TRASHFUTURE - Jagmeet Me in Temecula feat. Luke Savage

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

We’re putting this episode out early because it’s the day of the Canadian federal elections and we want to encourage all our Canadian listeners to go vote for the NDP. Here's a link to where your nearest polling station is located: https://www.elections.ca/scripts/vis/FindED?L=e&PAGEID=20 To discuss the Canadian elections, the US Presidential primary, and some terrible journalism, we have the full cast of Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) joined with Canadian journalist, podcaster, and friend of the show Luke Savage (@LukewSavage). It’s one for the ages, folks. Luke is also the host of the Michael and Us podcast, which you can access here: https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus We have a Patreon and signing up at the $5 tier will give you an extra episode each week. You’ll also gain access to our incredibly powerful Discord server. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

This is now the cold open and we're you're gonna finish the pivot to ASMR say welcome to trash future eating Milo Edwards has a pack of some notes. I hate it but I don't think the listeners do I think it's just you know the listeners were all the all the listeners are going to leave and we're going to be left at the horny ones just the horny ones are going to stay Louis the 15th thing of being like the podcast listeners say more. Milo listeners Milo was wearing a shirt with a high collar it looks like a starfleet uniform. Yo that shirt's really weird no it's cool it's not bad it's not that it's it's bad it's just strange it does have a very high collar and it's meant to be worn with body armor over it it's tactical I should clarify Alice it's not like a high collar college it's like a kind of like half roll net kind of I can't work out if it's a t-shirt or something else it's a t-shirt that's meant for life. Like the base layer no I'm thinking of more like the like stand collar you wear with white tie just bring those back oh yeah if you if that had an under armor logo on it then you'd have like a gigantic fat neck and you'd be shouting at airport security I look a bit like I should be like cattle prodding someone in Logan's run. Are you out of this I'm the Crest doing no not yet so what I was going to say was that last night I was finishing the sun bites we can't start the real episode I was organizing a show in Russian in London for this Russian community doesn't speaking English never been to the UK before and he's doing a bit of crowd work and so it's all Russian crowd right and he asked this one woman where she lives and she goes well I've just moved to London about she before that I lived in Maidstone for quite a while and then like even the Russians in the room were like laughing at the concept of living in Maidstone. And then he's like well what's funny about that is it like a rough area and then the woman goes no it was fine until all the fucking Romanians moved in. Russians cancelled.

Exactly Maidstone will remain a Russian area as it always has been. Look that's actually is core Serbian territory into the 15th century. No it's after as what happened is Stalin he actually seeded a population of Russian speakers into Maidstone so that in future he would be able to seed it into the Soviet Union on the basis of protecting Russian speakers is a very good strategy Milo is now finishing the crisps which means the theme song can now come in immediately. Hey welcome back to Trash Future it's me Riley you may remember from every other episode of this show and I of course joined by Milo and Nate here in studio hello hello Hussain somewhere in a different room who will be joining us randomly as the recording goes on no he's actually here he's going to be here the whole time like here every single episode he's here he's silent he's joining us via mind link yeah Hussain joining us on the present. Alice joining us also by mind link from Glasgow I know Harold and seal fantastic and also we have Luke Savage returning champion here live in studio from the sunny beaches of Canada Luke how are you. I'm good how's it going guys. Oh fine fine fine you know nothing nothing going on at all in my my home country know it's awfully boring here. Yeah no no pivotal no pivotal political event happening Hussain has gotten off mind he's continued to be here as he has been all along yeah I've been here slightly more.

He's wearing he's wearing the t-shirt and everything so I love branded content yes so if you listen to our episode with Rob Russo you'll learn you've learned about everyone in Canada that you shouldn't vote for liberals the conservatives and the PPC. But then there are two more parties we have the Greens who's a leader Elizabeth may just had a single use plastic straw photoshopped out of her hand after a picture was taken of her with one. So Luke you have the hand photo shoved into blackface instead. So Luke can you tell me what will Elizabeth do as Prime Minister now that all the Canadian MAGA people are going to vote for her to trigger the S.J. Dubbs the plastic straws. Well first I have to chastise you for your Anglo chauvinism because you've actually managed to erase the block of a quaw. Oh right which is unforgivable. So I'm storming out in protest. We're never going to get our CVC funding this way.

