TRASHFUTURE - Doctors’ Advice: Drink 14 Gallons of Water Right Now (feat. Mattie Lubchansky)

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

This week it’s Milo, Hussein, Nate, and Alice, joined by special guest Mattie Lubchansky (@lubchansky), and we’re discussing the UK’s energy pricing woes. Which are solely related to privatisation. Which everyone can see coming and nobody is going to do anything about. We also discuss an app-connected water bottle that sometimes tells you to drink enough water to kill you if its sensors are off. There’s a special smart segment in this episode in which Riley speaks with Dr Craig Berry about the disasters of privatised pensions. If you enjoy this discussion, Craig’s book is available here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pensions-imperilled-9780198782834?cc=gb&lang=en& If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ 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 *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237.  *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, everyone, and welcome to an episode of Trash Future. It's the free one. It's the free one. Exactly. Riley isn't even here to be irritated by that. No, I pretend to be irritated. If you want to. Yeah, let's do it.

It's the free one. Let me stop that, you guys. Don't leave me come over there. So as you can tell from Riley not being on this, he's in Canada. He's returned to his ancestral homeland temporarily. And but he did record a big, smart, important segment about big, smart, important things. And quite frankly, I haven't listened to it yet, so I don't know what the topic is. We don't know.

We don't know because we haven't listened to it. And I'm the only one who's going to listen to it. But I figured Riley digging into the hay. He's doing nothing where he goes, steepling his fingers like, and can you just tell me what is your name? What am I doing here? How did I get here? Is this my beautiful wife?

Is this the clock I just drew? I figured we would absolutely have no problem delving into important and electoral topics. And so we should keep this episode extra stupid. I'm going to shake it out. Extra fun, extra for the hogs, because it's just going to be us. And if you heard a voice you didn't quite recognize, we are joined by our special friend, great friend, friend of the show,

Maddie Lepchanski. Maddie, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Like I was telling you before, I'm fresh off of dismantling the FBI. Excellent. We've got my friends in the Republican Party. Thank you for your service. So here, I'm just going to derail this immediately.

Let's go. There's much of a rail to go on. But you hear a guy in Ohio tried to get into the FBI's office in Cincinnati with a gun, was stopped, fled on the interstate. And at time of recording is now shooting at the cops from a cornfield off the interstate. My culture is not a costume. My my official statement is that it do be like that. And I wish him not well, but not, you know, good luck.

I wish him a peaceful surrender. So before we start on a very funny topic that is is relevant to our lives and also about the most us kind of product ever made and sold, I did want to talk about something that's related to the UK really quickly. And I'm just going to run through some facts and figures because I feel like it's better if we both explain it this way and then also have with Maddie, who does not live in the UK mercifully, to react to some of these things. So so news came out earlier this week that utility bills are going to rise

to an annual cap of 4266 pounds a year. That's an estimate. And that's also about a 60 odd percent increase on the previous increase, which happened in April, which was a 57 percent increase. It's like a net sort of more than doubling of from when things were, you know, one percent more normal. Right. And the Office of National Statistics in the United Kingdom estimates median earnings in the UK are about 31000 pounds a year,

median earnings, which can include family income, meaning it's fine because everyone got that like 200 percent pay rise recently. Right. But I want to just give a couple more facts here. So median earnings for people in wholesaling, retailing hotels and restaurants is about 50 or correction, 21.5 thousand pounds a year and the London living wage, which is in some ways aspirational because people are definitely paid less than this is about 20,500 pounds a year.

So this is to suggest the median earner in the UK would see utilities eat up 13 percent of their pretext income. That's the median. And if you work in retail and hospitality would be about 20 percent. Someone on the London living wage would see about 21 percent. And the observer recently reported that about 11 and a half million people will be spending more than a quarter of their net income. So post tax income on fuel by October.

Yeah. And in real terms, what this means is that there are a huge number of people who will flatly not be able to pay their energy bills. Correct. And one of the things to point out is that many people are set up to have like an averaged bill, which is taken out in direct deposit at the beginning of the month. And we were already seeing reports of people getting rate rises and seeing direct debits going from, say, 200, 300 pounds a month to 1200, 15, 1600 pounds a month.

In many cases, the people who have been reporting this have been saying, this is more than I earn a month. And I'd also say bear in mind, there's about 54 million adults in the UK, about 31 million of them earn enough to pay income tax. And so of that, 23 million who do not, that not all of them are in work. But you have to consider for a second what that means. That's 20 million adults in the UK do not earn more than 12,570 pounds per year of taxable income.

And at the basic rate, the state pension is about 9,400 pounds a year. But it's like a hundred something pounds a week, right? Yeah. 181 pounds a week. You also pay income on even if your state income, state pension income and other income sources are more than the personal allowance, which is 12,570. You pay income tax on that. So effectively, if you were earning from pension benefits, et cetera, exactly one pound beneath the tax threshold, the point at which

you have to pay income tax, your annual cost would be a mere 34 percent of your pre-tax income. This is why the whole sort of like generational conflict to a like class conflict thing has always bothered me, right? Is that like you can go, you know, these boomers, they're killing the world. They expect us to pay for it, which is, yeah, to an extent, if you average it out across the whole population, there's also a lot of them who are extremely poor

and who are going to get killed by this. So and something I want to point out really quickly is that, you know, the finger pointing culprit here is people say it's the war in Ukraine, which is true in terms of international gas prices and spot prices. However, the UK produces about half of its natural gas domestically and about 20 percent of the gas that is imported is imported as liquefied natural gas. About 20 percent is imported via pipeline from Norway

and the rest are re imports, which I don't really understand. But I presume is gas that is imported from from other suppliers that it's not. You don't you don't audit the molecules. But yeah. Well, we don't have a lot of like liquid natural gas infrastructure in this country, bizarrely. And part of the reason for that is because we've been cutting it. Yeah. Well, why would you need gas storage?

Evil Vladimir Putin snuck into the heart of British government and made us cut all of our gas storage and also not build as much in the way of renewables on nuclear as we needed to. You got your guys, too. He did. Liquid natural gas imports in the UK are primarily from the US and from Qatar. About 12 percent of the UK's LNG imports are from Russia, which means Russian gas being cut off or whatever you want to say, you know,

being more difficult to access or a shorter supply in Europe. That's only about two and a half percent of the UK's gas supply and about 30 percent of the UK's electricity comes from burning natural gas. So what we're basically in a situation is that like Alice just said, this is everything's privatized. They've been cutting supply, everything that they make. They just basically pay out in shareholder dividends and bonuses. The UK government refuses to intervene in any way

that could stop private fossil fuel companies making as much profit as possible. And if this means forcing millions of people into absolute poverty and many more millions into relative poverty, they'll do it. And so far, labor has proposed scrapping value added tax on fuel bills, has also called for additional taxes on fossil fuel companies, but nothing concrete about cutting fuel costs or. Here, Stammer isn't even like at work. He's still on vacation with Riley.

