TRASHFUTURE - Erotic Fan Fiction About Capitalism ft. Tom Kibasi

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

Tom Kibasi (@TomKibasi), who is the director the IPPR think tank during the week, joins us in a personal capacity over the weekend for a recording session. We talk about the two geniouses who re-wrote the Communist Manifesto because they got angry about being left out of class struggle (or something), we read our first ever Megan McCarticle, and then we break down the industrial strategy proposed by Tory MP Alan Mak, the Mak Attack. It's a big one folks! NOTE: Tom's audio is a little messed up from minute 40:00 to 49:00 - sorry as ever. Can someone who is actually good at this please reach out to me. xoxo Riley

Well, I'm going to take this opportunity to formally open proceedings of the show. It's my gavel. It's my knocking gavel. And I'm going to say welcome once again to your weekly episode of trash future the podcast about how the future is in fact shockingly trash still. Oh, no. I was counting on that. You thought it was going to get better, didn't you? Yeah, we all did. Well, we are going to hear a lot about some people who are trying to reinvent the future in order to make it better or cruel or and more asinine. We'll find out. I mean, we're going to think that the future is trash up to the point when Alan de Botton School of Life buys us contractually contractually have to say, actually, the future

is wonderful and it's great. Yeah, and it's completely fine. How cheating on my wife actually made her a better one. Yeah, no, it induced it induced the competition, right? And so market. Yeah. And so there's a market based answer. Yeah. And so my dick is scarce. That's not what I've had. It's not what I've had. It's not small. It's scarce. Isn't this like isn't this exactly what I ran? Like isn't this like I ran life? So like her husband was cheating on her, but she was like, well, that's fine because like in a market economy, like he should be allowed to exercise his choices. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know whether that's I don't know whether like that's completely true, but I got it from Adam Curtis

documentary and therefore like I'm going I'm going with it, man. Oh, I'm going to edit it should be I'm going to edit in one of the one of those Adam Curtis songs back in the bowl triumphantly. Wait, what do you actually want from me? Introduce yourself introduce yourself you dumb ass. Fuck. It's me. The best introduction you can have with me is me going like, oh, shit, I have to say something now. Yeah, it's me, Milo Edwards back in the bowl as per usual. You may remember me from every previous episode of this podcast. You can find me on Twitter at Milo underscore Edwards. Hell yeah. Hi, my name is Olga. I'm a comedian. My Twitter handle is at rock and roll guy and you may recognize me from the

base section of the KPMG anthem. We're putting that in right. Okay. My name is the same Kizvani. I'm the lost member of team 10. He was the six year old kidnapped by Jake Paul. I have a large adult son now. You could follow me at age Kizvani. I'm trying to like so someone told me this week friend of the show Ash Sarkar. She just basically tweeted me and she said, stop tweeting. So I'm trying to follow that principle. Wait, is Ash Sarkar the person screaming outside your house saying log off? Yes, I'm willing to like I am. I'm very happy to log off because like she scares me in a good way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think I think we're all universally in agreement. So like, I still have bad tweets on that

the less bad than usual for now and our esteemed guest. Yeah, Tom Kibasi. You can follow me on Twitter at Tom Kibasi. And during the week I run think tank IPPR. But this is Sunday. So I'm here in a personal capacity. Holy personal capacity. You're the head of the think tank called the IPPR, which is a think tank that advocates no peeing that that's got it exactly right. It's in order to get Britain into like power mindset. You know, it's the only way we're going to get through Brexit properly as a nation. If we just believe it's great is if we hold it. I read this great paper by the IPPR, which basically said that the way to create a productive economy across the country is by not peeing for one day a week

listening to five podcasts at three times a speed and going for a 10k run once every two days. Yeah, that's Jay Shetty right there. Guys, we got content. And instead of asking you guys if we're going to go to it, I'm just going to fucking go to it because today. Yeah, I'm being assertive. I'm negging all of you guys. I think, you know, I think like, like you guys have lovely nails and I want to know where you can get such nice fakies. Yeah, so we got Hussain, I guess that's a pretty good body pillow for a normie. My grandmother looks just like that body pillow. So we got like fucking content today and it's sort of coalesced around the theme of just this sort of I want to say like obstinate idiocy of

free marketeers and I'm so excited to get to some of it. Delicious and our first our first thing today is a pair of I think genuine brain geniuses like guys who must just who like you know the Mars attacks aliens so they have giant brains and fish bowls for heads like that's who these guys are Rupert Younger and Frank Portnoy giants of our age. Yeah, the truly the intellectual titans have written an article saying what would Karl Marx write today. I'm thinking young adult fiction. There's not in the mark. There's not a market in political economy. It's just going nowhere right or maybe like a kind of slightly better version of 50 shades or something. No, no, Karl Marx would like he wouldn't be writing at all. He'd be like droid. He'd be doing manga.

No, he'd be tweeting Karl Marx would be a poster and a podcaster today. Obviously he'd be making memes. Here is this 200 years after the philosopher's birth, two staunch believers in capitalism have rewritten the Communist Manifesto editorializing for some reason. Yeah, that's it's really baffling. Like why you would want to do that like like some bizarre social experiment or like a weird Al Yankovic kind of like terrible parody song where it's like it's like this famous song, but it's about like grilled cheese now. Here's how these two intellectual titans of our age have opened their activist manifesto as they call it cool. A specter is haunting the world, the specter of activism. All the powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to

exercise this specter. It is high time the activists in the face of the whole world publish their views. So what these guys have done essentially is they have rewritten the Communist Manifesto, but removing all references to class changing all of its meanings. Yes. Yes, they've rewritten it, but they're very proud that they've retained seventy four percent of the words that don't matter. Yeah, every word that does matter. All of the ands, buts and this are completely retained faithful to the original. Yeah, exactly. They very proudly say that they did a search and replace or find them replaced in their word document for proletariat and bourgeoisie. Replace them with just the haves and have nots, right? That's right. It's not a class struggle