I'm committed to biculturalism so I'm outraged. We're going to do this entire podcast again in French in an hour. That's impressive. That's the only way you're going to get a Canada Council grant out of this which I know is the game plan. We have the Kancon. Yeah we got a podcast about embezzling money from your jet ski dealership in Montreal. Why would anyone need a jet ski in Montreal? It's the two greatest enemies of the Quebecois, the Salafiste and the Kali ski du Accident.

Look everyone knows that there are two kinds of French people. The French people in France who are constantly doing blackface drawing Mohammed who all work for 30 minutes a day for the government. And then the kind of French people who live in Quebec who are still like obsessed with Christian schisms from the 16th century and work very diligently selling counterfeit cigarettes so they can pay bribes to their entirely mafia government. For regular French people you missed out traveling on a scooter to have sex with women who aren't their wife. So Wayne Briley are you saying that the Quebecois are just French rod-drayer? Yes I'm saying that. Quebecois is like one of these rod-drayer intentional communities that got way out of hand.

It's l'option benedict the Italian-Americans of Canada. I mean not too far off. So I'm basing this solely on watching MMA and knowing who George Sampierre is. So my impressions of Quebec is based solely on that one guy but it seems to be pretty close to what you just said. So just to get back into a little bit of the canned con here because we need that grant. Luke can you tell us a little bit about the Green Party? Are they actually left-wing or are they just eco-fascists? I mean they're kind of whatever you want them to be.

Like a catch-all carte blanche political party. They're actually in some ways a bit like the Liberal Democrats. They're probably more analogous to that. I mean with less influence and fewer seats. But just in the sense of like they can pretty much be whatever you want them to be and they sort of oscillate with election cycles and they're very leader-centric as well. So they can sort of be whatever you want them to be. They got candidates who will have in their bios like yeah I'm an ardent capitalist.

That's a guy running for them and somewhere like Oakville or something. Their policy book is kind of a cornucopia of all kinds of different stuff. Some of which is good but like who cares? There's not really like a coherent ideology behind all of it. So I've never had much time for them. Okay fair enough. I mean I think that tells us more or less all we need to know about the Greens except that their main platform in Canada being of course the stopping of Brexit.

People in Canada are very passionate about that. What I'd like to focus on for this first of our segments is the NDP. The obvious choice for any sensible Canadian who isn't Mr. Wonderful. That's the billionaire, right? Kevin O'Leary, that's the one. Yes, I'm still Canadian. Someone running for office in Canada called Mr. Wonderful. Well he was on Shark Tank if you've ever seen that which is like one of those.

It's like in Canada we have dragons then. Yeah that's what we have in the UK. So he tried to run for the leadership of the Conservative Party and because he's like a TV guy, the Canadian media, everyone in the Canadian media just only knows American reference points. They're like, this guy's our Trump, this guy's our Trump. But he was a total flop because he spent much of the campaign like promoting his like shitty wine or whatever like in the United States

and not actually campaigning in Canada. Like for a climate. Yeah. And then we never promote wine on this show. Most recently he and his wife were out in their boat or something and they actually like killed someone at night. So I think she may have been charged. With a knife?

I'm not up on the case. So this is all, you know, all alleged. Loved to just allegedly murder a guy on my boat. Wait, was it Big Pussy Bomb Pancero? No, no, it was interesting. They took out this boat. It used to be called, what was it? The Lady Gislaine, I think.