I was going to say, he's presently on holiday and he has said. I've heard great things about the wines that come from the unique microclub of the Niagara Scarlet. And I think it's very important that we don't lose focus on that in this difficult time. Yes. So he's basically said he's on holiday, he'll get to it. And meanwhile, British Petroleum has earned an 11 figure profit so far this year, about 14 and a half billion US dollars. And there's one little note that I thought was very funny

as I was researching these factoids just to describe the situation in terms of this slow moving catastrophe that we're heading towards because it's basically the BBC is going, you know, doing infographics and saying, here's how you can take like take one minute showers and thus save one hundred and forty five pounds a year when, you know, that is what? Like save a tenth of one month's energy. Exactly. But for the record, the UK gas supply system was not privatized until 1986.

The UK electricity supply system was not privatized until 1990. And it's obviously been opened up to lots and lots of institutional investors and, you know, of funds and such around the world. And, Alice, you might appreciate the fact that Scotland Gas Network's public limited company, which is the transporter of gas in your part of Scotland, is thirty seven point eight percent owned by the Ontario teachers pension board. And that's right, which is to say that the teachers who have suffered through Riley as a student are now getting their revenge on us.

Not on us, on me, on me specifically. Why am I paying for him? The yeah, this is the energy prices go up. It's like, oh, fuck yeah, but I'm going to get it. Going to get a skidoo when I retire. Going out for a reply that'll be twelve hundred quid. I mean, it's just I don't know how I don't get tired of saying the same very, very basic point all the time every week, which is this is a market

that shouldn't be a market. It's there's no reason. There was no sort of market shaped hole here. It's been forced into being a market and it's a very inefficient and very deadly way of administrating things, administering things. The only market we need is a pork market. And that's why we're guessing us. Well, I guess I bring it up because Maddie, I know that, for example, last winter, so twenty twenty to twenty twenty one, there was this insane price

shock because of winter storms in Texas in the U.S. And because of the way Texas works and because of the way that they're sort of strong armed people into these deals where you can get more or less your utilities at spot prices. There were people who were suddenly being hit by, you know, fifteen hundred two thousand dollar utility bills for the month of January because of the winter storm. And that's it's not as much of like an immediate thing

in terms of happening overnight and then going back to normal. What's happening here in the U.K. is it's being declared months in advance. The change happens overnight and then it never goes back. And it's the chronic versus the acute. My mind was kind of reeling when you're talking about the prices of things in a way that like, oh, that's what it's going to be. Like we have this number that it's just the cap is basically what it ends up being at, right? Yeah, ironically, that is a case of a controlled economy, right?

Like it's a directed economy in that sense. Yeah. And there's something about like, you know, I feel like here when the gas prices go up or the heating prices go up, it's because of some freak thing that will obviously keep happening more and more for no reason that we can possibly describe or anticipate. But, you know, when it happens, it's just sort of like, oh, well, something happened and now stuff's expensive. And then, you know, it's not on purpose.

This idea that I feel like this is every time listening to the podcast, mostly just everything over there is just very much just like bad stuff is coming. And we're not going to do a goddamn thing about it all the time. One of the things that I think is perhaps interesting to compare this to in the UK is student tuition fees, because the UK didn't have tuition fees from basically the Atlee labor government until 1998. And I'm pretty sure they didn't go into full effect until 03, but they were introduced under labor, of course, under Tony Blair.

And in 2010, if I'm not mistaken, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I wasn't in the UK, under the coalition government between the Tories and the Lib Dems, they raised the cap from 3,000 dish pounds a year to like 9,000 dish pounds a year for tuition. Yeah, and they said, don't worry. This is just a guide price. Universities will charge whatever they charge. But this is not and then what happened British British

if any university is going to advertise, yeah, we're shit. We will take three. Yeah. And most of the point what happened is all of the university has started charging 9000 pounds that and the sort of combined with the cuts to the ESA led to legitimate student riots in London, which achieved nothing other than some long prison. Dave Gilmore's son went to jail for a bit. Yeah. I mean, I remember I can't remember the name of the guy,

but I know there was an activist who was like seriously beaten and sustained brain damage from a cop, like a territorial support group cop beating his ass with an ASP, you know, like those like metal, but telescoping batons. I thought you were talking about the snake. He's got a patch repelled. You see Cleopatra there's there's actually an insane. There's this this Italian like pulp artist.

I think he died recently or in the last 15 years, but he was in his heyday in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and one of his insane pulp illustrations was like a like a bank hold up where they're holding a big snake at people and they're just like, listen, motherfucker, give us all the money or this snake is going to bite you. Yes. Yes. Basically, that's the economy. We're not a gun that fires a snake.

I think that would be effective. Oh, there you go. Now we're talking. TM, TM, no one else can do this. Pan pending, pan pending. Yeah, I think anytime that you can introduce, you can turn something to a market when it doesn't need to be and then introduce a price that everything's going to be at and you can get the worst of every possible

economy and type of organizational structure. I think you got to take that every time. It's a failure of planned economy and market economy at the same time. It's so good. Well, I want to talk about, I suppose, since we we we wanted this to be a fun episode as well as an episode where we this hasn't been fun. It hasn't been pensioners freezing to death or boiling in the summer. But if you're boiling in the summer like we are right now, you know,

if this if you got bitten by a snake that was fired out of a gun and you're thirsty and your doctor says, hey, you need to make sure you drink a certain amount of water today to get over per day to get over your snake gun induced injury. I have found an object that will help you. This is a beautiful segue. It's called the hydrate spark water bottle and it is Mark. You can never have had enough hydration in your sparks.

Exactly. Well, here's the thing. It is an app connected water bottle. It is a Bluetooth sensor equipped water bottle. I'm going to say this in fairness. People use it because it can connect to fitness apps and it can tell you how much water you've consumed over the course of a day. However, it is equipped in its app with a sensor that will tell you

how much water is left in the bottle, which is transparent. Well, here's a question, mate. For you, if you're going to be critical of everything, how else would you possibly know that the water is low or even high? Well, I mean, quite frankly, trying to drink from the water bottle. Water is famously is transparent, right? So you need this. Yeah, that's right.

One of the issues that I have discovered with this, however, from reading reviews and no joke from joining the Facebook community centered around owners of this water bottle. Well, I found out that in the United Kingdom, the 620 milliliter or 21 ounce version is seventy four pounds. Awesome. Worth every penny. You could pay for up to a minute of electricity with that. Yeah, I have discovered that that the sensor has to be set by calibrated by you inflating, you know, filling the bottle up and then drinking it all. And then pressing a button again so it knows where it's at when it's full and empty.

