TRASHFUTURE - Cryptocurrency 1929-2008 Speedrun (Framecount in Video)

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

This week, Riley, Milo, Nate, and Alice react to new developments from UK politics (it’s wedge week!) and the crypto world, where discussions are taking place to encourage central banks to help unwind stablecoins. What does that mean? Well, it means free money, more scamming, and no time spent on explaining the actual use case–there isn’t one. As mentioned in the show notes, there’s a fundraiser for the 9 people arrested during a recent Stop Deportations action in Uxbridge. Please contribute here if you can! https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-stop-deportations If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello. Welcome to Sky News Home Counties, where we have a Labour leader, Keir Starmer, here responding to allegations that he is boring. I would like to put paid to any accusations that I'm boring. These are incorrect and also fundamentally untrue. As you can see, if you'd like to just pass out these handouts that are prepared, itemized on pages one through 19 are examples of the fact that I am not boring. For example, I am a member of the campaign for real ale, which involves drinking lots of pints of real ale. Would a boring man do that? Mr. Starmer, this is Adam, Adam, the bug Adam Barton swallowed, Sky News Other Home Counties. Are there any girls at these real ale parties? Technically, no, but I'm trying. I'm trying

to bring some along. I'm currently in negotiations with Julia Fox to get her to come down to a campaign for real ale meeting. I think that if we could get Julia Fox behind the campaign for real ale, that it really has a chance of success. And what do you say to members of your own party who have accused you of being boring? I would say, look, we all don't want to be boring, but sometimes a man has to come forth and say, this beer is not real beer. It's not bitter enough. It's not hoppy enough. It doesn't contain enough earthly notes to constitute a serious English beer. And I think that's something we all have to acknowledge and keep in mind when we're talking about ale. Thank you very much, Mr. Leader of the Opposition.

Quite contrary to, as you may have heard in our TF players rendition of what we think that interview with Starmer would have been like. Would we watch it? Heavens know. Where we're all being played by qualified actors. Wasn't really pulling my weight in the TF players there, to be honest. Look, we need Alice's stage manager for the TF players. Well, Alice's lines were cut. She's coming in at the end like, you love blood. Alice was office's Batman number four. That's right.

Alice was going to be understudying in case I got COVID again, which I did, but don't have. You're free from saying that again. No, I believe I got COVID. Well, at the J-Electronica stage at Primavera, we're surrounded by a bunch of like white Europeans chanting real hip hop, which was fun. Real hip hop. You got the little kill cam thing where you see like an accounts manager roll his r's and it causes one of the COVID molecules to like go into your lungs. The only more you way to get COVID is if you were tucking into a plate of oysters,

and one of them had like comical green stink lines that came out of it, but you ate it anyway and it gave you COVID. That's true. That's true. Hi, everyone. It's TF. You know what it is. It is Milo, Alice, Riley, and Nate, because Hussein is, I assume, off on his honeymoon, enjoying a heart-shaped bed somewhere. Yeah, he's on secondment to wife Gaia Stan. Yeah, that's right. You know what sucks is I was going to make a joke. I realized I was typing it out about

groomsane honeymoon's Vani, but then I was like groom slash grooming, groom, etc. Like no longer wife affiliated or marriage affiliated. Now it's just the purview of right wing freaks and that sucks. Yeah, we've lost a great word from us. Exactly. What word next right wing? Horse. Are you going to take horse? How dare you?

Hound. Come on. Let's not say things you can't take back. It's what I find very funny about that Starmer boring thing. He did actually say to his shadow cabinet, please stop calling me boring. The knives are out in the shadow cabinet office and Yon West Streeting has a lean and hungry look, albeit hungry mostly for McDonald's. West Streeting can't call anyone boring. Come on. Although here's the thing. He's a fun time. What do you think is not fun about a guy who has

spent his entire life within and against the Labour Party? Labour's answer to Matt Hancock. Without any of the sense of fun, that would be a non-boring Prime Minister. Matt Hancock is a more effective Labour politician than West Streeting. That's true. I'll say this though. That's all very fun, right? Keir Starmer being angry at being boring. What's much more fun though is Lisa Nandy coming out

and saying, I would find it deeply exciting to have a Prime Minister who is prepared to act with honour and strength and honour. A very complicated sentence structure there. That's peak sort of Starmerist Labour is like, well, would you have not been the Prime Minister who would have, like it's fucking Ovid and at the end of that, when you untangle all the fucking clauses and shit is honour, a thing which no one gives a shit about least of all borrows. Lisa Nandy has been hit on the head by a coconut

and has sort of convinced half that she is like Kato the Elder and half that she's in the court of Imperial Japan and has just begun AI-generating sentences. We're going back to Milo, your least favourite protest sign, which was Ketterham Kensei, how long O Theresa May must we suffer your injustices? Oh, it was Kway Tandem, but I have butare, pasientia, nostra, Theresa May or whatever. Yeah, that's the one, yeah. Here's the thing though, that Lisa Nandy sentence, I simplified it.

I'm going to redo the straight note. I would find it deeply exciting to have a Prime Minister who is prepared to act with honour and integrity to abide by the rules that he himself had made. Oh, that's a Latin sentence. The nested fucking, that's got an ablative absolute in it, 100%. This is she's become Kato the Elder. What has happened to Lisa Nandy?

This is like Freaky Friday, but with a guy who died 2,000 years ago. And I mean, again, I think it's, again, it's very amusing that it's in this sort of, with the government rolling slowly from crisis to crisis, limping on sort of- In the biscuit. Yeah, exactly. Eating the limp biscuit, awful. Of course, yeah. And all they're able to do is be like,

well, I don't think I'm boring. I think that I'd act with integrity and honour. No, I think that's boring. The voters want excitement. They want honour and integrity. Come on. I'm not a regular Labour leader. I'm fun, but also honourable.

I'm like a samurai. There's no way that I can leave this in the episode, but all I can think of is this dumb joke I used to hear Frat guys saying and fucking Indiana University 15 years ago. Every time you guys keep jumping in about honour, and I just think- I'm like, that's been fucking going around my head this entire time. Powerful. An episode mostly for us.

Just beep out the entire thing. That's the most fun option. I think Frat guys used to say- Exactly, yes. Exactly that. I- What's going around in my head is Gladiator the Kierst Armour Overdub. Strength and honour. My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius.

Commander of the Armies of the North. General of the Phoenix Legions. And loyal servant of the True Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Mysterial Code. Father to a murdered son. Husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance in this life or the next. It was- I think it was the Alistair Campbell's podcast.

They were like, what if- what if the Prime Minister had to swear an oath on the ministerial code? Do you think that would improve it? And do what if he broke it? Commit fucking Sippuku? I mean- Yes. Yeah, I mean that's-

Lisa and Andy again, straight in there. I agree. Standing by to behead him with the Daikosana, yeah. It's just the sort of just absolute relentless dysfunction of everybody involved at the top level here. Also the same thing, right, where the French legislative elections have like returned a, I believe like a minority government for Macron as well, right, with a beefed up left, yes, but also 80 more seats for the fucking Front National.