anymore, right? No, no, it's just we're no, we're all a team, you know, we're going, you know what it is. We're going back to Veitling. We're going back to the League of the Just before Marx and Engels got in there where there were no all manner brothers. Isn't isn't the haves and have nots just like a dumber way of saying the bourgeoisie and the proletariat? I mean, it's not it's like materially not that different, but just like for written in like a reading age of a 10 year old. It's much less elegant. And also like the term have not implies that at some point they can be a haver, right? Yeah. So it's kind of just like neutering these terms. And yeah, I mean, they've effectively written. I wouldn't even say it's a kids book because even kids books

like a much more nuanced. I'm not really sure what they've done. You're these guys have done. Remember when Ian Miles Chong did his recut of Star Wars The Last Jedi because he was mad that it had a prominent female character. So he cut all the female roles out to make it a 30 minute movie with all men, but no plot. I mean, that's like basically what they've done, which is also what Ian Miles Chong does with all of his favorite porn. What he said is so how did the two of us, the article goes on, come to take on the renovation of the manifesto? The answer is our interest in a linchpin of modern free market capitalism, shareholder activism. So when I first read that, I just thought it's things myself. Is this just a parody? It's the

entire thing meant to be just a parody of itself, but it goes on and on and on. So imagine first writing this, but imagine then reading it and deciding it should be in a newspaper. That is just utterly baffling. Okay. Is shareholder activism what like Broodog did with the pink IPA? Yes, pink IPA for all the people who get pink eye when they rubbed shit in their eyes after reading about Broodog introducing that. Well, shareholder activism, as far as they see it, is basically people with money buying big stakes in companies and then voting to see how they influence their direction. Oh, I thought that was when Morgan Stanley organizes a half marathon in aid of computers from Mongolians or something, and then all of the investment

bankers get to pretend that they're good people. That's called social responsibility. Come on, Milo. Oh yeah, shit. The only like the only experience I have of shareholder activism is that seen in the dark night rises. I'm already saying that because I want Milo to see the Bane impression again. I don't know exactly which bit you're referring to. You know the bit, so like when when Bane like starts capturing the city, capturing the city. That went quite carry on. So so base what he sees is that what basically these guys see is when they say the activist manifesto they basically mean we want to solve all the world's problems without changing any of its property relations more or less. So they say more over

many of the haves to the wealthy can be allies in this struggle because they're activists already pushing for various beneficial policies. Think of billionaires such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg, who support film. Do you think of them? Do you think of maybe having ahead of a timely who already support philanthropic efforts to alleviate inequality. Likewise, many corporations already advocate for environmental and social causes. State of the art approaches to corporate governance already take into account pay inequality workers rights and more. Although I do quite like the idea of Mark's coming up with the term state of the art approaches to corporate governance as code for nationalization. This is just this is nationalization.

This is a state of the art approach to corporate governance. Well, it's the again, it's the they're just they seem to think like it's this is just this is just this weird blinkered liberalism where they just think, yeah, we're all friends. We're all in it together. No one has any opposed interests. And actually, we should let, you know, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg colonize the moon. And then we get the benefit of being their organ farms. But there is a productive member of society into galactic society. But it does speak to a much wider thing, doesn't it? That there is this sort of thing that you get on the page of the FT and some other places that sort of assumes that you solve the current problems of the economy and society by just sort of encouraging people

at the top, just to be a bit nicer, that you don't really need to reform or change any of the relations between any parts of society or restructure the economy. Because you can just say, if everyone could just be a bit nicer to each other, it will be fine. Yeah. So it locates itself in a much bigger thing that's going on that you that you see in the sort of heights of neoliberalism, right? There's the kind of like friend neoliberalism with a smile, and it'll kind of all be fine. Sure, I don't pay any tax. But do you know how many Mongolians now have computers as a direct result of my donations? And that's but that's so many of their efforts to like alleviate inequality tend to and this is where I sort of I always take issue with the

Bill Gates thing. We're saying, Oh, Bill Gates is great. He's does so much charity. It's like, yeah, but the charity Bill Gates does is he's just appropriated an enormous amount of wealth by partly by starving the public sector. And then he turns around to the public sector and says, I'll fund your schools if you do my curriculum. And his curriculum is a just him doing an experiment on low income Americans. But B, it's him also training his future workforce. You know, so it's it's what really what I think a lot of this really comes down to is the kind of painting a philanthropic face on large just on largely like pro billionaire policies written by billionaires. Who would have thought billionaires would write pro billionaire policy? Oh, fuck,

I just realized what fuel is. They're trying to get us all drinking it so that then in a few years time will be much more nutritious when they turn us into Soylent. Exactly. No, I actually don't agree with you on that. So I don't think you can look at the Bill Gates. Well, I agree with you on the fuel thing, but I don't agree with you on the on that point about what is the motivation of Bill Gates and doing this. So the problem is not that this is some nefarious plan to really turn Detroit into a new source of workers for Microsoft. I don't buy any of that kind of stuff. The problem with it is a different problem. It's that by having so much wealth be able to be concentrated in one person, one family with the sort of 80 billion 90 billion that Bill Gates has, that it's then

means that the actual really big questions for society about how should kids be educated and what's important, lose their democratic character, because it just comes down to the views of one individual because he has such an enormous amount of wealth and power. And I think that's the problem with it. It's fundamentally undemocratic and you create a structure in society that says, this guy gets to decide what your kids are going to learn about, not it's not a question that's negotiated between different parts of society as a whole. And that's with concentration of wealth and power. But personally, Tom, like billionaires, the only people I trust with really important decisions like which color of car should be in space? And should we nuke North Korea?