Apparently, this sensor has to be reset a lot because it just goes out of whack. So people have reported everything from I drank a fuckload of water and it reported that I drank like 10 ounces of water today to my app thinks that I've drank 10 gallons of water today. My app thinks I've got that NDMA brain condition. It's obvious buying a like one of those digital kitchen scales that you'd like to tear yourself every time. OK, yeah, what you only need to understand, guys, is that if I didn't have this water bottle telling me, warning me when the water bottle was full of water, then I might think it was empty and then get really scared when I hold the water bottle up and I see a person's face through it

and it looks all big and weird. Yeah, when I when my water bottle is empty, what I like to do is to like celebrate that fact by inverting it over all of my sensitive electronics. And because it's transparent, that's that's usually a very risky prospect for me. But now now I don't have to worry about this because it can tell me if there's water still in there. I know I shouldn't do that in your sensor. Hydrogen is great. You're always checking it. Exactly. That's important.

So I've also found sensor is so important. I'm sorry, Matty. I didn't mean to interrupt you. It's fine. It wasn't a good joke. Nobody laughed. Well, I was about to but then someone talked over you. See, this wouldn't be a problem if we were all hydrated. True. We're all dehydrated. We're all cranky. My glass of water is now empty, or is it? I don't know.

I'm actually the opposite. I've drank 14 gallons of water according to my smartphone. So maybe that I just have to piss so bad. That's why I'm in such a hurry. I've actually I've actually hacked because before I think I want to know before the episode, you sent us all a hydrate spark. So I've been using it, obviously. And I've been I've jailbrick mine to also mine Bitcoin for how much water I drink.

So I've been I've drank 20 gallons of water today and I am in the hospital right now. That's where I'm recording from. Yeah, it's like a broken mind. So it works with them for loco. Yeah. I've just drunk nine gallons so far. So there are a couple of things on this this device, though,

that also make it extremely funny. So for one, it has an LED sensor, or rather an LED indicator on it that will start glowing. You can set it to remind you to drink more water. So your bottle will start glowing. However, apparently this is a feature that is only included on the pro model, which is functionally the same as the regular model. And if you buy and you buy the regular model,

you have to basically pay for DLC on your water bottle, or you can't control the LEDs. So basically, if you want your bottle to glow like a disco light, you got to pay, I can't figure out because I actually can and should jailbreak your water bottle. That's what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, instead of like getting a water bottle brought to you by Winrar.

Yeah, water bottle wants to be free is what all the web guys are saying. So another thing that I've discovered from it is that the app is somewhat unstable. And so I've gone through and looked on the on the Facebook community. A lot of people want to like join email friend groups. Based around this water bottle, which I find desperately sad. But there's one guy.

This is from August 7th, his name is Mike, and he says, is there an app problem? I'm missing about one point one thousand days of my streak. My water drinking streak. Yes. But I think maybe gamification as a sort of a model has gone too far. If we can sort of abstract your this idea of like a winning streak or like a sort of a streak of consistency to the thing that you have to do

or you die, one of the things that you have to do or you die. Because because right now I'm on my like thirty one year breathing streak feeling very good about it. I don't I don't really need an app to like note that down. And I don't know. It's very strange to me. I was very interested in some of these software problems because, you know, me and Milo are no stranger to the fact that like a lot of times

when you get devices that are notionally Bluetooth controllable or smartphone compatible, their apps tend to be really fucking shit. And we have experienced this with a heater in the studio, which is notionally Bluetooth controllable. But as it is, it is it is we we regularly discover that either it's freezing cold in the winter time because it hasn't turned on or it's balls hot in the winter time because it has turned on too much. But I was interested in one of those is going to cost you ten thousand pounds.

Exactly. Exactly. So we'll probably won't be using Bluetooth. But I noticed another comment in this group where someone has said that they'd updated the app to a new version. They're still getting the spinning circle next to water, which I don't know what that issue is. My water is buffering. My water is doing a blue screen of death.

But he says that he's basically done everything he can. Force closed the app because the app is freezing restarted the iPhone, reopened the app, still the spinning icon buffering logged out of app, repeated steps one to three, still the same issue. And then one of the mods says you can try deleting and reinstalling the app. Also turning airplane mode on for 30 seconds to refresh the connection. And there is something like I realize that's just garden variety troubleshooting, but there's something about I'm turning on

an off airplane mode to be able to drink water from my bottle. That just I don't know what the right word is here. It is dystopian, right? But yeah, it's dystopian in a very silly way, which is perfect for us. Yeah, it's a little bit of a dessert after the regular savoury dystopian stuff we had up first. Yeah, it's it's like you now have no money and also no heating or cooling for that matter and no electricity.

But also you can't get into your special boy water bottle. It's like it's like that. Is it a film, Kate Dick story where the guys like pay money to unlock his own front door to leave? It's just bad for that cup in your house. It's ubiquitous, isn't it? Yeah, like, yeah, like to get out of this house, he has to put money in the door. Well, I mean, the reason I upgrade my heater to the pro model

to turn it off in the winter, so I don't pay 10,000 dollars. Somebody somebody shared a photo of this in the United States, that they're selling these in a store at like, I guess, a high five store for one hundred and ten dollars per bottle. I am I'm buying one of these. I am putting it in the more like chillery, Clinton drink. And I am achieving Buddha nature. Alice, I have I have so much better for you than chillery, Clinton.

I have seen, I mean, on one hand, there's your garden variety. People have gotten there's really done up with, you know, sort of like hologram, rainbow colored, their name and stuff like that. Laser-etched portrait of Robert Mueller. Like the t-shirt you would buy, the airbrush t-shirt you buy in Key West or something for like spring break. But I see another one where someone has gotten a cozy cover for it that makes it look like the world's biggest vape.

And it says, when did you buy this? It says God is within with her. She will not fail or something to that effect. But it's it's got the hydrate sprocket logo on it. So it seems as though it's been extremely, extremely customized. Another one. I'm getting my water, my Bluetooth water bottle lowered and getting hydrolox put in and I'm driving it around. Yeah, I got like underlighting.

Yeah, I love this. I love I love to consume. I love to be a consumer. It doesn't lead me to any strange or weird places. I say is I sort of engrave a bunch of my favorite quotes from my brother, my brother and me on on my water bottle that won't let me drink unless it's in that airplane motors off. One of the things that got me about this is I understand because, you know, I use a fitness tracking app for just logging workouts.

Yeah, I use one of those for leaking sort of operational information to my enemies. Yeah, well, I was so excited by the Strava app that doxed a bunch of US military bases in Syria. The reason why I came on the show in the first place and got connected to the whole thing that I I wound up getting a Strava enabled thing to track my workouts. So if anyone wants to try to geolocate me, I suppose they can. But obviously, like there's the thing where you can enter in any fitness.

It's like there's one user in East London who is just like jogging perfect laps of a tiny studio for eight consecutive hours. Yeah, he's running up and downstairs nonstop trying to unplug things. Yeah. Yeah, a little little peek behind the curtain there because I have had the worst week in the world. You've had a day. Upgrading our studio computer.

And you have been such wonderful good sports with this episode. Record time running a full hour plus longer than it was supposed to. Because it's always a joy. Yeah, because because I've been running, screaming, throwing, shitting, throwing up, crying, etc. Yeah. It was nice to get a peek behind the curtain. Yeah. Yeah. But according to Nate's water bottle, he's doing fine. Just seem to see Nate shitting and crying. Yeah.