In 56 of 61 seats where there was a runoff between the far right and the far left candidates, the Macron voters stayed home. Yep. And like it just- it's genuinely the liberals hate socialists more than fascist thing yet again. You know what you can do, you know what's really fun and free to do is search from at Ian Dunt, left abstentionism and see what he had to say about the matter. Yeah, anyway. So there was so much for Manu's imperial presidency, that's the fun thing.

It's less of a Jupiterian presidency and more of a Hephaestian presidency. No, it is a Jupiterian presidency in the sense that he's gonna go to Jupiter to get stupider. That's another thing that Frank Geise used to say in Indiana in the 2000s. The finest dunks of 4th grade here on our channel. The thing I was thinking about recently is a lot of friends have kids who are getting to be early primary school age and I'm like, it's so annoying when they get one thing in their head and they can't shut the fuck up. Can you imagine what how awesome it must be to be a seven-year-old to hear

you go to Jupiter and get stupider for the first time? That must be like discovering cold fusion for them. Absolutely. But I think what I'm driving at here, right, is that there seems to be this manifest inability. And we've discussed various facets of it, whether it's the inability of the states to get build back better past or indeed to continue to safeguard anything approaching civil rights, even though Democrats sort of hold all three, hold two of the three major branches of government. There is an inability to govern there.

There is an inability to form a meaningful government in France. There is an inability to govern here. The Overton window has been restricted to won't work here. And that it seems like of all of the countries that kind of had consensus neoliberalism kind of just bolted into place from like the 1990s, it seems as though they are more or less all completely failing to meet the challenges of the day. Well, maybe we can get an op-ed from Tony Blair to explain to us how we went wrong. A rare intervention.

It's funny because I was going to be like, yeah, I think I saw a tweet about that today this morning on Twitter. Like, oh, yeah, it was you, Riley. I forgot. Whoops. Yeah. But no, you're right though. Working out the idea for the show before.

I do think there's a point there though that like if you think about the way in which the consensus of sort of this is anything besides this is impossible, being the dominant mode of politics in Britain and in America since the 90s, the extent to which that sort of 90s narrowing of horizons has never really gone away. Like there are other countries that are doing better in terms of like, trying different politics. And here in the UK and in America, it feels like there's this idea that, well, that wouldn't work anyway, so we aren't going to do it.

And it's just, it's wild to see how many squandered opportunities there have been, both in terms. I think to me, the one that really has been bothering me when I think about it is when I think back to the overarching dominance that Obama had in his first administration, specifically in that first Congress. Two years where he could have done anything. And like the idea that they were like, oh, the filibuster won't let us like, man, fuck the filibuster, fuck you.

They could have done anything and they didn't. And it's like, I don't want to harp upon this idea that the simplest and most vulgar explanation is the truest, but it's just sort of like, you would probably be more accurate or you would probably wind up being correct in more instances. If you looked at why the Democrats in America have not done things when they were in power, because if you were to explain it as, they want those problems to exist like a sort of Damocles so they can fundraise. That might be a simplistic explanation, but it's certainly, it's closer to accurate,

in my opinion. And have a win for vulgar Marxism. Yeah, that's the thing, right? It kills me because it's just like, if you look at what's happening here, if you look at what's happening in America, like right now, I mean, Joe Biden falling off his bike, notwithstanding, it's definitely looking like they're going to get their fucking lunch eight during the midterm congressional elections. And once that happens, it doesn't matter how many zero ideas they ran on,

it's going to be the left's fault because it always is. Because you're going to have your sort of rare intervention. It's a spectacle. It's because they, because it's the total disconnection. And again, I think you can see this, this is sort of, this is something that's occurring to me from just seeing the sort of continued failure of the gears to mesh together in these consensus neoliberalism countries to see the failure of, the failure of the centrist project in France on its own terms.

And much of that failure was, again, as you said, Nate, designed in sort of fucking the left where they could, again, beating themselves by fucking the left. But also finally, to sort of, to say that, yeah, that, that we're looking at places that, let's say, didn't have that, or where that consensus neoliberalism was never consensus, where it was always one side of a conflict, where there has been another thing pushing against it in South America, for example, there are, let's say, transformative, there are transformative elections actually happening. Yeah.

Yeah, good news from Colombia. Yeah, you have a left-wing president in Colombia. You have, you know, a left-wing president in Chile. You have left-wing governments in Mexico. Obviously, you're still in Nicaragua. Honduras, which is a rare, rare one, because Honduras has been a right-wing stronghold for a long time. So Ian Dunn's crying now.

Yeah, exactly. If you think this is funny. Well, don't worry. Don't worry for Ian Dunn. Guatemala is still run by a fucking right-wing military dictatorship and everything but name. So, but what I was going to say is, is that when you look at, for example, I was thinking about this earlier today, I was looking at the news too and saw the stuff about Colombia, you know, it's good to see that, was when I thought about like, much like Tony Blair's

rare interventions, when Hillary Clinton's rare intervention to basically try to strongarm the Haitian government into not raising their minimum wage up to more than a dollar an hour, because a fruit of the loom basically asked her for a favor through the Clinton global initiative. We need those on with her t-shirts. It's like people are like, oh, will people still be with her if they don't have the t-shirts? They wouldn't be able to look at their own chest and be reminded. Nothing, nothing's going to work.

You know, it's like nothing but consensus, neoliberalism is going to work. Like we can't do anything else is going to fail. Like you, the third way, it's the only way to do it. It's like, have you potentially tried running someone who didn't intercede to block the raising of the minimum wage in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere on a personal appeal from an underwear company? Like there's just an element, like a degree of venality to that that always makes me laugh in a dark way because it's just like, man, fuck, like you were being told that's the best there

is. And I, I have a story was in a spin class in New York during the 2016 election. Like, and I think it was after the primary, but before the general election. And me, I remember Hillary's campaign headquarters was in Brooklyn. And so it's in this spin class. And I guess like an entire fucking group from Hillary for America was there like doing a group exercise class. And they had when they go low, we go high, but it was the we go high part was written

in Hebrew for some reason. And they're all exercising together. And then I just remember thinking about them and all I can think of is like when Jeff Goldblum's fucking crew of twinks gets wiped out in the life aquatic and he's just getting for 15 crosses. That's what I always say of Hillary fucking eating shit. And then like all those people with those inscrutable shirts that you wouldn't understand unless you speak English and Hebrew doing fucking spin classes on a weekday when they ought to be fucking campaigning and they lost.

They lost the layup election. It's incredible. All of those people were the same ones whose jobs were to order lawn signs in Michigan. Look, so they ordered the signs with the accent. They ordered them all in Hebrew. So they let's get sent back and they weren't printed in time. Well, the last thing I want to talk about that a bunch of before we sort of get into some of the stuff I have prepared as well, which is, of course, Reuters hot on off the press of

again like of hot off of the off of the of the result putting Gustavo Petro in power in Columbia has published the following headline. Again, this is in the world in which the consensus neoliberalism that much of what we've been trapped in has been absolutely capping returns is just throwing the world into a recession. The thing that we did zero interest rates to like prop up after the housing crisis should have discredited it, right? That thing.

