fuck him up. Okay. They've said some very, very fucking fair things about fucking Boston on Mars. Okay. We're going to take care of it, folks. So look, we've learned a lot about capitalism today, but we've also learned that actually,

if you take Mark Wahlberg and Donald Trump, add them up and divide them by two, you get the trailer park boys. Basically, everything exists on a weird spectrum. So we were talking about the expanse. Oh yeah. And then so there's a colony on Mars and the people that have gone there, like they've enclosed Mars. So they like, like, like slice it up between loads of big, like, you know, those are rich people now, and they're all working together to try and make Mars work. And then you have the asteroid belt and all the proletarians live in the asteroid belt mining shit in the asteroids that they then send back to them.

And they like have, they like die all the time and treated like shit. And they have like a terrorist organization, a terrorist organization that's trying to like get them independence. It's a really good, but like, this is like this. I was watching that and I was like, politically, this is really like quite accurate potentially about what like a kind of capitalist. It sounds a bit like Total Recall as well. What's Total Recall? It's the film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I haven't seen it. I'm too young, Chris. I'm the same age as both of you, but just been less than I'm watching old movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

You can't be the same age as both of us. So which is it, Blake? They caught you in a lie again. Yeah, again, the young hip Stalin is left. She's not a real economist. These headphones come right off. Right. So, but I think what that gets back to is that like, this process needs to keep going forever and it keeps almost fucking up. And so that's why I get to- But they always find a way to deal with it. They always find a way to like, keep their power and just oppress people and exploit people. Because they can. In slightly more nuanced and horrible ways. Well, also, but like, that's what I think you, what all we always have to come back to, right,

is that they do it because they can, because if they say Uber's worth a hundred billion dollars, it's worth a hundred billion dollars. So their returns are safe for another day. And ultimately, the people, so like, originally, a lot of what drove the stock market expansion in the 80s was the shit ton of social security capital. So like, pension funds, wealths that increasingly you had to have because of the privatization of the social security system. And today, you know, when this blows up, because it is going to blow up, there is going to be some sort of generalized crash and fall in equity values. That's not going to create the same kind of crisis as it did in 2007. But you know, the bubble is going to

pop at some point. The hedge funds, the investors, whatever, they will all know that and they'll see that coming before it happens. It will be ordinary people's savings who, which are wiped out. And I'm not saying, you know, these are the people who have enough savings to invest in equity markets, whether themselves or by pension funds tend to be wealthier. But wiping out all of that wealth is also wiping out another potential avenue for consumption in the future. And therefore, constraining even more the amount that demand in the economy. And the important thing is all my Betamax tapes are safe, and those things are going to be valuable as fuck.

Look, one of the main themes of this show really also is just looking at the frantic stupidity of the modern economy. And the more I hear about this, the more I feel like the best way to describe what you capitalism now is basically as like a wounded badger that's getting increasingly frantic. Wait, it's Chris Maltesante going, you're supposed to push fucking logistics. More or less. Yeah. But in this case, it's just they're inventing how much value their equities are. And then that's how much they are. And the thing is,

It's a Ponzi scheme. It is actually because the next person is going to pay more for the same shares and suddenly your share is emotionally worth more. Yeah. And so then you got to crystallize your gains, and then ordinary people are left holding the bag. And so this is why I always really think of this, which is like going back to all that like new Tory Liz trust shit, where they're like, oh, well, socialism's never worked. And it's like, have you seen what this economy is doing? And they say, oh, it's the best engine for human

progress because it gave us the iPhone and the Peloton. But it's like, all it's good for is securing returns on capital. And sometimes as good a side effect of that is that it's produced useful consumer Gugas and then like, and so forth. But like also, you know, if you're like, if you're looking at this over the long term, then you can say, you know, there was a stage at human development under which capitalism was the next natural phase based on the power relations and like the political and economic relations that existed at that time. And, you know, that capitalist systems by virtue of the ability of states and powerful people with with monopoly on force to use that force to expropriate

and then kind of well, build up their own their own capital and then use that capital to force other people to work for them because they're just been expropriated, etc. That ends up creating a system that ultimately then does stabilize itself by producing, you know, enough for people to get by and producing some goods and like only exploiting the people that it finds easiest to exploit, generally segmented by race and gender and whatever. But that you eventually get to a point at which it's no longer rational, not just in the sense of like, you know, human needs, but rational in the sense of the political and economic base and the power relations that exist in society for that system to continue. And that is, we hope the situation that we are getting to now,