Well, like I said, if only if only I hadn't left my water bottle in airplane mode, I could have stayed hydrated throughout this process. But yeah, what happened was the reason why the audio kept not working is because it was all rooting through your water bottle. And crying, shitting and throwing up can all be quite dehydrating activities. So you want to make sure. I got I got an idea, guys. It's it's one of those New Yorker cartoons with the guys crawling through the desert.

Right. He's dying because he's so thirsty. And another guy is saying, have you tried unplugging your water bottle and plugging it back in again? I would do whatever the sort of the New Yorker equivalent of numbers is. Yeah, I think like upwards of three sensible chuckles. Yeah, I I would drink from my water bottle, but it won't pair with my Samsung Galaxy S7. Dan nine and in the desert.

Genuinely, the Samsung Galaxy Tab joke gets me every fucking time. I'm not sure what to tell you. This is it's just it's a known feature of my brain. Dan nine and come on the podcast. Yes. Yes, please. I don't know if if if any of you either in your your personal choices or from parents, family, etc. have bought stupid things and then regretted it like something that seemed cool at the time.

I feel like I'm not really prone to buying dumb shit, tech stuff, whatever. But I feel like I've never asked my mom if she's bought any insane devices because I can only imagine that she must do is buy dumb shit. All I have are useless trinkets. Yes. No, 100 percent. I a thousand times. Yes. I was just going to ask if anyone because like we can all agree that the Bluetooth connected sensor

enabled water bottle with disco lights you have to pay extra for. As one of the reviewers whose reviews I read on Amazon said, this is basically like buying a car and you have to pay extra to pull down the windows, which to be fair, I'm sure is going to be bringing that in. I know. I know some cars. There are some cars that you have to get you to play a subscription to get heated seats. Is it BMW? Yeah, even though you. So I'm wondering my people hate to see it.

I would not buy a Bluetooth connected water bottle. But I'm wondering if you are willing to confess on this podcast, if this is going to be the the you are not immune to propaganda zone when it comes to the tech industry and or gadgets. Have any of you bought devices that sounded cool and then you realize upon using them, they suck dumbest, dumbest thing I've ever bought that was app enabled was a tactical Garmin smartwatch that was not very tactical, not very smart

and wasn't very good as a watch. It's not the dumbest thing you might imagine, but I did not need to have a thing on my watch to set for fracking my sort of my heart rate just on the off chance. I was going to go skydiving wearing it. But Alice, what if you did do that? That's true. What if I well, if I did do that, I would I still have it. What if you fell out of a plane with nothing but your watch?

Well, the thing is that they would dig this watch out of a five foot deep crater that I had made and like sort of pluck this off of whatever viscera remained and see that my heart rate was like a steady seventy beats per minute the whole way down ice cold. Yeah. Other than that, no, not much. She hit a top speed of all time. That's right. Yeah. A new, new personal best at skydiving fastest time from plane to ground.

That is not quite that way, but that has happened to me where I've gotten a new personal best for for speed of walking. And I realized I forgot to turn my walking app off when I got on the bus. And so it thinks that I'm fucking hauling ass down Old Kent Road on a walk. It's sort of last conscious action. Falling off a cliff is like turning on the like walking activity. I mean, you're going to be at the top of the leaderboard on Strava. If you do that, yeah, the Strava segment from top of cliff to boss up.

I feel like I've been I get given a lot of like dumb gadgets by people like like parents or in laws or whatever, like for like Christmas or birthday presents, not so much anymore now that I'm a thousand years old and I don't receive presents, but like I feel like I got I really back when 3D printing was like new and exciting. My parents got me a 3D printer pen that I was really excited about. I know it was a pen that was a 3D printer called the the three doodler. I believe it was called.

Sounds like sort of two slurs at once. It sure does. And I was so excited. I was like, I like open it up and like, I want to do so much shit. I'm like, you know, like I want to become a multimedia artist. I'm like sell things at conventions that like are 3D printed drawings or whatever. And then I tried to use it and the best I could do was like a little circle on my table that didn't even dry right.

It was just like completely it was a pen that were the extrude plastic through its tip while you like drew with it. So it was basically like squeezing a caterpillar. So it takes a shit basically doing like Sarah coach. Wait, I remember another one. Yeah, I remember. Sorry. And this is the whole segment is going to be like this because you say

something and I'll be like, yeah, I remember another dumb thing I got. I I got a sort of like very retro styled word process. So like it was a Wi-Fi and typewriter called a free write. Yes. Extremely annoying, both to use and also to be seen using. But I did buy one and I do still have it. So if anyone wants anything type written, I've been on one those because every time I like sit down to write something, I'm like, what if I'm

not because, you know, because then you start getting distracted, right? Which is the whole premise behind those things. I here's the problem with with buying anything that's sort of one of those anti distraction things. You just go on your phone unless you like lock your phone and sort of like a timed safe or something, which I refuse to do. You will just find other ways of distracting yourself. Anti distraction does not work on me.

I am distraction. You were born in it. That's right. No, I didn't buy it. So now the question is, Mr. Milo Edwards, have you purchased any stupid tech things? Well, I and I don't I mean, as a BMW owner, I'm not sure if people will be surprised by this or not, but I'm actually not.

I'm not really much of a consumer. I don't really buy a lot of stuff. That's never really been a vice of mine. Like I like I like buying occasional big ticket items that I really want, like a car or like, I don't know, a new laptop or whatever. But like, I don't I don't really go in for like gadgety things. I spend so much money on food, like a huge amount of money on that. But yeah, I don't I don't really I don't really own any drink.

I probably have been bought some real shit over the years. I think probably the most the dumbest thing I've ever been bought is like it looks it's like a little shelf type thing, like a phone sized shelf with a hook over it. So that if you're charging your phone, you can hook it over the plug that's plugged into the wall. So your phone sits on it. I guess if you were using a really high in the wall plug socket to charge your

phone, I can't really think of the that's such an unusually specific gift. Like someone has been. Yeah, to like has been to your home has been like measuring from from wall sockets. Well, they fucking hadn't because I've never used it. Not once. It was bought for me like over 10 years ago. Now, Milo, although all the money you spent on food, the plates you're eating the food off of, are they perhaps weight-sensored? So your your phone knows how much how much how many pounds of food you're eating a day.

I mean, that that would be a good idea. But unfortunately, due to my cultural love of Greece, it would be a very expensive habit. So I'm always breaking the. I have not been gifted or bought anything stupid in the tech realm. However, in the adjacent, you're free of sin in the adjacent to this podcast. I did one time see an ad for and this is really embarrassing. I saw an ad for what I would describe as vapor wave jumpers. And the designs looked stupid, but also very, very cool.