But why was Christopher walking on there? This reminds me if I can digress for one second of a story. So I was once at a gig with a friend of the show, Pierre Nevelli and friend of the show, Jamie Fraser. And we were discussing the tragic death of Irish singer, Kirstie McColl, if anyone remembers that. Yes, I know that story. Yeah.

And I remember they would say like, did she like drown or something? And I was like, no, she was hit by a speed boat. And I remember that correctly. But then we like start Wikipediaing it. It turns out she was on holiday in Mexico and she got hit by a speed boat that was being driven at high speed through like a swimming area by the son of like a Mexican supermarket billionaire. And then they managed to like blame it on a boat hand who went to jail.

And it was like, I was like, wow, this is actually like a really dark story of like wealth and corruption. We were just being like, wasn't it weird that she was killed by a speed boat? So if we want to stop these people in Canada anyway. The people who kill people with speed boats. Yeah. If we want to stop, we want to stop Mexicans. Mexicans, oligarchs, Scions, must be stopped.

Exactly. The progressive speed boat murder party. That must be kept away from boats. So if we want to stop people in Canada committing murder with fancy boats, then the NDP are kind of the only real option, right? So, Luke, I'd love it if you could tell our listeners what the NDP are all about. Yeah. So the NDP is kind of historically similar to labor.

The big difference being that in the 1920s, British politics basically split along class lines. The Liberals kind of vanished. A lot of the sort of more progressively minded sort of middle class Liberals just joined the labor party anyway. And then after the war, obviously labor was kind of one of the, you know, was one of the two major parties. That never really happened in Canada.

You know, politics in Canada aren't really, haven't historically had this left-right split. The Liberals have been this kind of big, you know, fake left party that's been in the sort of middle of Canadian politics, and they've been really, really dominant. So, you know, at times the NDP has been able to, you know, force kind of concessions and force reforms, which is why we have, you know, a better welfare state than America does, things like that. And yeah, the NDP came out historically out of its predecessor,

the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which was a coalition of farmers, industrial workers, and socialists. And that merged in 1961, I believe, with the Canadian Labor Congress. So, it's very much a kind of a labor party. Oh, hell yeah. And historically, like you said that they've been responsible for some of the things that make Canada a good place to live, such as like paving the way for our federal-level universal health care program and similar.

So, what have they done for us lately? Quote Janet Jackson. I mean... No, no, fine, go ahead. I was gonna say, to quote Janet Jackson, what have you done for me lately? A song, no one is in here is old enough to know. Even me, because I came out when I was three years old, but there it is.

Fucking happened again. Dead vibes once again. Apologies, I didn't get the reference. No, no one did. That's the thing, no one ever does. Actually, I was gonna say, it's great with me in the studio and Nate here and Riley here as well. Now, there's three of us with this Philistine accent I speak in.

And Hussein's also Canadian. Yeah, but I don't have the accent, I just have the passport. Yeah, no, I'm a Canadian, I'm a Canadian national. I didn't know that. No one does. I forget it sometimes. It's like 8% law. Yeah, you have to really understand the back story of me together.

But no, yeah, I'm technically allowed to vote in Canadian elections, I just never do. Oh, wow. Well, hopefully by the end of it, we'll talk to you into it. Oh, no, I'm already like, you know, we're gonna explain who he is, but I'm already like, you know, team jug me anyway. He got the Drake blessing, right? I haven't seen it. I think Rihanna followed him on Instagram.

That's how you know. That's how you know. So my dad's British, so every time I come here and he has a British accent, obviously, I'm immediately really self-conscious about my accent or rather my lack of one as I see it. But anyway, it's good to have some fellow countrymen here. Oh, yeah. That's why this is basically the Canadian Embassy. Canadians in London do not try to vote here.

What's up with all these geese that's talking in these funny accents then? I think you're having a right, monkey. So I want to go back to this though. They're responsible generally for doing things like pushing for and successfully getting a universal health care. But what are some things that they've been campaigning for if not getting or indeed getting more recently? Yeah.