I mean, I'm against all billionaires except for Wyatt Coke. So I'm looking forward to the Wyatt Coke fashion curriculum. It's so bad. The fact that I have the same last name as him is a complete coincidence. I repeat complete coincidence. I'm not related or affiliated with the Koch Brothers at all. Olga slowly pulls on a jacket over her very aggressive Hawaiian shirt. Can I just point out that actually, it does show you what money can buy you, the Koch Brothers, because they've managed to persuade the entire world to call them the Koch Brothers rather than the Koch Brothers. It shows you what billions can do, right? The name is Objective Fiscal. It shows that you can get one of those rare things, a shirt that works in the boardroom at

the Disco Tackle. Do you think after a hard day's work being billionaires, they like to treat themselves with a nice refreshing glass of Diet Koch? Marks and Engels were revolutionaries, but also pragmatic. They wanted their ideas to be discussed as real alternatives. If they were alive today, we are convinced they would promote activism rather than revolution as a powerful social force. If only the activists in various areas, financial, environmental, political, corporate, and social, could unite. There is a strand of activism running through not only the and everybody bite down in your wallet. This is to the listeners as well. There is a strand of activism running through not only the Arab Spring, Trump, Brexit, and Macron, but also through

hedge funds pressuring underperforming companies. Hedge fund managers of the world unite where you have nothing to lose but your chains. That is like a Venn diagram of things where the Venn diagram circle is just labeled completely unrelated things and the other Venn diagram circle is other completely unrelated things. I really like how they associate revolution of like the Macron victory as if it was this kind of actual thing and not a bunch of people that would rather have some fucking dipshit and rather than a fascist. At least worse choice, but then also it's kind of interesting to put yourself on the same moral plane as people fighting for their democratic rights in the Arab Spring and losing their lives and you saying that a

hedge fund taking an activist position, it's just it actually is morally squalid. Hey look, all I'm saying is that like, you know, the gunning down of like 50 activists entire square, you know, it's sort of akin to like, you know, Hugh Bottomley Jones losing his bonus. He won't be able to go skiing and, you know, knew his monocle subscription. And that's like being dead. Yeah, how many Mongolians got computers as a result of the Arab Spring? Zero. Okay, last line, last line from this. And then we're going to move on to an article that if this didn't boil your brain, the next one will. It made my eyes bleed. So they say look, the original manifestos proposals wouldn't get a passing grade today in any setting left and right

alike reject its arguments on labor and property. Do they really do they really? Yeah, the radical left represented by checks notes. Tony Blair. Yes, the Marxists who are famously anti box of the neoliberal Marxists. So one of the most important texts in the history of mankind apparently wouldn't get a passing grade. No, it wouldn't get a passing grade now. But ultimately, I think, I think, Tom, what you said earlier is his spot on, which is largely that, you know, neoliberalism has looked sort of the two sort of avatars of neoliberalism have been like merry and netted around to like look at a classic anti liberal text and have largely said, Oh, hey, maybe if we change 26% of the words, we can utterly transform the meaning. And hey,

maybe we can update Marx and Engels to make them say to the opposite of what they meant. But on the other hand, it is worth now knowing that we have a statistic that we did not know before, which is that 26% of the words in the communist manifesto really matter. It's like revolutionary for publishing. And the idea of actually like lots of words in the English language do not need to actually be like that. They don't need to exist. So these guys also I was wondering, like, how is it? Does it qualify as a rewrite where they kept most words? Surely that's not a rewrite. Well, it's like, you know, okay, this is like kept the words that changed the meaning. Holy shit. It's a director's cut. Yeah, it's a fanfic. It's a furry family. It's

a capitalist fanfic about the communist manifesto. So we should write one. We should write one where we remove it becomes a manifesto about how Karl Marx touched her can. We should write one where we remove like, you know, 50% of the words who does capital, but we replace it with like furry porn thick that we get from Tumblr. I want the Justin Trudeau reimagining. That's called the people fester and there's the button on that segment. I've selected a next reading. So to sort of close out this segment before we go into our next section. One of the one of the things Tom Tom is is an expert on is health care. You would say you're roughly an expert on health care, right? You sort of help some governments do some stuff with health care. Yeah, let's just

say Tom knows what he's talking about. And this is an older article, but it's the first one I think by Megan McCartle. We've ever read. If you're not familiar with Megan McCartle, genius Megan, but she has like double digit brain cells, like she's a real genius. What did she say about grandfather Well, yeah, well, and this is again, this is sort of referencing a chopper episode from a while back, but they read an article of hers where she said, actually, it wouldn't have made sense to install sprinkler systems in Grenfell, because that could have pushed the price of housing up a little bit or push the prices up for the developers. If you fireproof something like Grenfell, and it might have meant that people might have had to live slightly further outside of the center,

and maybe more people would have died in accidents from longer commutes than burn to death in Grenfell. So actually, that is the most idiotic thing I think I've ever heard. That's actually just like the galaxy brain. Me and I thought the communist manifesto rewrite was going to win the prize for idiocy. I told you, but it turns out there is a better candidate. So that's who this is and she's a regular. She appears regularly on on choppo. She's a favorite reading subject of theirs, but this was sort of so perfect for Tom that we're going to we're going to do a Megan McCartle article, because if you do recall how a couple of months ago, Amazon, JP Morgan, and Barkshire Hathaway. Yeah, we're going to sort of basically try to do a corporate single payer

more or less health care that we're going to try to transform health care through a corporate merger of some kind in the crossover super, Mary superhero movie blockbuster of the summer, the health care Avengers. Well, Megan McCartle has taken her genius to write basically write an apologia for that particular abomination. I mean, at the start of all this, it's kind of a bit of a joy, right? Because it's it's a bit like, you know, when Uber and Lyft were like, we're going to think of this new innovation, it's going to be a multi person vehicle that goes from destination to destination. And it has different people who get on and off. We're not sure what to call it. And that like the rest of society was that that's called a bus, right? There is a name for

already is just called a bus. Yeah, exactly. Like we haven't been to this great new thing. This this Amazon thing is a bit like the observation that, you know, the rest of the world had a very long time ago, which is maybe you should provide health care for everyone. So they have a million lives covered in their scheme. I'll tell you what's better than a million lives covered. There's 65 million lives covered in the UK through the NHS. And in the US, you know, work a lot better than a million lives, it would be 320 million lives covered, which would be a single pair for the United States. Very simply, that might be the answer. Well, let's keep that in mind as we go into the reading. So can Amazon transform health care?