And I said, well, fuck it. Why not? These are funny. I'll get them in worst case scenario. We can wear them at a live show if they're things I would never wear. However, what I didn't realize was I don't know if how they were screen printed or what they were made from, but they were like they looked shiny in a way that wasn't cool at all. And they also trapped heat unlike any garment I have ever worn in my life. They were like this winter, then a trash bag.

So you can imagine a rap. Yeah, imagine us on stage under lights, just wrenched in sweat. That's why you need the bottles. Exactly. So in a way, this was the perfect use case for the Bluetooth enabled water bottle that would tell us when to drink water. I remembered another one. Oh, no, OK.

OK, so this isn't a tech product. It pretended to be a tech product. What I bought was a jacket that was supposedly very, very advanced because I needed a new jacket and I was willing to like splash out and spend a horrendous sum of money on it. And have this be like my one jacket and just make that my personality or whatever. And and what it is, it's a completely normal waterproof jacket, but it's made in large part of copper wire.

So and this is apparently because of like space reasons or Elon Musk or some shit like that. But so now I'm just wandering around wearing this admittedly very nice jacket just going, oh, if it rains, I will be the most electrocuted a person has ever been. You'll be the most green of persons. You know, I'm going to get a rock. Someone's going to like knock you out and strip your jacket. I'm yeah, I'm going to get all of the copper wire stripped out of my jacket.

I'm going to get like heavy metals, diseases that people like didn't even know that you could still get. I feel like the copper wire thing is like some whoo whoo shit. Like baseball pitchers will always be advertised in like copper bracelets that they wear. Yeah, 100 percent. I think the the deal here was this brand has the most annoying, most sort of like tech hipster copy you've ever read. It's a brand called Volaback and I ain't no Volaback girl.

That's what I said, too. And and their vibe was, you know, maybe it'll stop you from going covid. I guess money, please. I love the idea of you being like, oh, Milo, your catalytic converter got stolen. That'll never happen to me. I'm wearing wearing your catalytic converter. Yes, that is probably like the toxicity of Alice's emissions. That's right.

This is probably my most like personally reprehensible purchase. And it's it's not strictly speaking a tech thing, but it's so bad in and of itself that I had to talk about and expose myself. So I welcome my my killing after after the revolution. I would encourage you to go further. Well, yeah, exactly, exactly. I have to go because I've got to go and watch a show. Well, we're going to let Riley introduce his segment

and then we'll come back to say goodbye. Well, thank you, past either me or past versions of my creatinous friends who will have potentially been taking over the hosting of the show. Well, I am on a much deserved holiday in Canada. So with all of the sort of Japs and Goofs behind us, we are going to be putting on our mortarboards and and sidling in into class because once again, it is time to talk about how what is becoming sort of a theme, actually, in terms of segments I like to do,

which is to talk with an expert in their field about how some decision often taken in the 80s or 90s that involved a blind faith in the market, a kind of religious commitment to a homo economicist idea of rationality and also a gigantic handout to private interest has created huge politically charged and difficult to solve problems that we are dealing with now. And so on that subject, I am very pleased to be speaking with Dr. Craig Berry, the author of Pensions Imperiled, an authoritative account of the economy of private pension provision in the UK and the UCL Institute

of Public Policy, Head of Policy and Associate Professor in Economic Policy, a man of many titles and official qualifications. Craig, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So I've been I've been wanting to do this this episode ever since I saw just a random CNBC headline, which said that many younger baby boomers, the sort of first generation who move from a pension where you just get a certain amount every month, move to a pension where you just sort of your

company kind of invest money on your behalf, you contribute to it privately. The 401k it's called we have something similar in the UK. Well, it's being found that as soon as that is now being relied upon by a wide cohort of people, they are about to many of them are about to go broke in retirement. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the 401k system in the US is broadly equivalent to the dominant farm of pension saving in the UK defying contribution schemes. It's the first they're both individualized ways of saving for retirement.

You know, as an individual, you essentially take all the risks is if even if these schemes or these products are provided via your workplace, your employer, they're not in any sense occupational pensions that their personal pensions wrapped up in in different ways. And that essentially means that on the surface, what you get out is what you put in. But what you put in goes through all kinds of different processes. As you said, it's it's invested in capital markets. It depends on you making some good decisions or your advisors and your fund

managers making some good decisions. Also depends on quite a lot of look for you individually, but for the economy as a whole, how well your investments do. And then there are kinds of risks involved, depending on how, you know, irrespective of what kind of pot you end up accumulating over your working life, risks involved with what you do with that part when you reach retirement to where you may make the wrong decision, you may make the right decision, but get unlucky again and you could end up be retiring on, you know,

a much less secure sort of financial platform than you had hoped or anticipated. And I mean, I think that's for those and we talk sort of sometimes, I mean, in the show, you know, glibly, sometimes we'll say we'll see a piece of commentary whatever saying this will affect how millennials retire and then we sort of scoffingly say, well, no, they won't. Essentially, because many, many people simply do not have the security of a number one, a defined amount of money that you just start getting when you turn a certain age. And that even if you do have that, as you say, you have to make enough money for it

to be, if to make enough money for it to let for you to start contributing, your employer has to offer it. The idea of, hey, the idea of, I think, removing from market forces the question of, do I get to eat and have shelter after I stop working? You know, that thing that we had for what was essentially an anomaly for sort of the middle part of the 20th century has been like largely dismantled, right? And it was dismantled in, as I understand it, it was dismantled in the 1980s. Correct?

I mean, I was, you know, that's essentially when the dismantling began. If you take the UK, for example, you know, the manufacturers, government began undermining the traditional pension provision, which you can, you know, I mentioned occupational pensions. Technically, you would describe these defined benefit pensions where there's a guarantee, you know, you will put a size of money from your earnings. There's a guarantee what they will result in retirement or an approximate guarantee. And that pension's promise started to be undermined in the 1980s.

The UK and the US take the UK, for example, the fact that government started only first thing they did was to unravel the state pension system. So, you know, you've got your private pension and the state pension and factor reduced the generosity and coverage of state pension systems by breaking the links to earnings indexation, essentially abolishing the second state pension system. And so people became more dependent on the private pension. At the same time, she sort of, I mean, there wasn't one big decision

which ended the sort of traditional occupational pension system. But there was a series of steps. For example, the factory government allowed large companies, large employers with big pension funds to take contribution holidays. So, a period of time, they just stopped contributing to their employees. Pension fund, there was, you know, optimism about the, you know, the health of the long-term health of the stock market, whereby investment returns themselves, even without employer contributions, would do the

job of catering for people with retirement, optimism proved short-lived. And she also allowed various systems of tax relief to apply to define contribution rather than define benefit pen, define benefit pensions. Define contribution schemes are those where we started, the individualised pension schemes. So employers were able to access the same tax reliefs by setting these schemes up, which they had absolutely no responsibility for in terms of the financial risks, able to access the same tax relief as they had

previously when they were managing occupational schemes, where employers did largely, you know, uphold, take care of the financial risks. This was, you know, there was a broader context here. You know, it wasn't, you know, it's not exaggerating the extent to its sort of policy-driven all of these changes. There was, you know, the industrialisation, so a lot of the, you know, large employers that had these large pension schemes, you know, were in industries that were no longer as profitable, you know, those privatisation

and pensions was kind of a byproduct, you know, the pension system were kind of a byproduct of privatisation. And also in the UK, you had the sort of spread of American ownership of British corporations, which tended to be associated with the closure of the traditional pension scheme. So all of this stuff was happening without really any sort of deliberate attempt for it to have a pension's impact. But in fact, the government certainly helped help the process along the way

and ensured that, I mean, in the 80s and 90s, there was essentially very little pensions coverage in the private sector once the traditional scheme started to close. And it was not until the sort of new Labour government in the UK of 2000s whereby that policy makers tried to do something about that and actually put people into these individualised schemes. Instead, building on the sort of small steps was this that the factory government had put in place.