So the big split in Canada between the NDP and the Liberals, you know, there's a lot of people, it's kind of like the Sanders and Warren thing, which we'll get to about how people say, well, there's not really any difference between the two. And actually that's even giving the Liberals too much credit because Elizabeth Warren has much better politics than they do in her defense. But there is a very real kind of split between the Liberals and the NDP both kind of historically where they come from, the kinds of people that have been involved with them, the kinds of people that tend to vote for them, don't want to generalize too much.

But ideologically, the NDP favors a lot of the kinds of things that the Labour Party does at least in its most recent incarnation, so big universal programs. The Liberals are really into means testing. So in the last election, there was a split between the NDP and Liberals where the Liberals, you know, childcare is ridiculously expensive in Canada. It's like a really serious issue and the Liberals solution was, you know, these means tested checks in the mail, which is not terrible, but it's not a substitute when it costs, you know, $1,200 a month or $1,500 a month to send your toddler to daycare.

It's not really a substitute for a $10 a day system. So those are, you know, those are the kinds of schisms. The Liberals in 2015 also kind of rhetorically were like, we're going to tax the rich, but then they didn't really actually do that. The NDP is running on a wealth tax in this election, running to close a bunch of these egregious loopholes. I'd have to double check if it's on the platform. I'm pretty sure it is.

But there's this crazy loophole in Canada where if you get your compensation in stock options, which I assume it works the same way here, like if you're a CEO and you get paid through stock options, you only pay like a 50% rate on it. And the idea is this is supposed to foster competition or something. Yeah, it's competition of who can pay CEOs the most. It's race to the top. Yeah. Alien versus predator.

So I also want to talk about who Jugmeat Singh is, right? He has risen to the top of the NDP. He has taken the NDP from usually what I think most people in Canada would think of as perennially third place to coming and nipping at the heels of victory. Yeah. I mean, it's unclear how far this surge is happening right now is going to go. But and actually, you know, like a week ago or maybe a little longer than that, 10 days ago, the election was really sleepy.

Like it was probably the most boring election in recent memory in Canada. It seemed very low stakes. It was going to be a really sort of, it was going to be a low visibility campaign. Was this before or after the blackface thing? Well, the blackface, I think was kind of what, was kind of what shook it up. That was like the... That'll happen. It'll do it.

I wasn't interested before, but now there's been a blackface. Blackface is like the NOS button for an election. That's not true. What's happening? Like the week that I saw a third Trudeau has hit the world blackface center. Well, he, and when he was asked about it, he, they were like, well, how many more times and he's sort of like gave somebody the effect of like, I wouldn't want to put a number on it.

He's like, to be honest, I didn't remember all these other ones. So I couldn't speculate. Right. Okay. But so let's, but let's, let's talk about, about Jugmeat. Yeah. So he came up through the Ontario NDP. He won a seat in, in Brampton, which is kind of surrounding, you know, it's adjacent to

Toronto in, in the 2011 Ontario election. He became deputy leader of the Ontario NDP. And then in 2017, when the NDP was kind of rudderless, he was pretty overwhelmingly elected leader. And I would say he's had not that much visibility up, up into this point. The NDP was actually struggling with fundraising and stuff going into the election. But you know, I think he's made a pretty good impression on people, you know, and he's, I think, you know, he's, he's, he's dealt with these kind of racist incidents that keep

happening pretty well. I think that's, you know, one, one him a lot of admiration. He did very well in the, the debate recently, even the parliamentary press gallery, which is pretty, you know, down on the NDP usually seem to agree that. But I also think just the NDP program, the one that, that his leadership is kind of embraced is popular. Like that's actually my read, I think, on what's going on. In 2015, a lot of people when they voted liberal thought they were getting, they were going

to get a left wing government, basically. They thought they were going to get, you know, a green redistributive tax rich kind of government. That was even what was kind of reported in the media at the time. That's not what they got. So, you know, when I, when I see these polls suggesting that young people are departing or they're going to vote NDP in droves, many of them leaving liberals, it doesn't really surprise me. I think that's a big part of what's going on too.