whereby there are so few people that look as though they are going to benefit from the continuation of the status quo that it is almost impossible just based on a like basic political analysis to expect that situation to continue. Now, that is tempered by the fact, of course, that it doesn't matter how many people are opposed to capitalism, if capitalism is personified in a big fucking nuke that can just blast the shit out of all of them, which is another problem. So they are like, we've gotten to this point where the only real way out of this is some sort of, is what a lot of people think is impossible, which is basically the use of the state, the democratic capture of the state by like movement of people, working people, and that's working in

a very expansive sense in the interests of like socialism, basically. And that's the kind of, you know, that's why a lot of people have hope for the kind of like revival of the left as an electoral project at the moment, because there really is, doesn't seem to be any other way out. Let's say what I often wonder, like, because I have several, let's say, friends who don't view the world dialectically, they're a bunch of, you know, rump empiricists, and they'll say, yes, well, you know, you can, you people have always been saying that capitalism is, that their next recession is coming, but you know, it's, but capitalism has never really, quote unquote, fallen before it never has experienced its final

crisis. It does always keep going on. But I keep questioning, like, if we've gone from spatial expansion to temporal expansion, different kinds of temporal expansion, now to like conceptual expansion, where we're just inventing what's what things are worth now, where is there left for it to go? What kind of expansion will sustain this gap between what workers are paid and what capital is need to be produced? I love to be a guy in 1650 straightening my neck rough and going, what do you mean feudalism will never end? It will just find new forms. Yeah. I mean, it's true. And like, you will, you never want to be complacent about this

shit because they are clever at finding ways to sustain. Injured badgers are very good at playing back. They just get weirder about it. They give you TB. Then what do you do, bitch? They ret you TB. It's genuinely why these people are inventing fucking private spacecrafts. Like they need something else. They need something more. They need to find the next big frontier. Where's the big international waters of all space?

That's really it. It is a shell game. And the fact is none of these things are separable from one another. So the gigantic stupid tech shit that we talk about on this show, that's connected to the fact that there's nowhere to put any of the money. They need somewhere to put some of the money because if it doesn't keep growing, then it falls apart. And the only way that it can be profitable is if these things are more monopolistic and replace more of our daily lives with shittier and shittier, more exploitative jobs and practices and rent back more of our stuff to us. That's the thing. It's going to get worse. And the lift IPO being $2.3 billion is deeply connected to why I love to rent all of my cutlery so that

when the asteroid hits, I don't actually have to worry about the cutlery because it's not mine anyway. This is so coming back around to this. You familiar with the myth of Prometheus, right? Or one of the many myths of Prometheus as a cool movie when he stole the fire mix tape from the gods. What are the things was he stole fire and the mix tape, you know, mix tape is fire. Never mind when Prometheus steal my mix tape. Is that one of the secrets? Every time you come on, this happens. I'm not like in your weird internet subculture. No offense to everyone listening to this.

So what Prometheus did was... No offense. There's lots of offense. What Prometheus did was he taught humanity how to sacrifice to the gods. One of the many things. And he was like, look, what you can do is you can have a bag, fill it with bones and fat and all the shit you don't want and stretch a little bit of rump steak over it. And that will trick the gods into thinking that what you're sacrificing is actually quite good. And so what we've been describing is all the bones and fat and all the real shit that's actually going on, the gristle and nonsense that we don't want. But over it is stretch this rump steak of ideology.

And so every time you see something like this, and this was sent in to us by friend of the show India Block. I sent me this the other day. Right friend of the show. Every time you see something like this, know that what you're looking at is the rump steak over top of all the, all the bones and shit that we've been talking about throughout this episode of the podcast. It's like eating McDonald's. Link and Co created an innovative model with the belief that young people are willing to

spend money on getting around, but increasingly prefer not to own their own cars. Oh, fuck. I saw this. Yeah. It was just like, oh, it can't be that young people don't have any money. No, that can't possibly be the reason why. No, they're just hate owning things, fucking young people, not into like traditional things like owning stuff like we, the boomers, the best people who ever lived are. No, young people just hate owning things. They refuse. They refuse to even earn money, even though they could. No, they'd much rather eat an avocado and wank.