So if I was to sort of try to understand this process in its totality, it would essentially be that the universe where you reliably have a decommodified form of being able to support yourself, to reproduce your life in your old age was a product was just because it was taken apart by a lot of different factors. It was a product of sort of the mirror image of many of those factors, such as a largely Fordist economy, a Fordist economy that also had strong national trade union representation as well. And that had, let's say, a government that wasn't willing to sort of topple

some of the institutional pillars of those things. And but as as those things eroded, as as the, for example, national trade unions lost their power, partly because of political intervention, partly because of also, as you say, the internationalisation of the ownership of new kinds of companies and a new kind of economy. The this thing that was one sort of very quickly kind of fell away. And would you say that's a sort of a way of understanding the process and its totality?

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, this was a period of capitalist expansion. I mean, to some extent, we knew this at the time, but it's certainly in hindsight. And I think there was a sort of systemic assumption that pensions were, you know, a normal part of, you know, the social reproduction of labor, that everybody's going to get sick. So you have a health service, everybody's going to get old, so you have pensions. And, you know, workers needed to be able to rely on on a retirement income,

whether that's provided by the state, which it was to some extent, but also provided privately, there needs to be some ability to depend on that on that future income. Or you're a sense the insensitive to work is essentially undermined. And then capitalism kind of doesn't function if nobody's prepared to get out of bed and go to work. You know, it was a sort of a happy accident because capitalism was an age of, you know, high and stable growth.

So these things were deemed to be affordable. It was in, you know, the economic interest of the capitalist class as well as the workers. And when that, you know, happy accident started to sort of unravel, and it was the choice was between, you know, the profitability of capital and the welfare of workers and the farmer was invariably chosen, as I say, not in sort of a one-off, some big one-off decision, but, you know, step by step over a period of a couple of decades.

And that's what we are now. So what's happened now is that the workers have been told, you are a capitalist. We still have this myth that we have a sort of collective pension scheme is provided by your employer, even in the US with the 401Ks, which are about as far from sort of collectivised provision as you can possibly get. And the UK is starting to adopt some similar features, you know, provided by your employers, your employer will contribute to your pension scheme if you will contribute in certain ways, but it's entirely individualised.

So workers have had to become capitalists in order to secure what they used to get as a product of their contributions to economy as part of their remuneration. And I think that's something that you sort of talk about as well, which is part of, I think this sort of falls, correct me if I'm wrong, under what you call the kind of epidemic of misunderstanding around pensions, where the system that we've, again, the thatcher government put in place, and I would say these sort of Blair and then coalition governments sort of attempted to make a little bit nicer by, for example,

auto-enrolling people in the most preferential rate and so on and so on. But that what essentially we did is we have operated on the fundamental premise that you're that somehow you as an individual have to take responsibility for things that for the macroeconomy, more or less, for the macroeconomic conditions that abide at the time of your retirement and that it's a kind of swindle, essentially. And that your concept of the epidemic of misunderstanding is sort of bigger than just the idea that we are putting in

where we're giving people individual responsibility to control things that it is completely impossible for them to meaningfully control. Also, this idea that, for example, if we don't do this, then a demographic time bomb will go off and like for four young workers will be paying for 60 million old people. So there's there's huge amounts of misunderstanding and sort of ideology and propaganda that get layered in here that facilitated this move to what is essentially a prebroken system.

Yeah. I mean, this is a great myth that pension provision is a form of deferred consumption. I mean, it is it is actually a successful myth because it's partly true. Like you are putting money aside where you're doing that through paying taxes or contributing to a private pension and you expect to get something at the end of it. And you do always get something at the end of it, even if it's not quite along with the promises that were made. So there's a basic level is deferred consumption.

But that that idea contains a sense of certainty that if I've got, you know, if I put aside 100 pounds now, I will get that 100 pounds back in retirement, you know, revalued for inflation or whatever index five indexation is used. But that simply isn't the case anymore, at least not for enough people. I think this helps us to understand what pensions was in the first place. It was it was never about it's never a sort of classic savings or insurance scheme. It was about the fact that as human beings, we sort of live constantly with uncertainty.

If you're going to if you're going to live for 80 plus years, things are going to change on your life, the economy changes, society changes, policy regimes change and that creates a huge amount of uncertainty around those precise mechanisms of retaining the approximate value of the savings that you've put away or the tax that you've paid. And no individual can can possibly control these things. No government can possibly control all of these things. They have a few more levers than the individual.

So what I talk about in my book is this temporal anchoring function. And it's only really the state that can, you know, the state and its various different farms in different countries can provide this temporal anchoring function, like taking responsibility for ensuring that the money that you the income that you defer now has approximately the same value when you need it in retirement, you know, taking on the burden of coping with uncertainty. You know, employers can also do that job to some extent. And they did for a few decades and I think still should be doing it now,

but slightly more understandable that they're not to the same extent. The one group who certainly can't take responsibility for this is the individual. It's, you know, it's obviously completely fallacious, the idea that an individual is able to cope with these sort of macro level uncertainties and make all the right decisions all the way, all the way along. You know, it's just way, way too, way too many variables than to possibly able to, to, to, to compute and control. The reason what we've ended up with this individual,

this idea of the individual as the temporal, temporal anchor, the idea that the individual is always going to contribute to their pension. The reason we've ended up with that is as you allude to this, this sense of demographic time bomb that was upon us, that, you know, employers and even the state couldn't possibly be expected to provide decent pensions for all anymore. Because basically, because there were going to be too many pensioners, you know, you've got, you've got increased life expectancy,

but the baby boom is reaching retirement. So it was, it was too much for these collective institutions to take on. And you had to make the, put these, put these pressures back on the individual and the individual would, would respond. And it's a kind of crazy sort of market utopia where people act rationally. If people sink or swim, the, the inherent assumption there is we need some people to sink. I mean, that's, yeah, that's, that's the bit that's,

the bit that's never said out loud, isn't it? But, you know, some, some people will sink. You know, in, in the US, you've got the 401k system where people's savings are not, are not sufficient for them to see out there in, you know, their entire lifetime in retirement. And some of those features have been imported to the UK with the attention freedoms. So, yeah, if, if, you know, if everybody contributed at a sufficient scale into their private pension, you can, you can more or less approximate

what they're going to end up with, but they aren't going to. And, you know, a highly marketized system is very good at honing in on the customers. I, you know, normal people, we're going to provide them with the most opportunities for profit and the ones that are very good at identifying the ones that won't and have designed a system where they are providing the best services for those who are going to be the most profitable customers over the long term. That's where you need the state to, to step in. And it, you know, isn't doing so in the kind of, you know,

tightness necessary to prevent, you know, you know, the coming epidemic of, of pension poverty, which we had, we had sort of dealt with 10, 20 years ago. And it's, it's probably just 10, 20 years in our future. We're already seeing the signs of it. We see this as, as well, right? I mean, this is something that we've discussed many times before on the show, but anytime a sort of British newspaper will go and do a kind of, I don't know, you might say, investigative reporting piece at an Amazon warehouse.