Megan McCartle asked a rhetorical question or headline. It's not a crazy idea. It's not crazy. It's not crazy. I swear. Health care costs are a bit like the weather she opens geniously. Everyone talks about them, but no one does anything about it. When we think that the weather is something that you could do something about. Yeah, Megan McCartle really wishes we could just, you know, we could weather machine. Yeah, why isn't big government taking control of the weather? Because only Poseidon does that. They differ in this regard. People want to do something about health care costs. So she's saying everyone likes the weather. I'm not really sure. She's a great

writer, guys. And yet those costs have long outpaced inflation and are projected to reach one fifth of the US GDP by 2025. It's real stumper. Megan McCartle advocating that we blow up the sun. She's Mr. Burns, I think. I feel like at some point she will pen an article which says we just need to blow up the sun. No, she's going to say let the free market blow up the sun. Oh yeah. So a partnership of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan is forming between them an independent company, quote, free from profit making incentives and constraints to provide US employees and their families with simplified high quality and transparent health care at a reasonable cost, enabling them to tackle the enormous challenges of health care

and harness its full benefits. Okay, first question. Mary fuck kill Amazon, JP Morgan. But it's it's really interesting, right? That a famous libertarian has said, hey, maybe free from profit making constraints, they'll finally be able to provide the service. Except that isn't really what they've said at all. All they've said is that their profit making motive is more important than the health care company's profit making motive, right? So for them, health care is an expense. So they want to keep the expenditure down. And why do they want to keep the expenditure down so they can have higher profits for themselves? It's just a different profit making motive. It's not free from a profit making motive. I love how they still

bother to like lie through their tits with their teeth like, oh, yeah, we don't have any profit making motive in this like a fucking vampire opening a blood bank and being like, no, I just want to improve society. John Rental does on his own time. In fact, they say and if they can more power to them, Megan McCartle continues Amazon at all paying Amazon and others and outlandish profit would be well worth it if they can actually dam up the river of money that flows into the health care system every year. Wait, let's just get that straight. So what you want to do is to spend more money on Amazon and less money on treating people who are sick and curing disease. Well, Tom, it's because all that money great. It's because all that money flowing

into the health care system. It's it's like a law of physics. We can't do anything about and it just happens naturally. Absolutely. It's not a policy choice. No, nothing to do with drug companies insurers or policy choices. It just happens and we have no idea how and remember like libertarian say we can't do anything about it. Yeah, I want to be able to do things conveniently like ask Alexa why my penis is leaking and then she laughs at you. I really you know, funnily enough, like someone who was talking about this was none of it. None of it, but our personal friend of the show Martin Chakrally, who's now in prison, but on one of his like YouTube love you, Martin. Miss you every day. You're pouring one out from a man, Martin, pouring out a bottle

of AIDS medication from a man, Martin. Well, like one of his gaming streams once he was talking about he was talking about like how he like one of his big plans once he had like beaten the feds was that he wanted to start his own health care company to provide private sector health care at like a really affordable cost. It's only affordable housing here, right? Oh, it's it's it's only a matter of time before like the pool brothers, Jake and Logan not you, but they start very competing health care companies and that's the thing like YouTubers. That's what YouTubers are going to do next. Oh, of course. It's gonna be like, yo, like subscribe and check that blood pressure. So here's here's how out why Mac Megan thinks that this might be a good idea.

By the way, can I just give you my favorite fact on you as health care? Oh, please do. Okay, so it's a bit nerdy, but but but here goes. So firstly, the majority of health care spending in America is government spending. So 55 percent of health care spending in the states owned is spending by the government, right? So the US as a country spends its government spends as much as the European average on health care every year and still doesn't cover all of the population. And then you layer an entire private system on top of it. So it's just the most inefficient system on the planet. But it's worth knowing that already that the US is already spending the same as European countries without covering the population. And with that fact in mind,

let's see why Mac Megan thinks this is going to be what fixes that. Yeah, exactly. Oh, wow. Spoiler alert. It won't strap in. Yeah, strap strap in. And like again, put some cotton but gauze around your eyes and ears in case your brain leaks out. Buy down on this pencil. Let's start with the little known fact that most large companies self ensure they generally pay outside firms to administer their health insurance for them, but they're financially responsible for their claims. A large employer is a little statistical universe with unusually healthy employees balancing out the bills for unusually sick ones. So thank you for explaining insurance to us, Megan. So well, well, but let's let's just pause there for a

second, right? So so in most countries in every part of the world, right, people of working age pay more into a health system than they take out of it. So actually already the cross subsidy applies between people who are elderly and the working population and the working population and kids, not between different parts of the working population. That's why they self ensure because fundamentally it stops the transfer of risk between them and the people who actually need it who are the elderly or kids. It just makes no sense to carry on. No, this this this makes about as like that's the thing. The first two things we read today make about as much sense as one another. The capital is taken the communist manifesto and Megan McCartles utterly economically

illiterate and for health care. I didn't add in the so so they know a little bit about insurance is her point there. I didn't the fact that Amazon is really good at technology. Sorry, it was really really good. Sorry, really, really, really good. I don't want to editorialize justice to her. I'm going to do justice to Megan's prose style. She's a modern day Proust. Thank you. I didn't the fact that Amazon is really, really good at technology. I love how specific that is good at technology. That's like I'm good at business. It's good. It's like we are good at audio and most health care companies aren't much medical technology is wondrous to be sure, but the systems that tie all that technology together are by the standards of any other industry, a hot mess. There are a