And it's unclear how far it's going to go. If it's going to prevent the, either of the two major parties from, or the biggest parties from forming a government, or if there's possibility for something else, who knows, there's only a few days left. And in fact, by the time you're listening to us through this, there will be no days left. So vote. Unless you're not planning to vote NDP, in which case, don't.

How can they vote if like it's already like, well, this is coming out in the morning of election day. Oh, I see. Okay. So go vote today. Yeah, go vote. Yeah, vote early and vote often. And I would say, you know, the polls right now, the Ipsos poll yesterday had the NDP

at 20 and the other two parties in the low 30s. But these things, which, you know, is still like a 10 or 11 point spread. But the thing is, you know, momentum has, the polls only capture snapshots. And yesterday, I couldn't help but notice that Justin Trudeau was campaigning in downtown Toronto, which if the Liberals were feeling good, and if their internal polling looked good, they would certainly not be doing this close to election day. So I'm pretty optimistic about what might, what might happen. And hopefully it's happening by the time you're all listening to this.

And remember, it's close. It could come down to just a few votes. So if you're going to vote NDP, why not vote three or four times? You know, go down there, go in different disguises, you know, give various pseudonyms that sound ridiculous. Use various face paint. I was just going to say, Justin Trudeau can give you some advice on how to convince a person to vote.

If you're going to vote conservative, you're probably going to get a speedboat to the polls anyway. So try not to maintain it. Don't like practice good seamanship. One thing I always enjoy is a little historical fact is that the Democratic Party machine in New York City always used to keep getting itself elected in the 19th century by like bribing homeless men with whiskey to grow long beards and then go vote and then shave and then vote again.

I love Tammany Hall. Amazing. I'm just loving the story idea of just like conservatives distracted on their way to the polls as they're traveling there by a swimming Irish singers who are enjoying the lakes. So one more, one more thing on Cancon before we go to discuss our neighbors to the south. From the point of view of Canada, not Spain. What should we expect out of the NDP if they potentially go into coalition with the Liberals

to stop the Tories? There's been some noise made about this. Yeah. So I'm not sure how serious the noise about a coalition government is. I'm not sure if the NDP is kind of putting it up so the Liberals knock it down and look at it or if it's more serious and obviously a lot will depend on how the seats break down. I guess my own view is that if the NDP is going to enter into any kind of arrangement with the Liberals, whether that's a kind of supply arrangement where they say we'll support

you until ex-date if you do all of these things or if it's an actual coalition. I just think the NDP should make the price pretty high. The Liberals should have to do a lot of stuff before they get the NDP support. Well, if there's anything I've learned from Liberal parties in Britain, it's that when faced with the prospect of having to implement even mild social democracy, they immediately go into coalition with the Conservatives and then institute a new policy that if you make less than 100,000 of the currency, whatever it is, any year, then you have to eat a diet of nothing but bugs.

They love taxing plastic bags. They are in that coalition idea. That's a really good question actually. I think regardless of what happens, unless the Liberals pull off some kind of miracle, his brand is just so utterly tarnished now. The guy built an international brand on being this performatively woke, anti-racist feminist prime minister, this beacon of liberal multiculturalism in the age of Trump. If you're going to undo that, you really couldn't have chosen anything worse or anything better

than blackface. If he does stay, at least if he's forced by an NDP coalition or supply agreement to do something he doesn't want, like not building pipelines, he will have a good reason to protest his own government this time. I love the idea of a compromise solution. We will go into coalition with Justin Trudeau, but there can be no more blackface. He's allowed to do yellowface once a year on his birthday. That is as far as we'll go.