Well, Reuters has said that this break from consensus neoliberalism or this sort of break this move to a different politics in Columbia. This is their headline. Columbia's first leftist leader Gustavo Petro targets inequality. Investors on edge. If you want to understand capital, read the fucking capitalists papers. That's yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, that's look, look, we need to make sure that nothing works because, you know, otherwise, you know, the line gets sad to be fair. I can think of by some people who have like large financial commitments in Columbia specifically might be quite on edge a lot of the time. Investors considering starting a small place restaurant. But also, I mean, something that I point out too is that Columbia's vice president is a black Colombian woman who at one point in her life was was like a domestic cleaner. And like Columbia's politics has been pretty call it pigmentocracy in a lot of ways.

So this is a lot of this is a lot of sort of momentous things for movements of people that like I think it completely turns the advice of like anything that's not fucking guy in a hard hat is fringe diversity issues. And it's going to alienate the white working class. Like you can't find a place morphe to Jordan Peterson. Yeah, that's also every fucking nerd who works for the Democratic Party. Look, like there's there's this you can't I can't think of countries that are more like politics fucking governed on racial lines in Latin America.

And here you have a coalition winning. Like I think when you look at stuff like living standards of living wages, you know, what the government does, what it what it can provide, those kinds of things. Like when you actually say you're going to do things to fix people's fucking living situations, like it's amazing what you can do. And I feel like what kills me is that we're always told no, that's that's a that's a what are the some cheating sometimes people say. What are that?

There's some dickhead for like the Wall Street Journal who when Trump won basically said it was be the fault of boutique sexualities. I was like, because I go and buy my fucking sexuality in a goddamn store like a small store. Luxury beliefs. Exactly. Luxury, luxury beliefs, etc. And it's like, nah, man, I mean, like, like, have you ever seen the way right wing Latin Americans talk about people who aren't white by their standards? Like, holy fuck, man, like it makes America look like fucking Nordic social democracy.

And that's saying something. Yeah. And so I look at this stuff and I just think like the thing is that people are voting for this because they actually believe that they are capable of improving their lives and that they will actually do it. And it's like the Democrats, we're like, no, we won't do that. And also it's illegal for you to say that you want to do it. And then when they lose, they're like, oh, the left did this to us.

Why did you defund the police? We have to increment the big rare intervention counter that I'm suggesting we put up because Hillary Clinton has done another rare intervention. Yeah. What if Tony Blair lost all the fucking time and basically it's Hillary Clinton? Yeah. What if we got some. Triple the losses.

Yeah. Because what we were all sitting around asking ourselves was we need advice on how to win elections from like someone with a proven track record. Isn't there one man you forgot to ask? That's the thing, right? I think it's funny you mentioned that because that is a really good point. Like Bill Clinton actually did win. Like Bill Clinton bucked the trend does.

Fuck Bill Clinton, but he bucked the trend of. A lot of people did. Let me tell you that pal. He bucked the trend of the Southern strategy and won as the Democratic governor in Arkansas. And then as president twice, you know, in the face of Reaganism when he was opening for governor and then subsequently post post Reagan, whereas Hillary like, yeah, she was a senator from New York, but like she was the senator in a state that always likes Democrats were like, once you win the primary, which is basically a coronation, you are going

to win. And like, and then she lost in 08 to Obama despite going full racist. And I mean, I don't know if you remember this, if you guys were paying attention at the time, but Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary when Obama was clearly winning, people were like, why haven't you dropped out? And she's like, well, Bobby Kennedy got killed in June. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Like, well, she forgot to ask the guy on the FBI. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, I think the thing that I want to sort of drive home here with the comparison case, right, of these two elections and sort of remembering things, which again, it's illegal to do apparently unless you're like one of like, I don't know, a few tens of thousands of people.

I would listen to Hillary Clinton's opinion if she had won. That's the thing that I'm trying to say. And I find it very funny that we're, you know, as you're saying that we're basically the people who cannot stop fucking losing or like, well, if you do that, you're going to lose. Very, very, very quickly before we move on. I think like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are examples of like a slightly earlier stage of neoliberalism where they would promise to do stuff and then just not really do it, whereas Hillary Clinton is a later stage where it's like, oh, no, I'm not going to do anything.

And I'm also then not going to do it also. They call themselves, they were the original island boys. So, but the thing I'm sort of trying to draw out with this comparison and this sort of active memory is that so much of the limitations drawn around politics now in Western Europe and North America are fake. They are fake limits. They are, and they're imposed largely by spectacle because there is this, because there is the shadow play of people asking Hillary Clinton what to do.

There is the shadow play of, of saying, well, the investors are going to be on edge if you elect the leftist president, et cetera, et cetera, right? That's what an Overton window is, right? That's what it's originally designed to describe is that phenomenon. But what I, and I think that it's, it's important to remind yourselves as well that the Overton window isn't just this thing and it's not just a different one in Colombia because of, it's closer to the equator. It's a, it's a, a product of people.

It's an atmosphere. Yeah, the politics when the politics swell in a different direction. But what it is, is this is a product of ideology and contestation and that where we have lost the ability to do that, you know, we didn't lose it where it was taken away, basically, is you, you find nothing but sort of dysfunction and disengagement. Mum said it's my turn on the U.S. Senate. Also, I mean, like, like just, just because I know a little bit about Colombia, I mean, like Colombia was always touted as the example of like the, the, the, the pinnacle of

why Western Hemisphere is strong presidential by Camerole states fucking suck because like it was constantly in sort of internecine conflict between its two parties. Like then you have, you know, post-World War II era, you have the drug war, you have a civil war, like Colombia has been governed by right-wing pill and paramilitaries by right-wing parties. Like it's never had a left-wing, it's like Honduras was one of the country like this, but, but Colombia, I think was a much more violent place in terms of the conflict that was taking place within, whereas Honduras was more of like a staging area for other violent conflicts in Central America.

This is a huge thing and part of this is because I think there's been a shift in the electorate in Latin America, like a lot more, like I think that you don't have the sort of boomer, monied, landed class, the way that you do in, in the global north in the sense that like if you look at Chile, if you look at Colombia, if you look even at Mexico, like there just isn't this bubble of wealth and sort of status the way there is in Britain, the way there is in America. I mean, there certainly is a fucking huge income inequality and wealth inequality, like don't get me wrong, but like it's not as generational because if it's generational, it's multi-generational because the people who have the money like have it from fingers from

like the fucking 17th century. Yeah, exactly. Why does this Mexican guy have a German surname anyway? And also it's like, you know, it's, I think that's a linked explanation, right? Why do we have this sort of, this entire class? Why do we have a people of, of a generation where that generation kind of has a class element was because so much of the money that was plundered from being able to create a stable middle class in these countries was moved up here and used to create permittories.