number of reasons for this from privacy laws to provide a fragmentation, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that and she just sort of degenerates into squawking because Megan McCartle is doing her thing where she's taking a very simple problem, whether it's we should have sprinklers and housing high rises or we should have single payer health care and bogging you down in just detail after detail after detail. It sort of reminds me of what we were talking about earlier in the episode, which was about Bill Gates and mice. Yeah, it's what we're talking about Bill Gates and basically selling his products back to you, selling his products back to you in the form of charity. And I was just thinking, obviously, like Microsoft isn't in this particular example

of like setting up health care, but there's not, you know, it's not completely inconceivable to think that like Microsoft would be in the run to like be providing these types of very, very good technology services because after all, Microsoft is very, very good at technology. Despite the fact that like, you know, you know, that, you know, the NHS crisis, the systems crisis and how like it was all completely run on like these big probably patch problems in like windows. Was it Windows 7 or like Windows XP, I think, where they were on. Also, just let's be clear that what she says just factually wrong. Yeah. So, so 15 to 25% of healthcare costs in America are administration costs much higher than here, for instance, where they're 2% versus 15 to 25% in states depend which study

you read. And what causes that difference is the structure of the health system. So because they have so many different people paying for healthcare, right, you have so many different health insurance plans and different payers. As a result, the system is fiendishly complicated. So it's nothing to do with the use of technology that makes it complicated. It's the structure of the system. And what this proposal is to make, you know, Amazon collaborate with others is keeping exactly that structure in place. So just just wrong on the facts. But yeah, you know what it is, it's like you're driving the wrong direction. And you've decided you want to fix it by making your car a little bit faster. So eventually, when you get around the world, you'll be where you're looking

to go. Yeah, or it's like you're driving the wrong direction, but you fix the indicator light. I was like, so what that makes no difference, but carry on. Well, and the thing is she's so she mostly focuses on getting technology right and creating some unified some unspecified unified solution. But she says most importantly, you're dealing with human beings that are most stubborn and vulnerable, your regime of evidence based medicine will found her on the fact that human bodies are not well standardised. Do you have a liver? Do you have a liver or lung? If only we could predict the human body using evidence, it won't run by some kind of mysterious black magic. I'm fairly sure that in fact, they're quite similar. Yeah, because that's the thing is

going to throw it out there. I love I know I love having being in a capitalist system where I get to choose how many kidneys I have. I mean, I'm looking forward to when like new media companies start taking up hospitals. You look for Buzzfeed where you need a surgery and they just give you a hat. But she said basically it's sort of facing sort of non standardised human bodies with their inscrutable livers and humours and stuff. Too much blood. You need to be like I want a second liver 41 kinds of pancreatic cancer. You didn't know you had number 32 will shock you. Well, that that's be fair is in fact true. There are many more types of cancer than than people realise. But it says your attempts to beat down costs will run aground when you discover that many

marker participants enjoy being the only game in town, like rural hospitals and pharmaceutical manufacturers. And you cannot avoid dealing with them unless you want some combination of legal trouble or employee revolt. I mean, this is absolute drivel. So so rural hospitals are going bust at a rate of knots in the states, partly because the opioid crisis and they're not reimbursed for taking care of people who don't have insurance like people who have opioid addictions. Congress passed legislation, which means that Medicare cannot negotiate with drug companies on prices. So the idea that somehow we don't know what the problems are or how to solve them is just total drivel. That's brain strategy is what that is. It's 12th dimensional chess. That seems

like a very normal policy that definitely benefits someone. Here's her. Here's her indictment of the American health system. But the one reason our health care system is such an expensive mess is that Americans hate being told what to do. They demand maximum expensive freedom of choice about their health care and they rebel if they can't get it. Worse still, if they're denied it, they call their legislators who do things like telling insurers to stop denying so many claims for experimental treatments of dubious worth. Yeah, it's just you can't. It's just Americans have too much freedom for health care. It's definitely the patient's fault. Absolutely. Yeah, it's nothing to do with insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies. It's all down to the

people. They're actually they're actually so free that sometimes the level of freedom can cause their bowel to rupture. It's like it's like look, my kidneys may have exploded, but I'm not a fool. I'm going to go and find the best deal for the most luxurious care at the premium rate because I'm worth it. And I learned that from a shampoo commercial. All I'm saying is that when the trash future opens its own hospital because we're going to be billionaires one day, we're going to offer the treseme version of kidney transplants. We look curious. Salon quality at retail prices. It's a kidney transplant that'll make you silky smooth. Hey, your kidneys are so shiny and like Hussain just taps his nose. I can't I can't wait for the commercial like, you know, like the axe

body spray commercials. There'd be guys walking down or in links is called in this country. You just guys getting swarmed by girls. I can't wait for links to produce its own version of a pancreas where you're walking down the street. Women are just like lowering their glasses like oh look at how much insulin he's producing. Thanks. Damn that guy's blood glucose levels are properly regulated. Man, sugar is sweet, but his blood is perfect. Peter teal. I'm going to leave before we go into the break. I'm going to leave us on on on Megan's final philosophy philosophical muse here. You know, maybe Amazon with big data and smart algorithms like the one that recently enticed me to buy Russian cake piping tips, a product I had previously

no interest in or awareness of can get us to start acting like more responsible healthcare consumers. Can I just point out the blinding the obvious? So we're saying that the company that's really successful at getting you to buy things you don't want and to consume more shit you don't need is going to be the company that's so good at that that it's going to stop you from consuming anything that you do want and things that you do need. That's that's idiotic. Yeah, that's yeah. I had all my limbs amputated. It was a great deal. Two for one on leg amputated. How does Amazon Prime work in Amazon healthcare?

So you need like an over you need like you need like an urgent kidney donation and then some guy like delivers it to you know delivers it in a prime box. I think it's permanent two for one. No, you know, it's like you really need that kidney and the doctor's like, well, it's going to come between three to 10 working days. If forever you sign up to our prime service and order by 5pm, like, you know, there's nothing there's nothing that's stopping Amazon from like setting up like a tiered like structure of like their own health care, right? And isn't that affecting whatever you like private health insurer does already, right? I'm going to say how other health care providers don't offer you a subscription to Emmy award winning TV shows.