I love renting. I love renting money. It's great. And so they're ready to spend money and mobility, whether it's uber taxis or whatever, but they're not ready to commit to spending large amounts of money for a longer period because they love to live day to day. As I say to my car, it's not you. It's me as I take out a lease on a Toyota Igo. So that's it. It's that the car industry needs to keep making cars. And the like financing, finance industry needs to keep taking in, taking in money and signing loans, but they don't want to give you any of the money in order to do that.

And so all this disruption is, all any of this is, is ways to keep the cycle going without empowering you anymore in any possible way. And all that shit about how you love your iPhone, you hate to commit, you have a go-go lifestyle, you can rent an Hermes box to make it look like you have a rich boyfriend. All of that is just the rump that's over top of all of the steak, the, sorry, that all of the bones, in fact, no steak at all, that like you're constantly being served. And you just have to rip that ideology off. Yeah. Which is what trash futures does.

That is a dick joke. So the thing, okay, I want to quickly come back to is that the really interesting thing about like the 1980s onwards was that in order to stabilize that financialization 2.0 with financialization in like, you know, the UK, et cetera, 1.0 being the interwar period is that to stabilize it under electoral democracy, you have to extend its benefits to a much wider constituency. And that was what pensions privatization right to buy and the big privatizations of all the same enterprises was about. It was about extending asset ownership in conditions of asset price inflation where you've got the prices of all these assets going up relative to prices in the real

economy to a wider constituency. And that creates a big, that creates the baby boomers. It creates a class of people with a continuous and constant interest in the maintenance of the status quo in order to protect the value of their assets. That model has broken down because young people can't afford to buy anything. They have to rent everything. And when they can't afford to buy anything, they don't have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, especially when the continuation of the status quo involves them being like, but to death in 20 years because the planet is exploding. But that's actually just because there's no flex. They don't like that. It's because it's because it look, I read this in spiked and I'm pretty sure that that I'm pretty

sure that Brendan O'Neill only had a minor magazine that, Hey, maybe don't drink that. I'm pretty sure Brendan O'Neill only had like a minor concussion when he wrote it that actually it's because we feel guilty about technological progress. Wait, well, I don't understand. Oh, neither does he. No. Brendan O'Neill said that actually, it's what you said isn't true. It's actually... Well, that's where I went wrong. Yeah. Brendan O'Neill, who again, I'm pretty sure only had a small concussion, said actually what it is is that millennials these days hate responsibility and love feeling guilty. And so that's why we're sort of turning to the left and worried about environmental collapse or whatever. Someone needs to feed Brendan O'Neill

a nice healthy spoonful of materialism. Just sprinkle a little bit of sugar in that. I hear about rising sea levels. I hear about rising sea levels. And as a millennial, I'm just like, yes, choke me, daddy. And so this is why this comes back to what you were saying earlier, which is like, this is why there is a reinvigorated transatlantic left. Yeah. I mean, that's essentially what it comes down to. Either you have an interest in things staying the same or you don't have an interest in things staying the same. And I mean, sure, have a broad conception of what an interest means, right? And a very long-term conception of that, because environmental breakdown is something that is not in any of our interests, but which is in

the short-term interests of people who own all the shit, who will be dead by the time any of this unless you want it to happen in order to own the libs, in which case. That's true. Yeah. Also, when you're Toby Young and everyone hates you, like being able to just look down in a drowning world and be like, now we're all fucked, like me, Toby Young. But these people are all functionaries to capital. They derive their earnings and their material wealth from providing a function to the people who have all the money, and some of that trickles down to the functionaries. Also, if Toby Young was just continually sunburned in this climate change future,

he'd actually look pretty badass. He'd look like Hellboy, but without the horns. I think we've done it. Over the course of a single episode of this podcast, we have managed to connect the two disparate threads. We've managed to connect Toby Young with terrible tech products. We've shown how they're part of the same process. I can't believe that he is still a thing after everything. It's mad. He's like a hard-boiled egg that someone keeps like chocking at a wall. He's a hard-boiled egg that can survive a nuclear apocalypse.