I thought it was really interesting what Gustavo Petra said recently. I think last night he basically said, for people who were worried we're going to overthrow capitalism, don't worry, we still need to overthrow feudalism in this country first. Like, and genuinely, like the situation, I mean, I think this is something specifically about Brazil, I remember seeing this comparison, but it's true of other countries. The only country in Latin America that doesn't have this enormous wealth inequality disparity is Costa Rica. And the reason for that is Costa Rica never had the kind of like massive plantation farm economy

because it's super mountainous and like, it just was poor. So like, other than Costa Rica, basically that, what you described, aristocracy, that was 100% the case. And the sort of like landed families controlling everything and politics just being kind of window dressing on that. And I think in Brazil in particular, but I think Colombia is similar in this regard, like the people who are in the upper classes, people have a standard of living comparable to someone living in the western part of Germany or in North America, in America, in Canada.

But people in the lower class, people in the poorest circumstances have, as poor, conditions is anywhere in the global south and play anywhere like places like in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the poorest of South Asia, like genuinely the disparity in Brazil is like a rich person lives like they live in fucking Berlin and a poor person lives like they live in like Haiti, like genuinely, it's that bad. And so feudalism is about the only word I can think of to describe it. Yeah. And I mean, it's the, to see this, I mean, it's, it is to see it, you know, be able to be redressed, I guess it just, in addition to being a good thing in itself,

it reminds you that, you know, they're, that so long as you can, if you can discover and channel your oppositionalism into an actual institution, it's not, and if you can, if you can actually do that, then it is not, it's not permissible to give up. It just, you just have to, you just have to keep that flame burning somewhere. Sure. And I would also say to you that like a single political party called the Labour Party in Britain may not be the vehicle for that, but it doesn't, it's just because they've, they've crushed the left and Britain electorally does not mean that like all of us have gone away or that like what we believe in has gone away. It's just that like

that vehicle has been slowed, that vehicle has been derailed for the time being. But I think that like you are, you know, I take a lot of stuff. The 2012 BMW 320i convertible, it can be fixed. It can be put back on the road. If you go to enough garages run by guys called Gearing. He just crawled underneath the left and soared off our catalytic converter. That's right. I would say though that we will rebuild. I look, I look at like in the United States, it looks like shit's really bad right now. You know, you've got fucking whole sorts of reactionary garbage being kicked around,

like psychotic McCarthyism and fucking, you know, deranged right wing. Eric Gryton's campaign ad was what if we did a death squad on Republicans in name only? You know, you look at like anti-transbills and all this transpanic, like like anti, basically homophobia, just full bore homo, like the homophobia that I recall from growing up in Indiana, basically like everywhere in politics now, but also incidentally very funny. If you were one of the like cis gay dudes, like what if we concede to the transphobia and that's just everything they want? Turns out the LGB Alliance weren't as smart as they thought they were. Yeah, weird how that works. But the point that point I was going to make though is that like

I also see lots of news of strike action and unionization drives and things along those lines happening in America and places where we were told before that this was impossible in companies like Amazon and Starbucks. And I think that like you can see these countercurrents taking place. I hope that that winds up being the story of this coming decade and not just like capital winning and then just fucking, you know, floss dancing on us. But like I do also, I don't think you can be like, well, see, they have it in Latin America. They've gotten there, but we will never get there. I think we can. I just think that I think we absolutely can't buy that. No, we will. I think we can. But the way I think that they get there is they is you don't just have the

opposition to what's going on kind of floating around as an opinion, a little sort of a little perfect list of opinions that you keep in your head. It's that in is that there was an actual, in their case, very actual conflict. You're telling me that I have to fucking organize instead of just posting? Well, the thing is what we and what do we have? I hate organizing. And what we have here. I hate even more than posting and I hate posting a lot. What we have here, in addition to like huge unionization drives in the States, we have a strike wave coming in Britain as well, what appears to be a strike wave. But also, even there are still places where that, I don't know, almost like Manichaeanism

can take place, where that fight can be. You just have to find an enemy that's like ontologically evil. So can I introduce you into landlords? I mean, I was just thinking about this recently having, I'm not somebody who typically goes to demos. I have tummy aches and anxiety problems, but I got a message that they were trying to deport someone or roll someone up, not too far from where I live. And I was on the train anyway. So I got off the train and went to the action in Peckham and stood. Eleanor, friend of the show, and Riannega was there. We just stood in front of the van with a large group of people. The people who had been there for a while were way further ahead in the crowd of us. But we were just there. We're like, no, fuck y'all.

Unless you can manifest all of the cops that you would need to arrest all 300-odd people who are here, then fuck you. You're not getting out. We've got to replicate PC Shuffle's worth. We've got to make hundreds of her. She must become Legion. The thing about it is that there were lots of people who were there because of organized campaigns, groups like Lewis and Manti Raids, groups like Stop Deportations. But she also had a lot of people who lived in the neighborhood who was like, fuck the cops, leave this guy alone. And I think that to me, the thing that was the biggest takeaway was the extent to which it's just people being activated because it's something that matters to them and the opportunity existing to be there. So I'm not an organizer. I did some

doorknocking. Yeah, I'm probably the wrong guy to do it with my beloved accent here in America. Listen, buddy, you're going to vote for Jeremy Corbyn because I'm going to have a problem. That was me 100% in 2019. But I do think that if the opportunity exists, if the opportunity to get involved exists and people feel as though that there is a certain degree of love, they have confidence that their concerns will be addressed and that people aren't just pulling their leg and it's not like Owen Smith bullshit. You know what I mean? That genuinely can kind of spark things with people. And most people that I saw in that crowd were just locals, they're just people from around the neighborhood. People who lived in that complex, people from

nearby in Dulwich and elsewhere in Southern Borough, people who just as well as an activist group, they just didn't want to fucking see the cops win. You know what I mean? They didn't want to see the cops ruin some guy's life for some bullshit. And that was powerful because it was just so simple. It was such a small thing, but people cared enough to do it. And I guess to me, it's very easy to get blackpilled given how fucked things seemed institutionally in America and in Britain. But that doesn't mean that will is gone. That doesn't mean that desire is gone or that that critical mass people is gone. It's just that you will have to go against the power of a fucking insane press who basically, if I'm not mistaken, we're on a tirade that builders going to therapy

means they've turned woke. We're going to we're going to keep that in our back pocket though, because I do have that in the notes. One thing that occurs to me, right, is that as with the flight to Rwanda that was canceled at the last minute, mercifully, no one thing ruining a lot of people's holiday. That would be the Daily Mail headline. Yeah, we spoke to one family who were hoping for the trip of a lifetime to Rwanda who were furious. It saved up all the coupons from the Sun newspaper. The thing that actually stopped it in the end was a last minute legal challenge to the the European Court of Human Rights. But there are also people lying in roads. Yeah, stop vans. And I feel like all of those things happening at once is something that is going

to be a recurring feature. And I'm going to drop a link in the show notes for the fundraising for their legal fees, because nine people were arrested for that. Like when I was at the thing in Peckham, no one got arrested. The cops just gave up. They more or less, even though they came in and roughed people up and kicked and kneaded people and punched a woman in the face, afterwards, when they realized how fucked they were, they actually started laughing at the taunts and the jokes. They realized how absurd the situation they were in was too. Whereas in Uxbridge, people got fucking arrested and are being charged with bullshit for standing in front of the lying down in front of those vans. So that is another

point I would make is that I think that one of the concerns is that for a lot of people, if it's not critical mass, if they can be rounded up and arrested, they will be. And so I want to help raise some awareness of that, that there are folks who are now facing legal charges for having helped stop that. It's a diversity of tactics. It's classic Lenin shit. You do illegal stuff, you do legal stuff. So you have the most respectable form of activism you can have, which is going cap and hand to the courts and saying, this does not fucking fit with the expressed purpose of the law and the like letter of the law. And you also have lying in the road.