But in the future, that's true. Well, no, it's that we wouldn't you wouldn't illegally download a kidney or would you? All right. I think that puts the button on the first segment. We're going to take a break and we'll see you all in a second. Okay. Excellent. So who is who is Alan Mack, the author of Getting to the Future First, How Britain Can Lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution, known as Evangelion Rebuild Five. I for one am very excited for when he inevitably like goes on. I'm a celebrity. Get me out of here. I actually I actually regularly chat with Alan Mack on the Matt Hancock MP app, or as he's known in our as he's known in our saucy girls DM. I love sending him a message on

Mac Attack 69. What what the Mac Attack has done is partnering with conservative home, the home of conservatism. It really like it does what it says in the 10 and it also labels the 10 a 10. So he's written, he's written this paper that's kind of tries to set out the Tory position on the fourth industrial revolution, which is basically like if the first industrial revolution was steam powered machines, the third industrial revolution was like the advent of computing. The fourth industrial revolution is the advent of automation AI and similar like exponential technologies, right? And there is this big debate on how to deal with it, like how do we deal with the fact that most people are going to be out of work? And so the

conservatives, specifically, Mac Attack 69 have written a document setting out a conservative vision for dealing with the fourth industrial revolution. And I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the cover image here. Zoom in. I can't just lean in. Okay, so do lean in feminism of Sandberg, this bitch. That robot is thick. I love any robots, a sex robot, if you use it, right? I'm really, I'm really intrigued by this image that like the two halves are so great. How on one half, there's a bunch of like angry people shouting at a bunch of people who look a lot like the tin man from the Wizard of Oz, who are apparently taking their job and going through the new employees door of the factory.

Meanwhile, on the other side, that's under Labor's dystopian future is labor, a future for the tin men, not for the few. And, and the other side says positive conservative vision, which involves a load of drones carrying packages, presumably bonds online shopping, packages just labeled online shopping. No, I love how online shopping is going to revolutionize healthcare guys. It's all my new kidneys being delivered by drone while some self-driving cars attempt to navigate what appears to be a cabbage patch. It's the mad max future that all the billionaires are preparing for, but I love also how then there's a foreman shaking hands with a robot. Well, two apparently executive slaves are just wearing VR headsets,

presumably on a, just presumably on a fake holiday somewhere. I like, I like the idea that they're watching VR porn and he's like explaining. He's like, right, now what you have to do is I know, and you really should be wearing a hard hat like me. So we'll link, we'll link the report in the show description so you can all check out this image, but it, it really is like, like Ben Garrison, like God of Fever and just started drawing in his sleep. We've not, we've not yet covered my favorite part, which is the man who looks a bit like a sort of young Dick Van Dyke circa diagnosis murder era who's using a 3D printer to build a sort of crude flute. Positive conservative vision guys. The industrial future where everyone will be able to build a flute,

flutes, online shopping, cabbage patch, getting jacked off by a robot. Alan Matt can bring all of this to us. Holy shit. So wait, wait, can you go back to the picture? Maybe the two panels are related. So the new jobs that those robots are walking into are actually jobs where they wank off humans while they watch. Yeah, no, this, the, the, the, the new employees factory is actually a sketchy massage parlor with many smoke stacks. Ah, and the guy holding the sign that says no jobs in massive letters. He's not actually complaining that there are no jobs for them. He's actually protesting saying no more hand jobs. We're not going to go through the whole of it, but I've got some highlights of what Alan Mack thinks Britain's economy should be in the future.

I'm delighted to share them with you, my friendly co-hosts and our listeners. Hell yeah. This is the Mac. If your, if your brains haven't already been grounded dust by the genius of the capitalist manifesto and then Megan McGriddle as Britain implements a new industrial strategy to secure our prosperity and enhance our productivity. After Brexit, we shouldn't forget that we're building on strong foundations around 250 years ago. It was Britain that launched the world's first industrial revolution powered by Colin steam and accelerated by new railways, roads and innovations like Stevenson's rocket heralding a new era of Britain, British industrial strength. So what immediately jumps out to me with this and this is what happens constantly

is he does evoke the major innovative potential of the first industrial revolution, which famously didn't claim lots of laborers lives in limbs powered powered by coal steam and the maimed bodies of children who had to climb into weaving machines otherwise known as Intel Pentium processor one. And it's a fantastic thing to see how sort of roughly human the machine is, but also how is that relevant to now? Like it's just this idea that somehow we have a first industrial revolution. So now that means that we're building on these great things. We had a huge program of deindustrialization in the 1980s and 90s. And actually, our industrial base has been massively weakened. So the argument surely is that we need to take decisive action now or precisely because

actually a lot of the foundations that we once had have already been destroyed. And we've got to make sure that we start to rebuild for a new future. You see, Alan Mack has actually anticipated that argument already much like Megan did as well. Jeremy Corbin and John McDonald are already using automation as an and deindustrialization I'll edit that in there as an electoral weapon mobilizing their supporters against a dystopia they have created themselves in which robots take workers jobs. Their Luddite trained union focused agenda involves quote managing new technologies, taxing innovation and heavy regulation that attempts to put the future on hold. If you look at what's really going on with automation, what it says is that in the 2020s,

it's not going to be that it's going to destroy a huge number of jobs. That's quite actually quite unlikely that most of automation AI will suffer from jobs. It will change who gets the job. So there's a real issue for some people in managing that transition is a really good question. And the second thing is just that as technology has a greater role in the economy, it drives up inequality. And those are huge questions for society. So this idea that all you need to do is to stand this sort of step back and relax and it all take care of itself just simply isn't true. We've had 10 years of stagnating wages. And if we don't have some serious policy response to these changes, then we're going to have another decade where wages go nowhere as well. So it's