The thing that they always remark upon is that the average age of the people working there is always very high because as the, as we sort of have accepted that in terms of pension savings, we need a certain amount of sinking in order to keep the, to keep the system moving while being profitable for all the right people, that those who sink then end up sort of shocked back into the labor market quite frequently in labor overproduction jobs, such as gig economy work, if they can, or more often things like warehouse work. I mean, it was Walmart greeters was the stereotype in the US, right? Your 401k runs out and then you're, and you're greeting people at Walmart, right?

I mean, because there is a place for these people to be absorbed. And it's the same way that all overproduced labor gets absorbed, which is highly exploited, very low paid, poor condition work. And in many cases in these places that are often out of the way, right? Absolutely. And in the UK, the success story was also always the being queue greeters, you know, the hardware home improvement sort of store. And, you know, typically older men who would be tradesmen in their early career take on this job in retail, sort of advising customers about which tools to buy and how to fit a kitchen

and so on. This was the great success story of how the workforce was responding to aging. But obviously the numbers of people who were able to take on jobs like that was extremely tiny. And most older workers were sort of in the hidden workforce that you're talking about in the warehouses where, you know, actually, when they would like to think we're at their sort of peak earnings potential, actually, we're taking enormous pay cuts in order to stay in work one way or another. That's partly because the pensions were not up scratch, you know, many will have been in good pensions. These essentially the younger boomers, the sort of forgotten generation where you think of the baby boomers are, you know, hugely wealthy. But

not so much. It seems especially the sort of younger end of the boomer generation who may have been in good pensions early in their career, they may have had a, you know, they may have been in the public sector early in their career. So the last half of their career, they haven't had access to good pensions coverage, they've been forced to work for long years. And, you know, the first to say that, you know, if people want to work as long as possible, they should be able to, we should encourage that, but nobody should feel that they're forced to, especially when, you know, ill health and disability becomes a big factor for many people of that age. And what one thing I would add is that this was just so unnecessary, because they were told

that it was because we had to respond to sort of the baby boomers with timing was creating this ageing society. So therefore, we couldn't afford their pensions anymore. But the baby boomers all had a lot of kids because they could afford to have kids. So those kids with a sort of demographic demographic dividend is people like my age, you know, people in their 30s now with boomer parents who, there's loads of us and we should have been able to sort of finance good pensions and replenish the system with contributions. But essentially, it's not because we couldn't afford to, we were not allowed to, you know, the mechanisms by which we were able to do so, which we're taking away. And I think there's an important step back we can take as well to

wonder, well, why is that, why did that happen? And I think one of the effects is that now you cannot, if you want to talk about, say, nationalizing some thing that's often, you know, say invested in maybe by risk averse asset managers such as pensions, you say, oh, you can't nationalize the railway because that takes away, you know, little old Doris's annuity, right? It means that instead of having the benefits and burdens of social cooperation be based on cooperation, we've sort of hardwired private ownership and so on into this because we've kind of tied the bomb of private ownership around pensioners, essentially. So you can't get rid of it, you can't, he can't sit up, he can't, we can't, the Britain can't step off this landmine

of private ownership or else it will blow up and destroy all the pensioners annuities because the solidarity element, the intergenerational solidarity element has been removed. Absolutely. And you see similar arguments around, you know, fossil fuel companies where, you know, any, any, any threat to the profitability of polluters is a problem because, you know, it's pension funds on all the shares in these companies. It's exaggerated, but it's almost like the threat that's hanging over us when you have a, you know, what I would see as a highly financialized pension system. And this was, this was true of, you know, the golden age, the traditional occupational pension funds as well as, as well as today. When you have a highly financialized

system whereby our pensions are dependent on, you know, investment in the, you know, the largest companies, the key industries of the economy, then it, you know, it does breed conservatism in how you're able to respond to sort of change in the economy or how you're able to sort of manage, manage transition. Because, you know, low behold, anybody threatened the pensions. And you'd like to think somebody stops thinking, well, maybe it would have been better if our financial futures weren't putting that kind of jeopardy in the first place, which was, which was never necessary. Yeah. I mean, what's something you write, which is in the early pages of your book. And I think this is a sort of a sentiment that we've really thoroughly explored in the last

sort of just under a half hour, which is rubbish pensions are an affront to our essential humanity. And I think we can, we can sort of see that this idea, this idea that you shouldn't just basically sink or fuck off and die or just keep going until you stop being useful to someone who counts is something that I think if we all had a choice, we would want to feel like was happening for us. We would want to feel like we could, as by working together, opt out of that, that we could, we could all live the kinds of lives that we think are worthwhile, and that we could do that through cooperation, rather than maintaining the sink or swim competitive element that is introduced, as you say, by essentially a lie, a falsehood, an idea that we are meaningfully

competing as opposed to just buying a lottery ticket, essentially. Right. And so I really sort of, I think this really illuminates, you know, what you say that rubbish pensions are in fact an affront to our essential humanity, complicated though they may be. It's, you know, you could say this about a lot of different parts of the economy. Honestly, pensions are only or even our biggest problem. But yeah, I stand by that kind of statement because it's exploitation of, you know, just sort of biological function that we can't avoid, you know, getting old. And there will come a time when you can't contribute to the labor market in a way that's going to enable you to sort of meet your basic needs. So you have to have, you know, obviously increased life expectancy

is kind of a good thing that we're living longer. So, you know, until recently we're living longer anyway. So you need to have some sort of provision that was financial security in later life that isn't just down to sort of good luck or family helping you out. You know, the fortune of being able to work for longer because many people are simply not able to. And for that to become a sphere of sort of competition and exploitation is just, it's really crap. And as I say, like unnecessary, it's not a system that anybody would choose. It's a system that enriches, you know, our few companies in a few industries, but is essentially completely irrational. If you're going to have the state, there are all kinds of things, I think the state should do a lot more things than our

society and our economy, but all kinds of things I think the state could probably do a little bit less of. But if there's one thing you want the state to do a bit more of, it's to ensure that we're, you know, able to enjoy a slice of retirement before we die. You know, there are question marks about when retirement should begin. You know, I think we shall be grown up to growing up enough to accept that if people are living a lot longer and healthier for longer, then perhaps we should be retiring later. The evidence suggests, you know, of late that that isn't the case. There isn't something that we can rely upon anymore. So let's put the right foundations in place to, as I say, like deal with the uncertainties, the things that we can never possibly control about the future.