You also have what Eleanor and I saw, which was I would describe as a cross punk first date at a demo where in between taunting the cops, they talked to one another very, very openly and avidly about how hard they were going to fuck each other later that day. And as you know what, that I cannot describe a thing I respect more than that. Folks looking like straight out of fucking extras from a Franco Potente movie in 2004, just ready as soon as they could find some bushes to fuck. But also taunting the cops. It was a beautiful thing to see. And I mean, on the Rwanda issue, right? This has been subsumed into something that I've seen at least several British commentators refer to as wedge week. That's right, where the

Tories are going to do a bunch of stuff. We're going to fold all of this real suffering into the thing that makes politics seem like sports. It's wedge week. It's like the big block of cheese in the West Wing. Everybody comes in, has a real life human social issue. We figure it out in a sort of like interesting Bartlett way. And then everything's over and problem solved. Priti Patel's comments about the ECHR judgment were like pure drill, where she was like, not only do I disagree with this judgment, but I think in suggesting that Rwanda is not a safe country to send people to, it is in its own way racist. And it was so like looking back at the crowd for approval. That was the one thing is that between them, between all of these actions,

I don't remember a Home Secretary seething and coping this much in a long while. And also in the perfect sort of horseshoe of this thing, a professional crying in my beard down the authenticity pub, Paul Embry was crying about how actually it's racist to suggest that Rwanda is not a safe place. Real working class communities don't have a tradition of resisting the police. Make no inquiries into any of this. This thing is it's important to never take any of these people at their word, obviously, because their whole thing is just they just are creatures of this spectacle where they know that their role in the pantomime is to yell and boo and to see and again to see the same. But that driving this pantomime is

basically an engine that runs on human suffering. And they want to drag you into the pantomime too. That's why a cop will laugh when you start roasting him when he knows he can't win is because it's in the fun zone now. But I also have to say that the cops did laugh at the jokes also after having beaten the fuck out of people and they absolutely would have done it harder if they thought they could have won. So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, it's absurd, but also there is genuine suffering there. And yes, I will say as much of a throwback comment as it is, it does seem like Pretty Patel's response and this was, I'm not mad, I'm actually laughing. But I firmly believe that had you done what I think is going

to be said here where they're like, don't take the bait, they're just trying to bait you, let them deport people to Rwanda. Like if people hadn't tried to intervene, they absolutely would have deported people on that flight. Yeah, they're still going to or they're still going to try anyway. Well, that's the most British thing of all, right? It's like, well, we're the cops and we're going to beat you up if we can, but it's all still kind of the Queensbury rules. Like we all can still have a chuckle about it. You know, I think that's what this is. This is what gets to and why I sort of especially the concept of wedge week really, I think, made me quite a bit angrier inside than sort of any other bit of Westminster drama has, because it is like so much of the

the Westminster way of viewing the world is a great flattening, a sort of looking out into into a world where you used to be able to pull levers and cause a lot more human misery, and now you can pull way fewer levers, but still cause quite a bit of human misery. And to see that only in the context of the little lights, it lights up on your console of who's happy and who's mad and the little the fucking disgusting confidence of like the assumption that none of these wedges will ever affect you, right? But you can just sit here, your quality of living is going to remain exactly the same. And this goes on outside your window and you're totally insulated from it is and it's it's why I say that all of all of these people, the everyone

behind wedge week, all of the politicians, all of the all of these, the Tory strategists, and their little friends in the media, all of them are going to go and visit Osiris at the end of their lives, and they're going to ask to cross into the field of reeds. And then Osiris is going to weigh their heart and they're going to be devoured by the crocodile. Yeah, they're going to be torn into crocodiles. They are their heart will lay more than a feather, and they will not be allowed to go to heaven. Yeah, that's that's true. If you write one of these things about how, you know, woke lefty lawyers are stopping us from securing our borders or whatever. Amit the devourer is coming for your hearts. Riley, could you could you explain

what they mean by wedge week? I think I know, but like I just for our listeners and also for my own clarity, I presume they mean that they're trying Hail Mary shit that they would be referring to the idea of a wedge issue. Of course. It's the wedge week is the plan, which is to a unilaterally break the Northern Ireland protocol to send the deport deportation flight to Rwanda to have the to sort of go to war against the unions. The thing that that the 30% of British people who have been, you know, conditioned to shoot their own grandmother, if the telegraph said so, those people, this is just it. The idea is just red meat for all of them. So basically, we're going to activate the Tory headbangers by doing BSE thatcherism.

Very quickly. Yes. Anytime anyone gets mad at us, Boris Johnson calls Zelensky. Yeah. It's all you can't you can't stop me. I'm talking. I'm talking with Zelensky. You can't be mad at me. And so it's, but I think it's the, and I just think this is this to me everything we've been talking about in the last 40 minutes, all sort of ties intimately together, right, which is the experience of politics as nothing but this flat spectacle, which is sort of what we have been sort of condemned to in Western Europe, in North America, means that these, the actual, the actual things that you are doing, the deportation of some of the most, you know,

world's most vulnerable people who can, for what it's worth, legally be here who have a legal claim to asylum to Rwanda. And again, and then to say, well, this is humanitarian, so you can't get mad at us because we're trying to stop the people smugglers and having a total sort of inability to metabolize or unwillingness to metabolize any of that new information, that that is all a kind of deeply interconnected with that flatness is the ability to do it and the ability to sell it and the ability to say that anyone who says otherwise is being racist, because fundamentally it treats these things as pretty unimportant. And what's more important is that I get my fancy job for life or that I'm a newspaper editor and that I make sure that I'm

invited to the garden parties and that it's all just this, the image that sort of keeps replaying in my head is that of a group of friends who are meeting and who are always going to one of those houses for social events, but the tires on their cars are made of people. Oh, I see. So you're saying that a hot air balloon shouldn't look like a Black person. Oh, okay. That's real equal opportunities of you. Okay, all right. And this is sort of where you contrast the sort of the flatness of everything is impossible, so we are just going to kind of have fun with it and play the role of politics. Well, still doing actual politics, it's just all that can happen is the things that cause the dopamine

spike, but nothing that can cause any kind of material transformation in the way that living happens. Well, I mean, all we can do is the unthinkable. I also think that something that's interesting to me is the extent to which there's this incredible timidity on the part of the labor party under its current leadership, by which I mean that they are unwilling, even when it's, you can look at polling of everyone besides hardcore Tory voters who will never, ever vote for you. Everyone else in polling has reacted to the Rwanda deportation policy, negatively, to a large degree. In most cases, majorities, in some cases, pluralities, but it's very unpopular aside from with 2019 Tory voters who we know are the sort of fucking