just just this idea of the answer to all this change is basically to do nothing is bizarre. Yeah, I mean, and also it's like the fact that technology increases inequality is down to the fact that you can own technology, but you can't own people. And therefore the way in which the economics of it work are different, which leads me to think that Alan Mack, if he'd been around during the day, probably would have accused William Wilberforce of stifling innovation. Well, and that's just it, right? Like in his positive case, centers around suggesting that precision medicines will help us live longer, healthier lives, new energy technologies into more efficient national grid will lower energy bills, driverless cards will make roads safer,

induce congestion and innovation will raise living standards. But he never says for whom. He just assumes that the future will be evenly distributed. Much like Megan assumes that, you know, if only health care can get the incentives, right, it'll be evenly distributed. And much like sort of the the guys who rewrote the communist manifesto said, Oh, no, we can just make everyone nice enough, then everything will be evenly distributed. We don't have to take any action at all. Alan has a few actually a couple of policies, most of which are kind of milk toast, like increase innovation R&D, teach kids how to code the usual shit and computers to Mongolian teach Mongolian kids how to code teaching kids how to code is is really poorly supported by the

evidence, right? Most of the end suggests that machines going to be self coding or pretty soon or that sort of already in the foothills and doing that. So it's a total waste of time, this idea that you've set up coding colleges. Well, it's like it's the it's the same pull up your pants argument that Bill Cosby always said, right? It's the no before the allegations, the you damn kids, you know, with your rap music, pull up your pants, learn how to code. And it's the it's it's just another iteration of the of the I'm just gonna stick with this that sort of poverty is the result of sort of cultural choices on behalf of the poor. They didn't learn the right thing. They look the wrong way or whatever. It's utter fucking

tripe. Basically, like a lot of of the policies that advocates this milk toast thing, but one really stuck out to me, which is that he intends to introduce a new British innovation principle in the UK to counterbalance the effects of the EU's precautionary principle, which can hold back innovation. The enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty, the precautionary principle can unreasonably burden innovators with having to prove the absence of danger regarding a particular product service or procedure. It does not require regulators to weigh potential risks against potential benefits that society may enjoy from technological development and often constrains innovation. So what what why the precaution why he's his just why is Alan max description of the precautionary

principle utterly misleading. Firstly, right, he he confuses Lisbon principles, which are set by an ecologist in 1997 with the Lisbon Treaty. And the precautionary principle is basically saying you shouldn't start polluting and irreversibly destroying the environment without first knowing whether you know what the consequence of your actions are. So he takes that and then sort of says that that's been extrapolated across the entirety of society. And this is just not true. It's just factually false. Right. I mean, if it was true, then we wouldn't have Airbnb or Uber or any other innovation. So it's just it's simply simply a lie. Yeah. And he says that he wants to replace this principle that doesn't exist with another

principle that doesn't exist. The British innovation principle would place a statutory duty on all public sector bodies to ensure that whenever policy or regulatory decisions are under consideration, the impact on innovation as a driver for jobs and growth has assessed alongside any potential risks from technological development, which basically as far as they can tell means that if he can prove removing guardrails from around wheat threshers and having the occasional worker fall into the bread, I will make it 5% more delicious because of its sinfulness, then that's worth it. Blood has a lot of iron in it. Yeah. What I what I'm saying is if Richard Branson wants to build a sort of half chimpanzee, half human hybrid, he should be allowed to

and the bureaucrats in Brussels shouldn't be allowed to stop him because that's what innovation is. The problem with this is that it just assumes a world that simply doesn't exist. Right. Uber started without a regulatory response. And the question is not actually, is there too much regulation that is stopping innovation? The question is, is there sufficient regulation in order to make sure this innovation happens in a fair way? So if you take Uber as a really good example, which he does, in fact, Alan Mack actually does take Uber. He says, if we don't if we don't get the conservatives in power, then we'll just have labor who'll do stuff like trying to regulate Uber. Yeah, but I think Uber is a really interesting. So at some, at some level, I think you can see

all the convenience and the upsides to having Uber. And I think sometimes people on the left forget about the status quo ante, right? What was this? What was the state of mini caps before where it was a guy above a fish and chip shop who would probably take 50% of the driver's fare, you know, rather than 30% that Uber takes could be pretty unfair, pretty poor quality employer, unsafe cabs and all that kind of stuff. And Uber applied a system that was in many ways much fairer. The problem is that then Uber on top of that, right, couldn't just accept the great profits that you could make with that innovation. They then decided that they didn't want to pay national insurance on the employer's side. So they said that these were independent contractors. They

didn't want their drivers to be able to get the minimum wage. They didn't want their drivers to get holiday and sick leave and maternity pay. And so they exploited this sort of independent contractor status. Now, in my mind, it's not about finding a way to say, should we ban all app based transport? That's obviously stupid. But equally, there should be regulations in place that stop companies like Uber trying to exploit their workers by denying them basic rights and try to avoid their taxes. And surely we can all agree that actually you could have a system where a company both provided taxis on an app and also actually paid its taxes and treated its work as well. That should not be beyond the wit of man. So regulating Uber is exactly the

right thing to do. We're not talking about any man, we're talking about Alan Mack. The new Mack principle. It strikes me as like, you know, it's like one of those really obvious things, right? Like at this basic level, it's like, we're not complaining that it exists in an app form or like that it will exist in like whatever fucking VR headsets we're all going to be wearing in the next few years. Like, you know, the problems that we have with these companies are to do with like structural imbalance and like inequalities that exist within particular systems. But for a lot of like Tories like Alan, especially like these types of Tories who want to appear to be like the new young innovative crowd who like, you know, in any other sort of scenario would be

head of activate. But they're too old to do that. Like, yeah, it sort of feels like, you know, that is that kind of goes beyond them. But if you're talking about innovation in a company, like any sort of conversations around like rights around labor and responsibilities as like employers shouldn't even be entertained. It's just like innovation fire. It's like, it's really characteristic way of looking at innovation. So I mean, like, in just in the same way that, you know, remember when like Silicon roundabout was originally a thing. And George Osborne was like, it's all about like Silicon Valley innovation. You know, it's going to be this wonderful, like new, exciting project that's going to like replicate everything that's happening in Silicon Valley. And so he

sort of like ignored all the other like structural problems that were beginning to happen in the conversations in regards to like pay and contractors and like, you know, who should be allowed to work in these spaces and, you know, what kind of protection should they offer. It sort of feels as if like for the Tories, the conversation that started in like 2013 is still there for them, even though it's sort of advanced for everyone else. It's these are people. And in fact, this really dovetails in with the next sort of section I picked from this paper, which is that these people's imagination of what innovation can do for them is so blinkered and tiny. And I'll read you this. This is how Alan Matt kind of brings the case to life, you know, because