Yeah, like a cockroach. He's proof that capitalism can really make anyone a viable economic commodity. There are certain personalities who just can't be killed. It's like Toby Young, no, Ledman Slut. I just keep going back. Going back from our favorite columnist who we love to love is what we have to remember. This should fill us with some renewed hope that capitalism has more or less run out of stuff to do. The object of just trying to put in a couple of new laws to tinker around the edges won't work because, as economist Marshall Steinbaum put it, the main drivers of wealth exist now

largely because they've been allowed to break laws that everyone else has to follow. We have fewer and fewer things to do except for genuine structural change, and I find that very exciting. Me too, right? But we'll just use starving to death instead. I'll back them. Like, okay, there's no food, but my pile of money is bigger than ever. My pile of money is worth this. There's no food in it. It's like, look at my pile of money. It won't even be a pile of money, though, because we'll have moved to electronic money by then. Yeah, look at my pile of bitcoins. I'll be like, look at my 1s and 0s.

You should pile up bitcoins. Hell yeah, more 1s and 0s than you've got. Very sad 1s and 0s over there, okay, folks. Very few 1s, not enough 0s, in my opinion. Right, but no, so it is exciting because you can see them running out of ideas. Yeah, totally. I mean, I really do think that we live in a very exciting moment. And it's one of those moments where pessimism is irresponsible. I am H.J. So there's a lot of very cool people who get their reputations on the left just from continuous dog pessimism, that things are shit. Capitalism is shit. And there's absolutely no way out now because... All that's left to do is buy dungarees.

Yeah, literally. Just like, welcome the end of days. It's here. And then you end up in kind of ridiculous debates with Jordan Peterson and things just go downhill. But that's increasingly when we're in this moment of crisis. And no one's saying that this moment of crisis is the kind of demise of financial growth is going to end well, right? No one's saying that they're not going to find a fix. No one's saying that it's not going to end up in some sort of attempted revolution where everyone gets nuked to death and we end up with just Toby Young left on a dead planet. In the land of the unions, the Toby Young was king. But it is our responsibility to believe that we can potentially use this moment,

use this period where there are divisions within capital, where the balance of power seems to be shifting away from something under which it was monopolized by this tiny elite and in which everyone else had an interest in things staying as they were. It's our responsibility to think, well, okay, fine. Things might not be looking that great. But we also have, we do have a task ahead of us that we can chart a way forward that will allow us to get to a situation in which somehow power, wealth are shared amongst people who live off work rather than those who live off wealth under which we kind of move towards dissolving the distinction between workers and owners. And in which the planet isn't dying and there are ways and there are people, there are flawed

people and flawed movements that are engaging in that project at the moment. And I think it's the responsibility of everyone on the left and everyone actually who gives a shit about you know, living for the next 40 years to start thinking about what their role is in that. We're at the start of the screwball comedy from 2005 where we've just discovered that the money required to stop climate change is exactly the prize money of the dance competition. Yes, that is it. That's the best thing you've ever said. We have to assemble a team of misfits to make podcasts. Mark that. And so that's it. That's what we have. We have a better future in which we

are all able to like continue being alive or we have luxury or we have a world where lift is worth 2.3 billion dollars. Well, I mean, it's not even going to be a world where lift is going to be worth shit. Mars is where it's worth 2.3 billion Mars bucks. But that's what I mean, right? Is that right now we have the choice between those two things is and that we can keep one or we can try to move to the other one. But I hope in the last hour and a bit that we have explained sort of just exactly how that process is working and how it's interconnected and how it's kind of connected to the apocalypse. Also, can I just say hashtag plug a lot of this I write about in my book,

which will be coming out in September of this year. What's it called? I really like the cover of the book. I just wanted to say that. Oh, thanks. Yeah, I like it too. The bird's great. I didn't design it myself. The book is called how to get person and influence people. The book is called gettingyourdicksuck.com. Shit. Can we can we like advertise it on gettingyourdicksuck.com? That's how we stop climate change. We're like, when the planet dies, you won't be able to get your dick sucked anymore. And I'll be like, but I'm not