iron bloodless heart of politics in this country. So you have to activate other people. Voter participation is pretty low in this country, turnout is pretty low in this country. If you are going the electoralism route, there is an argument to be made that this policy is unpopular. And one of the reasons why it's unpopular is because it's so fundamentally on its face immoral. It's so obviously wrong. It's so obviously cruel for no reason at all. And I think the thing when I say about timidity is that the labor party refuses to ever address that there could be such a thing as a moral dimension in politics now. It feels to me like they've gotten briefing advice from the dumbest motherfucker on the planet who basically said,

don't ever talk about stuff in moral dimensions because that's woke or something or like the one exception. The only time I was talking about morality is Boris Johnson going to parties that he shouldn't have gone to. That's dishonorable. I enjoy a real ale as much as the next man. This isn't dishonorable. Going to a party is dishonorable. But no, it wasn't dishonorable. It wasn't that it was immoral. In my opinion, they didn't talk about it in moral terms. They talked about it in terms of like, that's not right because you broke the rules. It was this fucking hall monitor shit about like, well, the rules are the rules. And that's how they set their own fucking trap

because they were breaking the rules just as anybody else was. And I think were you to tap into some of the incredibly unfair and uneven applications of lockdown rules, for example, of people getting 100, 200, 500 pound fines for smoking a cigarette outside, kind of shit, like some of the crazy stories that came out of people being fucking victimized for no reason and how like, in what's the right word, inconsistently applied the rule was across the country. Like you could have some traction, but to basically be like, well, he broke the rules and that's the problem. Like, well, so did you guys. And you knew that you knew it was stupid and you did it anyway. And like, whoever's briefing these people is a fucking idiot.

And as regards Rwanda and some of these other the unpopular policies, the total failure to do anything about cost of living, I think the thing that really drives me nuts is that like, they could make headway if they could A, say it's wrong and B say, here's what we're going, we have a thing we will do to stop it. And they refuse. And that's the thing that makes it is it, while I'm not necessarily saying that that's going to be like, this one weird trick will fix the fucked up British media system. I still think that you can try, you can try to frame things that where people will believe in you. And there it seems like their argument, like you've said this before on the show, Riley, it seems like their end stage plan is to make it so fucking

indistinguishable from anything else in the hopes it drives down voter turnout so low that they can win the election because two people vote Labour and one person vote Tory. Yeah, like that's it. Well, I think that like both parties in this country sort of fear populism because they both know that the British public are completely fucking insane. And I was talking to a friend of the show Phoebe Roy about this the other night about how interesting a figure Piers Morgan is, because he's like, weirdly popular. But if you start looking into the various views Piers Morgan has expressed, they're all over the place. He's like, he's got like some really reactionary right-wing views. He's got some weirdly left-wing views sprinkled in there.

But actually like Piers Morgan is like the most populist guy in Britain and everyone fears this. Like Phoebe was like, honestly, if someone ran for government on a platform of save the NHS, hang the pedos, they'd be Prime Minister for 25 years. And I think that's quite an accurate summation of what this country is like. I do want to move on from this in a sec, but I think that the thing to remember is that because, and I think this is a symptom in many ways of our centralization, it's something that's happened in American television over the last several years, or the last sort of several decades rather, but that's been sort of so baked into just the weight. Britain, the geography, the rocks and dirt of this country

is the extreme centralization of everything. And I think that you, and the fact is, and the fact is that most people's experience of living in Britain is filtered through somewhat what someone in London thinks that they should be thinking out there in Yorkshire. And so there is this boomerang effect that I think amplifies the madness. Actually, but when we say it, you should be thinking it out in Yorkshire. Yeah, absolutely. When we say it, that's different. Yeah, it's different. It's not top-down. It's just common sense. Because so many of us aren't actually from Britain.

That is true. This is a decentralized podcast. It doesn't occur in it. It's on the blockchain. Okay, speaking of decentralized. Technically, it's decentralized out of London because of me. I'm taking the average out of London. I want to speak a little more about decentralization, though, because if we think about, you know, well, what does and what doesn't government do, right? We've established so much of, and again, just that's thrown so much into great relief by sort of seeing events of recent

weeks unfold, and then seeing what it can and can't do. And then seeing also the other way it can have material impacts on the world is, of course, if you give a comically small amount of money to a Tory minister, and then they decide that they owe you their lives. If you give a Tory minister 15 pounds, they take a bullet for you. Access to a tiny room with very small furniture and design for very small people, for example. Basically, these are all things that have been revealed recently, but I saw this in investment week recently, which is that the UK... That was the full wedge week.

The UK Treasury wants to like give the Bank of England authority to address collapsed stablecoins if they register here. Basically, they're like, look, look, look. What if the Bank of England can take responsibility to manage the orderly collapse of a dying stablecoin? Like how they did that with banks in 2008. Let's buy the dip. If there is one country that's extremely good at managed decline, it is the United Kingdom. So I guess we're world-beating in that regard. So they basically said, look, the failure of assist...

They published this paper, The Treasury. They said, the failure of a systemically important stablecoin could pose a wide range of financial stability as well as consumer protection impacts, which means, of course, we should backstop it. Here's the thing, right? I realize that there are people who've been taken for a ride for this and it sucks that they bet the house and they lost because people buy into scams all the time. There are human stories to this that are very sad. And I've raised that point on this show before that you don't lose out of the fact that there is a lot of suffering involved.

But when it comes to the actual fundamentals of keeping these coins solvent, it's nerd shit. It's fucking nerd shit and it's a bunch of marks or a bunch of fucking scammers. It's not my problem. Well, no, it will be because if the Bank of England decides that, well, we are now responsible for the orderly unwinding of the stablecoin, guess whose problem it is? Well, that's what I'm saying. That's why I'm saying they should not do this, because for now, it just exists on some loser's computers. But if it becomes real, then it's my problem.

Well, here's the thing, though. That's one way of looking at it. But have you considered that Christopher Harbourn, who's a big crypto lobbyist, gave £500,000 to the Conservatives before they said that the UK should be a crypto hub? They bought so cheaply. In political terms, that seems like it's nothing. The thing is, already, we are living in one tiny jockey chair. And for this, we have agreed to dynamite our own economy. Yeah, buying Matt Hancock a Nando's and telling him to say something nice about crypto. Milo made the joke with me not that long ago that if you break up with your partner,

and then you encounter them down the road, and they've gotten a lot harder, then it's the same sensation as the guy who had the laptop full of 1000 Bitcoin that he threw away, and it's in a dumpster somewhere. But 1000 Bitcoin at its peak would be a lot more money than what this guy was being given. 100%. The Tories at this point, they're not even getting bribed. They're getting nonced. They're getting bought at McDonald's and asked if they want to go to the zoo. They're like, yeah. Pushing a crypto guy in a headlock and then walking him to the police station, but making him observe the minute silence. That's right. Have a bit of respect, mate. You thought you were going on a date with a conservative party, but you're actually on a date

with me and big date. Am I going to walk you to the cops? Here's the thing, right? The crypto crash, right, has essentially, if you replace Florida real estate with Bitcoin, it has been pretty much identical to the 2008-2007 financial crisis. As much as what happened is, the entire decentralized finance ecosystem was basically like a series of banks that could do interbank lending, various kinds of stable coins that had reserves or didn't, and then a bunch of insurers that would ensure the various interbank transactions of these people against losses. What they did was they built pretty much from almost first principles. They just created organically pretty much a one-for-one copy of the financial system, except the only difference was its tendrils

really didn't touch the real economy that much. They've started to, right? We've talked about before in this show where large pension funds will invest in crypto or national banks will want to backstop stablecoin projects after the whole thing has fallen apart. I got a little pop-up batter, a push notification from one of the online banks that I used when I initially came to this country and had to register as a freelancer that I don't really use anymore, but I've kept my account open just in case. They were like, use our app now to invest in crypto. That was yesterday. I don't even think of myself. I'm like, now? Now's the moment. You want to tell like, fuck me, man. You're basically like, hey, guys, we've got a great deal on Bear Stearns in its October 2008.