Uber ambulance. Please tell me it's an Uber ambulance. You're not. I mean, it's it's it's more banal. Opulence. So you've just shut down your computer after a long day at work. And like many computers, you head off in your car to face the rush hour motorway traffic battling tiredness all the way. So already technology hasn't liberated you from the world of work. It hasn't liberated you from their daily misery. You're still doing it once home you open. But what if while you were driving you could get down to some mac. Once home you open the fridge only to find that you forgot to pick up milk on the way home sound familiar only now new technology heralded by the fourth industrial revolution is on the verge of causing a social and consumer revolution

where driverless cars will let us relax during the commute and smart fridges will over refresh groceries before they run out. He's an infomercial. He's not even a person. He's like Barry Scott. He's like does this sound familiar? This is the best sponge you'll ever own. Oh my god. Hit. Let that sit for a second. Right, but his imagination is so tiny where it's like all it's like what we what's it's the best world he could imagine that we're like we're like automated post scarcity economy is an easier commute to your job you hate and you know you're just on the computer when like big you ever

shuts down the computer. But more than that question you like early onset dementia you've given yourself from like really believing Megan McCartle that causes you to just forget to get the milk all the time like oh well I'm still going to have that I'm still going to forget it. You know my brain is still you know down to its last three neurons but you know at least you know the computer will pick up milk for me. That's the future that they dream of that's their better tomorrow that's their positive conservative vision. Yeah well like you know you know I guess the next evolution of this is that you know your just the order is like automated so you'll get the same meal every time you come back come back home. Politically there's something quite smart about

it right it's basically trying to tell you look it's going to take away some hassle in your life it's all going to be very straightforward very uncomplicated and everything's going to be great and it's it's clearly as flawed an account as an entirely dystopian future where the machine's doing everything can we also to live in in this this very bleak world but it's just as idiotic right it's time to sell the public on a story that says this is not complicated and there's only an upside and there's an upside for absolutely everyone so it's not only unambitious but it's also kind of deceitful. Well it's also I think the the thing to note is precisely how middle class all of his examples are like this is not someone whose main struggle is feeding their

family or paying their rent or dealing with illness or disability this is someone who is basically comfortable in a sort of white-collar job who sort of is bogged down with a couple of the inconveniences of modern life because if you wanted to give deliver a real a real solution to most of the problems that most people face you'd have to actually wonder how are we dealing with work how are we dealing with unemployment how are we dealing with like housing benefit well and also with after this period of wage stagnation right and sort of rising prices and all that going on the idea that there's some large segment of the population whose sort of principal concern is forgetting to pick up the milk and everything else is great just I think

is showing a very detached relationship with reality. Yeah I mean it's just like one of those it's like one of those like things that you like come up with in fucking sixth form when it comes to like imagine what the future you know imagine what the future will be like in 10 years and then in 10 years time you're thinking to yourself wow like a decade ago I imagine that there'd be like self-driving cars everywhere but now my now my wife's boyfriend is trying to get another you know trying to start a relationship of a body pillow. Yeah so for this kind of way of telling a story of the future. And I think his concluding thoughts in this paper is he says it is impossible to resist the rise of the machines. Thank you. He was to fuck a robot. I know he this is a guy

who like I think he must just constantly be just just bashing his dick off to like Borg for or like he wants to be assimilated so bad. It is impossible to resist the rise of the machines so we must let them lift us towards a global Britain that uses the fourth industrial revolution as a springboard to a more productive outward looking economy. This will mean mutating opportunities more jobs rising living standards and more money for our public services even though I might add he says that taxing the robots will only decrease regulation so I don't really know how we'll get more money for the public services. Put it on the side of a bus. That's the answer. Absolutely. Yes that comes from the magical mystery box. Yeah that's a crime against the

English language. Well I mean we may not have enjoyed this document but I will say I've received actually something which was really great from Alan Mack which I got an advanced copy of his forthcoming gangster rap album The Ten Mac Commandments so do check that out. It's in stores soon. Guys we've been recording for a little bit and I think it's time we have our stencil it's time to write some stuff down the side of a bus. Yeah let's go. We ready? Time to go and get jacked off by a robot. Please Milo it's called Mac'd off when you get jacked off by a robot. Oh yeah sorry sorry but it shouldn't be taxed that's the key thing. Tom. Nor regulated. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Thanks for having me on.

It's been great. It's been fun. All right. Is there any new publications with the IPPR? Grace has something out now. We have a publication a week at the moment as part of the Commission on Economic Justice so we just put out some stuff about changing income tax. We put out some things about wealth taxation so we've had a load of interesting stuff recently but have a look at ippr.org to find out more about what we're thinking and talking about. Hell yeah. I'm here in a personal capacity of course. You know Tom is only here as a fan of the IPPR. Exactly. He's an enthusiast. And our theme song is Here We Go by Jin Sang. Olga you have one more. I'd like to use this opportunity to formally ask out Alan Mack. So if you're listening to this now I'd love to have

some dinner maybe stuck your fridge. Olga you're doing a preview for your show soon right? Yeah probably. All right I made that joke earlier. All right everybody thank you for listening. I'm going off for a back sack and Mack. Fucking hell Milo stop but let me end the show. Thank you everybody so much for listening. Have a good night. I'm hitting close now. Oh oh oh you