You trade the blackface for the pipelines. He can dress up however he wants, but he can't bulldoze anyone's house to run oil through it. That's the deal. Justin Trudeau gets to live his life as that silent movie, The Jazz Singer, but he doesn't get to make any policies. I want to pick up actually, Luke, on something you said a little bit earlier. As we move into segment two, tentatively titled Ballistics, Sanders versus Warren, which is a lot of this noise that's made of there being no clear blue water between Bernie Sanders

and Elizabeth Warren as progressive or left candidates. There are two of their core policies that have come out in previous weeks that I want to dive a little bit further into. That is Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act, and Bernie Sanders's Corporate Accountability Act. Now, make no mistake, these are not the presidents from Futurama, at least before Nixon, who are just have the same name and are the same guy. These are actually very different.

Here's a little bit from a Vox article, we're going to talk about Warren's plan first. The conceit tying together Warren's ideas, and we'll see what they are shortly, is that if corporations are going to have the legal rights of persons, they should be expected to act like decent citizens who uphold their fair share of the social contract and don't act like sociopaths whose sole obligation is profitability, as is currently conventional in American business thinking. That's what she then said, when our companies did better, our workers did better, and America built a thriving middle class.

Awww, a bit of a reductive history there. You know, like how the American government helped United Fruit to do better. Everyone knows the Gilded Age was great for workers. I'm going to say Upton's Sinclairs of the Jungle is actually just a book about animals that live in the jungle. They're colorful, they're savage and wild. So wait, are you saying that this is some kind of horse shit? I mean, I just don't think it's going to work.

Later in that thread that you just quoted from, there's a tweet about how 181 CEOs signed a non-binding resolution about corporate accountability or something, and I know this, tacking this kind of moderate language on to stuff that, I mean, the stuff in the act's not in and of itself bad. It doesn't go nearly as far as Bernie's legislation does, but it's the way that it's being packaged as this kind of very technocratic kind of, you know, revolution by white paper or whatever. I just don't think it's going to work, and I also think it's designed specifically not to irk, you know, the, you know, patricians and managers who are actually very enthusiastic

about Elizabeth Warren, and you're just not going to change anything unless those people are made to be very pissed off. And also something that I'd point out is that this idea that you're somehow going to appeal to the good nature of American business, basically, if you pass laws that make it so that they're breaking the law, if they don't do the things you want them to do with regard to workers and pay and things along those lines, then you might get some compliance. But if you're just doing this as kind of optics, we've seen this time, and again, that even if companies, even if there was such a thing as an enlightened CEO, it doesn't matter.

They can't do these things. They can't pay workers more because they're going to be pummeled in terms of their share valuations and their boards aren't going to let them. So basically, Elizabeth Warren is like, well, maybe if we make a few tweaks around the edges, we can get people to behave in a way that's going to not really change the status quo. But the two points, one point is kind of banal, because we've said it so many times. One is it doesn't matter what you do. They're just going to scream about how this is, you know, this is Stalinism.

But if they can get away with not changing anything and still treating workers like shit, that's what they're going to do. They're just going to call you Stalin and do that as well. Whereas you might as well do some fucking Stalinism. Now, I'm not saying that as a tanky, obviously. You might as well pass laws that are going to deliver the effects of tangible gains in people's lives because corporate America is going to behave this way no matter what. That was actually how Stalin got started.

People have called him Stalin his whole life. He's like, well, I may as well be Stalin, man. Well, like, further to your point, it's not just that there's going to be some compliance. It's that there's always going to be the minimum compliance. Yes, exactly. I think some of the difference between Sanders and Warren is that when you get that kind of sort of disobedience to the law or like finding loopholes, you want somebody who is not an ardent capitalist to actually try and enforce them.