You're getting in on the Ponzi scheme after everyone's already left. It's like buying Bear Stearns physical stock certificate in 2010. Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey, you want to get in on this Ponzi scheme? It's by a guy whose last name is Ponzi. You've got to buy these certificates from a guy whose last name is Ponzi. He's in jail right now, just FYI. But the thing is, we've created this system of interbank lending and insurance and all this. That all existed and all of these tokens moved back and forth and provided liquidity and all sorts and all sorts. But really, most of what it was to do was to then invest in Bitcoin, which you would then say we've got some of, so we have more

collateral, so we can print more of our things. We can pump more units into this system of interbank lending. Then the value of Bitcoin kept going up because Bitcoin is like the real estate in this case. No one can accidentally live in it. It's not useful at all. Then what happened was simply as the rates go up a little bit and then all of a sudden, some people start wanting their money back. Then once one person too many asks for their money back, then all of a sudden, everyone's calling in all of their loans all at once. When the value of the asset of Bitcoin specifically goes down far enough, just like when the value of Florida real estate went down far enough, that's the music stopping. That's all of those loans coming due at once. It's so strange

to see there are these big crypto hedge funds that are completely falling apart, like three arrows capital. That's a Singapore-based one that coined the phrase zhu per cycle because it's started by a guy called zhu. I was really confused for a second there, but okay. Yeah, they came close there. But that's quite a bit like the Bear Stearns collapse. Then the collapse of the exchanges is very similar as well. The collapse and the price of Bitcoin, because as it goes down, as the value of the asset goes down, the value, all of a sudden, if you got loans against it, you need to post more collateral. All of these loans are all falling apart all at once. What I find so amusing is that we went in a period of about

five years or so from inventing central banking to having the 2008 crisis. Yeah, first is fast, second is fast, but much quicker. I really, really do enjoy a nice game of Jenga, but I don't want to live in an entire civilization of Jenga blocks. It does feel that way sometimes that you're like, I would love to own a home that I live in. Oh, we're way beyond Jenga blocks. This is fully kaplunked. There are little rods, we're little balls balanced on the rods, people are pulling the rods out, yeah. But that's the thing, right? What I wonder, right, is how much actual productive, how much productivity, how much of people's lives was saved by the fact that this didn't

last another six months and they wasn't able to warm its way further into the real economy. If this lasted another six months, what if the Bank of England said, we'll handle the unwinding of Terra Luna? How much worse could it have been? It's good that this grenade went off before we were able to throw ourselves onto it, I was saying. Yeah, thank God for the crypto crash because it could have been, or at least, presumably, could have been so much worse because right now in the US, crypto friendly Democrats are preparing to integrate more of crypto, and specifically, again, backstopping crypto into the US financial regulatory system. The UK is just desperate to do it, and I think it goes back to,

I think a lot of it goes back to that flattening because when nothing else is possible by the dint of the only thing that does anything, which is people doing things together by the use of, by the direction of their labor, which is directed by politics, the only thing you can do is hope that a helpful wizard will come and just kind of make everything better without you having to do anything. Mr. Hancock, why are you wearing that wizard hat and robe? Right, can I ask you a question as the oracle, the man who understands money? Yes.

Do you think that central banks in general, and specifically in Britain, do you think that they want to get in on this because they think, number one, that they think they could actually leverage it for profit because they believe in it? Do you think that they do it because there's a sense of needing to keep up with the Joneses with every other fucking moron? It just becomes like a snowball effect? Do you think that they do it because they know it's going to fucking implode that it's an excuse to do austerity? Why? What in the mentality of people who have entire departments about fucking risk management? Why do they fall for this stupid shit? It just seems as though it's like anyone who knows

anything about anything at all in the economy can look at this and be like, but this doesn't have an actual fucking use. It's like stocks for companies that don't exist, that can't exist, that can never exist. But you're like, oh, but the stock's going up, but it's nothing. It's a fucking icon. Yeah. It's new. That guy has a wizard hat. Well, it's so much more. That ape has a wizard hat. To answer your question, it's not central banks that love it. Central banks are generally pretty skeptical of it. Usually, it's that the Treasury loves it because to mainstream politicians, what crypto represents is a way to materially increase the freedom and well-being of the people

who they are supposed to dole out freedom and well-being to without them having to do anything. It's like mana from heaven to them. To me, the only argument I could possibly see is people being like, well, we know it's based on bullshit, but as long as the musical chairs keep fucking moving and people keep buying into the hype, that's that much more revenue we make in capital gains taxes because people are obligated to pay them. Other than that, I cannot see a fucking use for it because way back to Instagram stories, a lot of these people are fundamentally stupid. They're just like, this sounds good. It is fucking magic beans. Except magic beans could be a bean. You could have a single bean. It might sprout if you're

lucky. It's probably just a fucking navy bean. You might have like one-one-millionth of a soup when it fucking sprouts, but that's more than crypto. But what I'm hearing is that these beans are magic. I've never seen your relaxation vein before. It's gone my way. The answer to this is partly that the reason that you're sitting here at this table and they're sitting in the Treasury is that they believe the fundamental theory of, say, crypto and Bitcoin, which is that if only we get enough transactions happening, because remember the promise of Web 3, it says, look, you're engaging in a lot of transactions when you go, say, browse the internet. Twitter is taking your personal information and you're getting to post what you had for lunch. We're

saying we want to make those transactions much more front and center and much more obvious because you're going to have in a crypto-based world, this Web 3 world or whatever, or whatever other iteration of the crypto promise it was, you're going to have materially more freedom because all of the transactions you enter into with other people are going to be denominated in a kind of money so you can value how much you're going to pay to post your lunch, how much you're going to pay to post your lunch at peak time, for example. And then the idea, and again, I think they have to really believe this to get into that situation is that they can say, we are going to maximize everybody's well-being because everyone will have agreed to exchange some kind of

medium of value in order to do everything that they're doing. There won't be anything outside that world. And to them, that is a free way to materially increase freedom and also to decrease the role of institution. I think that a lot of the austerity freaks, they love crypto because it says we can finally get rid of everything but the cops because all of the other things won't have to be administered by people. We're just going to have the code and then you can vote to change the code based on how much money you have. And I simply, after receiving billions of dollars of what feels like the world's most manic timeshare pitch, simply can only respond to this by saying, don't think I'll be doing that. And I cannot imagine that I'm the only person on planet Earth