That's what pensions are and should be. Well, I think this, if I want to sort of connect this to the last, one of the last conversations I had in this vein, the one that I hand with Dominic Leuzder from LSE about a sort of energy pricing policy and how decisions sort of made in the late 80s and early 90s have led to the insane energy bills being faced sort of around the broadly speaking West today, right? I think we can sort of see the same relationship with uncertainty, which is the mitigation of uncertainty for a small number of preferred players in the economy. And that is sold to the public with essentially the same kind of delirious optimism that because everything is going well now in this period of unprecedented capital expansion,

that it will all continue to go well in the future. And so long as not one thing goes wrong at all ever, then this house of cards that we've built to replace the sort of solid foundations that we had will enable more people to say be sheltered for a lower material cost. If you live, if I can continue the house metaphor. But replacing bricks, I mean, it's sort of now, I mean, it beggars belief that anyone would possibly have swallowed that particular load of tripe that cards could perform the same structural function as bricks, so long as everything remained perfect in the world stop turning. And yet just as with energy, as with pensions, I'll go back to what we started out at the beginning, which is the reality of these schemes

manifestly failing, making some people sink because of a kind of incorrect and cruel ideological belief that some people ought to to preserve the rest of us when it's not, don't have to, is now, as I said, it's failing in front of our eyes. The defined contribution schemes, people are running dry. And now, and now something else is going to have to be done, because the wild, irrational, risky gamble based on either delirious optimism or optimism, or cynicism, or a combination of the two appears to have once again run aground. Absolutely. I mean, just one one, just on the technical side of it, one difference between the UK and the US is that various I've wanted to develop annuities market in the US, or people

have the 401k savings, and they draw down those savings in retirement. Whereas in the UK, typically, you would, you know, give your savings to an insurance company would then pay you a regular income. There's problems in both ways of organising it. But if you're able to do that in the UK, then you won't necessarily run out of money before you die, but you will be living on, because annuities market is essentially broken in the UK, you'll be living on much less than you kind of expected to hope to. Yeah, but the broader point, you know, I couldn't agree more. And it's interesting, if we're precise about when the key decisions were made in the UK, you know, I think it's easy to say that the sort of fact of government and neoliberalisation was

a source of all the problems, and there were steps taken along the way to this individualisation then. But, you know, it was essentially the new Labour government, 2000s, where the real real damage was done. And I mean, that's, you know, this is, you know, I'm on political economists, it's kind of like a cliche that we didn't really have fully fledged neoliberalism, until the Social Democrats got back into government, same in the US as well with Clinton. Obviously, so, you know, so the decisions that they made in the mid-2000s, like just before the financial crisis, so, you know, the recognition that was, you know, things could be a lot worse than they are about to be if the Labour government had done nothing, if they hadn't acted at all and

just allowed people to just wholesale stop saving for a pension or just accepted that legacy of the factory governments, which is a very real prospect. So things could be worse if they had done nothing. What they decided to do was, you know, let the house on a highly financialised system whereby financial services providers, you know, through market mechanisms would always be able to provide, you know, a pension which was comparable to anything that the state could provide or anything that was previously provided, you know, via employers in the occupational pension system. And, you know, with the financial crisis in 2007, 2008, you know, that led to a rethinking of a lot of assumptions about how stable the finance sector

was and, you know, how reliable the products that it offers to the customers were in lots of ways. But strangely, that sort of rethinking never entered the sort of pensions terrain and we just sort of went ahead with it. In advance of the, in advance of, you know, alter-enrollment of this defined contribution pensions being sort of rolled out. There were serious debates about whether or not the state should provide these new schemes and whether or not we should have, yes, defined contribution, but it'd be notional defined contribution like they have in Sweden whereby it looks like people are saving and getting in what they get out of actually the state is managing all of the risks ultimately. There were serious debates about whether or not

the state should become a giant insurance company and provide annuities to people so you always know that you're getting a fair price, you know, obviously a system there for not one on profit. But invariably, whenever these sort of possibilities cropped up, the labor government chose to go down the route that was as marketized as possible. And, you know, that was partly because of sort of ideological zealotry. I wouldn't rule out that explanation, but it was also partly because the analysis suggested it was just as good. It was, you know, the financial sector was going to produce outcomes which were just as good as anything the state could provide because you had 20 or so years of, you know, booming if an sector and nobody could imagine that it would

ever end. So I have put this coin 19 times. It's always been heads. Yeah, you know, and it's, you know, it's not like the private pension system has, you know, failed to get off the ground since then it has got off the ground and is delivering products. But, you know, the kind of outcomes that people are going to be retiring on the next 10, 20, 30 years and nothing like what was anticipated when the system of Ottoman run was put in place in the mid 2000s for all kinds of reasons. It's just the ability to think beyond the immediate present circumstances was just absent. She's just so frustrating. Well, I think that's brought us around actually, I think, to a nice little stopping point that we can put a little bow on is it came down to being unable to live outside of

yourself. So Dr. Barry, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on and chatting with me today. This has been extremely interesting and you out there in podcast land. Take a look at your pension because the state sure fuck it isn't going to. And where can people find you online and possibly even if they are interested, take a look at your book. Between gigs at the moment. So you mentioned that I'm joining UCL, but I'm starting there in a couple of weeks. So I'm curiously off grid, but you can find my book on it from all good retailers and some not so good retailers, as well as pensions in parallel published by Oxford University Press. So you heard it here first, buy book, early buy book often, but not before contributing to your

pension. I'm going to throw back to either myself or my hooting co-hosts in the future past to take us home. Bye, everyone. Well, that was really informative, deeply, I'll actually stimulate it. You know what I love is hearing this joke every time this happens. It's good every time. And now that I'm doing it, I agree. You know, staying for that half hour segment has made me really late for the show, but I'm just going to say, worth it. Yeah, it's worth it. I just love sitting there in total silence. So thank you again for listening. We have a Patreon. It's $5 a month. You can get bonus episodes to include Britannology and we have a second Patreon tier at $10 a month that gives you a second Britannology per month. Also, we've got live shows when this comes out.

Milo will still be doing his Edinburgh Friends show. So go to that if you're in Edinburgh. We have a show on the 26th of August is sold out at the Edinburgh Fringe. Don't come to that. No, you will be turned away. I'm packing my suitcase as we speak. However, we also have our tour of Australia, which is basically sold out in Melbourne, but there's a second night in Brisbane and Sydney tickets have just gone on sale. All the links are in the show notes. Hopefully soon, I will have a show link for Canberra. But until then, we really appreciate you being listeners and we will talk to you next week. Bye bye.