And something I threw out too is that, I mean, think about the tweaks and changes that were made under Obama. Like two things happened. Basically, none of the corporations cared. None of the CEOs and industry figures actually supported Obama beyond like, okay, he got, was it Jeffrey Immelt, the head of GE to be on his CEO board or whatever he had. But none of that changed anything. GE certainly doesn't pay anything besides zero dollars in taxes. But also the extent to which this all got undone once those same people donated the maximum legal

amount to fucking Trump and he got elected, basically meant that this whole decade that was supposed to produce all these gains for workers didn't really produce much at all. Like in the same way that people are now just kind of looking at tables and figures and saying, wow, why is it that even though we have three and a half percent unemployment in America, wages aren't going up at all? It's like, well, I don't know, maybe because you're not making them do it. And it's this idea that all you have to do is, I don't know, prime the pump in some way and then everything's going to take care of itself.

I feel like that's just, that's both a historical and just really, really, I'm going to say pie in the sky. It's just, it's like naive in a way that should be criminal when you're somebody of Elizabeth Warren stature. Well, even, even on a like, aside from the materialist view of this, on a like really reductionist level, I feel like you want someone who has that animus, who does not like CEOs, who is not friends with them, who isn't going to take their speaking fees. On the basis that, yeah, okay.

I like Obama could have nationalized a lot of companies during the bailout, but he also could have put some people in jail. And I think if he had done that, which he never would have, he wasn't the person who was going to do that. But if he had, I think that might have had more of an effect on those people. And first of all, it would have been hot, Daddy. But also, yes. There's a, there's a really good piece by Matt Karp at Jacob and Calda.

Is this the future liberals want? Which I think is probably the best, the best essay you're going to read probably anywhere on the differences between Sanders and Warren, why they matter. And, you know, there's a couple, there's a, there's a few really good points in it. You know, he points out, for example, that, you know, a lot of Warren supporters are really into her 2% wealth tax, 2% tax on fortunes over 50 million. But it's become a chant at her rallies where they chant two cents, two cents.

And the implication is that they're actually, they're actually into how kind of moderate it is. Like they, they don't see it as like, we're taking power back from these people. They fetishize it as like, this is actually, this is a moderate request that's being made. So Matt Karp also writes, he says, when Warren, when Warren does vow to challenge the, when Warren does vow to challenge the power of the wealthy, her rhetoric often works not to stoke the popular mind against America's inequality, but to naturalize it as a fact of life.

And there's a quote from Elizabeth Warren, she says, in America, there are going to be people who are richer and people who are not so rich, and the rich are going to own more shoes, and they're going to own more cars, and they may even own more houses, but they shouldn't own our, more of our democracy. And I think that's a really good, that's very emblematic of the, the limits of Elizabeth Warren's vision here. Woking the Marcos. What do we want? Mild reform.

When do we want an over structured rollout program? We all remember Alice Cooper's song, Schools Out for Summer, parentheses to give the teachers a nice and well earned break. And I mean, if we actually look at some of the highlights of her proposed policy, we can see that Warren really wants to keep the game the same, but just tweak some of the incentives so that people play more fairly. And again, also before I go into this, I want to say like, Warren's proposals are by far and away better than every single other Democrat

currently running with the obvious exception, of course, of Marianne Williamson. I think like Andrew Yang is pretty close to basically promising an Evangelion, which is what I was hoping Marianne Williamson would be doing. So I don't know, I'm quite disappointed by that. Marianne Williamson is like, everyone gets a free tarot reading or something like that. No, not Marianne Williamson, I'm sorry. Tom Steyer is my favorite now, because I think Tom Steyer could just be told anything. By a consultant and he would do it.

Like we're going to see him get a YouTube show called Vibe Check with America. And I'm very excited to see him do it. Is his campaign going to be something like, he's not a goer? So here are Warren's proposals. She wants to require workers to elect 40% of corporate boards. She wants to restrict board and company executive stock sales so that you can't sell shares you receive as compensation until at least five years after they're received and you can't do it as part of a stock buyback.