who feels that way. Crypto investors on edge after trying some things that Colombian investors sent them in the mail. The thing is, there was this mad dash to integrate this into the state for a couple of reasons. Partly is the reason, as I explained, is that a lot of the treasury people genuinely believe that. And one of the other reasons as well is that the last big wave or what felt like the last big wave of tech innovations, which again, came out of the central bank basically. That thing where the appearance of, say, being a consumer was visibly changed, the governments have been wrangling with that for the last basically 12 years. And they've never really been able to try to capture what seemed to be the lightning in the bottle

that Uber and Netflix were able to capture. Because even now, I believe the most recent version of this was it was claimed that the NHS should learn lessons from Netflix, which I guess means they need to make Spencer confidential. That's what I presume they mean by that. I want that five year waiting list, my golden arm surgery, UCLA hospital, pantomime, Spencer confidential Christmas 2022. We can't give you the pussy, but we can give you a Mark Wahlberg. We can get Chrissy Teigeners here to consult. I was just trying to fucking transition. I came out of the hospital. They've done me in the Mark Wahlberg as a smo. I'm walking upstairs. I really, really do want to see this Netflix bio pic about Bob Mark Wahlberg cat or

Yeah. Oh, people are entitled to their sexual proclivities. I'm not going to spend any more time on it. Because in the last two months, three people have been torn to pieces by crocodiles in North Queensland. So this is what it was. It was Sajid Javed. Yeah, you've taken his blood. Sajid Javed says the NHS is quote like blockbuster in the age of Netflix. What the what it means is right? Netflix in the age of Netflix. But what that actually means, right, is that there it feels as though there have been these massive changes in how most people live their lives and that the state, because of, you know, again, a lot of reasons we've discussed chronic underinvestment, but also just not no one in

charge really has a good theory of what the state should really do has been sort of has felt unable to keep up, if you will. And so whereas they whereas they spent from like, I don't know 2010 to 2019 sort of humming and hawing about how they're going to incorporate the insights of Uber into like a DWP or whatever. Crypto offers a offers them, I think, a chance to have the government much more directly involved and to try to and to try to get and to try to try to get ahead of it. But the difference is, is that like, like the, again, the last version of the economy, it did perform a function. Now that function was in many cases very bad, that function was in many cases to do things like depressed wages, the strip rights, and so on and so on. But it's almost like whether

or not you agree with it, it did act on the world in a meaningful way. And the difference is that what they're trying to jump in front of and claim is a sort of, and that's claiming, again, in its marketing, and a lot of the marketing written by credulous journalists who don't really understand it would say, oh, this is the next wave of that. And so they basically, they try, they say, well, we can get in on it at this time. Riley, have you ever heard of a game called Drug Wars? I have not. Alice, have you ever heard of it? Rings of Bell, but mind me. Yeah, and people used to play this on Calculator. Yeah, Drug Wars was a game, a text game you could play on the TI-83 Calculator, and it's somehow, a graphing calculator, it's been ported to some smartphone. What do you call

the man who's played that boring? Drug Wars posits a deranged sort of fantasy version of New York City in which you can take the subway between the multiple boroughs of New York City, which are the Bronx, Central Park, Manhattan, Ghetto, Brooklyn, and Queens. I didn't realize that Ghetto was a borough of New York City. And you people live in Central Park. Exactly. And you can buy, you can buy dealing drugs to the squirrels in every, in every, in every borough, unofficial, and otherwise you can buy drugs or sell drugs at different prices and you can acquire them and then travel to the boroughs where prices may be up or down depending on the situation. Things like, for example, the pigs are selling cheap speed is one of them. For example, you can

buy speed from the cops or you can turn around and then sell it really fast somewhere else, similarly with cocaine, heroin, crack, marijuana, etc. However, the cops might stop you. There's a random chance the cops might stop you and you can either fight them with a gun if you have one or you can run. If you get arrested, you lose all your drugs and your money and you start from zero. And I feel as though that is the only use case I can think of because drug wars posits a problem, which is if you're running around selling drugs in person, the cops might stop you and you might lose all your money. Whereas if you can anonymously sell drugs on the dark web using crypto and do small transactions, because I can't imagine you want to risk shipping a kilogram of cocaine

through the post, you know, anonymously. If that would make you very nervous. If you go up against the federal law enforcement agency with a 99% conviction, right? Exactly. You don't want to do that. But small drug shipments, that makes sense. That's the only use case I can think of for crypto. I understand why people use it. Anonymous currency, anonymous transactions, cryptography to scramble your addresses, that makes sense. The rest of this, it genuinely feels like everyone thinks they're in on a joke and no one knows what the actual joke is. Well, the actual joke is that all of the people who talked about how Fiat was doomed, how crypto was an inflation hedge, how it said, have fun being poor, all of those people,

the most likable people in the world. What they did was they gave you all of these valuable database entries for your terrible old Fiat. And you know what? Now they're stuck with huge amounts of Fiat currency that's going to be worthless any day now. I simply don't think I'll be doing that. I have no idea what else I can possibly say, but I simply won't be doing that. And I think we won't be carrying on any further with this episode, because it's time for us to, I mean, as far as you're concerned, the listener, it's time for us to go away, back and live silently in your phone for several days. I'm going to go and settle my dogecoin. It seems as though it might be decreasing in value. Let's all go and sit quietly. We're going to go sit quietly for a couple of days,

according to you. We're going to go into stasis. According to us, we're going to, because I was away and then got unwell, record the next episode basically right now. Well, everyone, thank you for listening. We have a Patreon. If you want to hear bonus content, $5 a month gets you a ton of content. $10 a month gets you two Britonologies a month. You have a lot of content to choose from. Milo, do you have any shows coming up? A whole bunch of content. Yeah, I can plug most of our domains, podcasts that I do, but also I am doing the N number of fringe. If you're going to be in August between the 4th and the 28th of August, my show will be on its good voicemails at 4.35pm at the MASH house.

Also, Trash Future will be doing a fringe show Friday, the 26th of August. I will be there. The first Trash Future live show I'll be at. I will have to be struck by lightning or the novel coronavirus, not to take an hour train from Glasgow. Our fringe show will be at The Space, which is saying it reminds me of a very niche YouTube video, which plaudits if you remember the line. And his friend, The Space, falls in love with cocaine. Riley also has some shows to plug too. You have The Bottleman. I do, yes. With me and Dan Bekner, which is very fun. Alice has newer shows. I have Well There's a Problem and I have Kill James Bond.

That's true. And I have What a Hell of a Way to Die. And also, it is my duty to inform me that our theme music is a song called Here We Go by Jinsang. And I will link to it in the show notes. Oh, I've been handed a bulletin just before we go. Appears that Labour has finally taken a strong position on the strikes. Shadow cabinet members being banned from attending pickets. Amazing. All right. Well, with that, we're going to leave you and we're going to go into recording the bonus episode. People find picket lines boring.

They should do lines with me to your story. The only lines members of the shadow cabinet should be doing single gunshot rings out. All right. Bye, everyone. you