getting my dick sucked now. Can we buy the cereal rights to your book? So like we run exclusive. That's it. Look out for look out for the book stolen. Grace's book stolen and financialized capitalism serialized in gettingyourdicksuck.com. Yes. World exclusive of the quick papers. Yes. Look, look, also, I'm still very committed to turn and gettingyourdicksuck.com into a real thing. Yeah. If you would like to be involved. Okay. Right now, I think we need web design. We already have a volunteer for editor. But we need someone to actually do the web design. So if you can do web design,

graphic designers hit us up. 100% on the like, like 99% male audience that's listening to this, a web designer. Like people with people with writing credits who want to write for it. Yes. Absolutely. I'll write for you guys. Hell yeah. Amazing. All right. We're serializing your book. I thought we agreed. We have an economics correspondent on lock. We need a cartoonist to like New York style cartoons that make no sense. We are so serious about turning gettingyourdicksuck.com into a real thing. Cartoons where every week the punchline of the cartoon is always like, oh, I thought you were a Yale man. But it's just some like different fucked up shit in the picture every week.

Yes. This, I cannot emphasize to you enough. We are serious about doing this and doing it well. Yeah. However, so Grace, people can pre-order your book. Yes. They can. They can pre-order my book, stolen, colon, how to save the world from financialization at ourfavoritefriendamazon.com or.co.uk if you're in the UK. Nice guy. Our favorite. We'll put the link to that in the description. Also, as you know, we're trying to stick it to the stuffed shirts of the British podcasting awards. Yeah, we are. So if you vote for us, we will skateboard on to stage. And we will literally do that. No shame. And we will mess up their award ceremony.

I will take off my shirt on stage and swing it around my head. So the link to that's in the description. And all the ladies want to see that. I am pretty good to them. I know, I didn't see that. Being homeless has made me weirdly jacked because I'm not eating enough and I'm spending a lot of time at the gym because you can shower there. We also have two live shows coming up. Two. One on May 30th in London at the Star of Kings. Tickets are on sale for that now. And one in Cambridge at Wolfson College on the 14th, 15th of June. You get that wrong every time. Tickets on sale for that yet?

No. Well, they might be by the time this comes out, I'm going to try and get a text up for that. Next Tuesday. Well, this Tuesday, if you're listening to it now. I was going to say, you could also pre-order my book. Everything goes into funding my dream of becoming, of opening up my own soup shop. Exactly. Which I've had since I was a very young boy learning under the Sarasen leader, Saladin. The soup so hard it burned down Notre Dame. Anyway, all the book also from famously good place, Amazon. And yeah, take like, you know what I really want? I want someone to take a

bookstagram picture of it, but like in the most unreasonable or like stupid setting. So just like make it look aesthetically good, but I don't know. So if you're a billionaire, like one of your friends, maybe one of the Russian billionaires, put it like on, I don't know, some glass like floor that's looking down on all the plebs, like next to a bottle like Dom Perignon, with some wrapped in some Hermes scarves in a bag. Weeding upside down on the toilet. Yes. But all of that, or get a Peloton, break off the iPad from the Peloton, and then be motivated by Hussain's book or Grace's book, or my mom's book.

It's coming out now too. It's book season. Oh wow. Is your mom actually writing a book? Yeah, Joe, she's already written it. It's so cool. We need to talk about Riley. It's so cool, isn't it? No, it's called a cure for heartache. Oh, that's so lovely. And it's out on Hodder and Stouton.

So you can pre-order my mom's book too. Did you break your mom's heart? Is that what happened there? I'll pre-order your mom's book. Yeah, what's his name? All right, I think we've done enough plugs for now. Yeah, I'm reading your mom's book, if you know what I mean. I'm leaving her very good reviews on Goodreads.com. Okay, we've done like 10 minutes of plugs at this point.

Yeah, also, smoke comedy on the 8th of May. Link in the description, as always. The headlines can be rad. It's like, that's gonna be really fun. Come down. Also, I'm doing the Brighton Fringe on the 3rd and 4th of May, and also the 31st of May and the 1st of June. So do come to that. My show is called Pindos, and it's not ready yet,

but it should be by then. So do come and see that. You can't buy tickets online because it's free, but if you're in Brighton, it's gonna be at the Temple Bar. It's laughing also at the Temple Bar at 10 p.m. Yeah. All right. Brrap, brrap.

Brrap, brrap.