I don't think you could really chant that at a rally and have it sort of grip people's hearts. You know what it is, it's just too verbose. It's looking, it's leaning over the table at Angela Merkel and being like, can I copy yours if I just switch it up some to make it look different? What if I translate it into English? No, I think what will happen is that you'll have like, you know, things like two cents, two cents. But then when Elizabeth Warren gets the nomination,

she's going to hire a consultant to kind of come up with a chance. And that consultant will be Pharrell Williams. But she also wants to require 75% of executives and shareholders approval for political expenditures. So you can sort of see where she's falling here, right? She believes that one of the ways in which money gets into politics is the direct spending on political campaigns from companies, that GE donates to someone's campaign and then they're beholden to GE.

But that's not really how it works. It works because GE goes up to someone and says, hey, can we build this extremely polluting factory in your district? It'll give you 500 jobs. And then all of a sudden, no exchange has been made. But because GE just is able to pull the strings of which districts get what so much, then they're able to essentially buy a legislator. Yeah, and then you get like PACs coming up to support the, you know,

like extra jobs or whatever purely by coincidence. Yeah, I was going to say, or also is something even worse than that. And I mean, I don't know if the similar thing exists in the United Kingdom, but definitely in the US, we have this problem where it'll legitimately be something like, oh, by the way, here's a bill that our consultants wrote or that our lobbyists wrote, you know, introduced this into a session. Think tanks. And yeah, and it's one of these things where I think the biggest,

the problem that I see coming from the US is that if something drastic doesn't change in terms of like the outcomes in people's lives, whatever Warren proposes is going to be undone by President Tom Cotton. Like that's going to happen. And so for me, the more radical the course correction, the better, not just because out of like an adherence to radical politics, but also because you see how dire the situation is and how that incremental stuff isn't, I mean, not that it was ever a good idea, but that certainly given the last 40 years and the last 11 years,

the kind of things that most people are dealing with in their lives, what, you know, what's going to win people over to the point they're willing to support, you know, more, I don't know, Democratic politicians as opposed to someone who's going to be like, we're going to make you proud again. By the way, we're also going to be really racist. I'm very excited for President Tom Cotton to replace the minimum wage with a daily birthday cake ration. I love how you said, not out of any adherence to radical politics,

five minutes after saying, let's do some Stalinism. Exactly. I think more, it's along the line. What I'm trying to say is that I don't want it to seem like it's just, it's not based on any kind of like contrarianism or some sort of like adherence to theory. Where we are right now in the US, basically, one of the most significant killers of people under the age of 55 is opiate overdoses. Oh wait, yeah, sorry, those guys.

You know, the military recently came out and said that one of the prime drivers of enlistments is not unemployment, but rather student loan and medical debt. Like that's not a particularly sustainable situation. Never mind, you know, anemic wage growth. Never mind the fact that like outside of major metropolitan areas, there's been zero wage growth. The US army, more of that please. Another Elizabeth Warren policy. The US army, more of that, but greener.

You know, what if every drone was also solar powered? Well, I would degrade the M4s for the boys. So something else I'd add is even if you look at Warren's program, which as Riley said, is much better than the, I mean, it's significantly the left of the sort of median Democratic Party program. Assume that she, you know, 100% believes in all this stuff, which again, I think unlike a lot of other Democrats, when, when she takes these positions, I mean, she is, she's very keen to regulate Wall Street.

She's, you know, she has a record to that effect. Like she, I think she, she can be taken at her word that she wants to a lot of this stuff. But it's just not going to work with the current Democratic Party in the way that, the way that American politics, the obstructionism that exists in American political institutions, it's just not going to work. And unlike Bernie, she seems keen to basically try to play nice with the Democratic Party, to not antagonize, you know, it's kind of a patrician voter base too much, or it's even it's big donors.

I mean, a lot of them don't, don't like her, but it looks like she's going to allow their money if she's the nominee to, if not fund her presidential campaign, still fund parts of the Democratic Party. So her agenda is just not going to get through. I mean, people often say this about Bernie. It's like, well, why would you elect him? This agenda is not going to get through. None of these people's agenda is going to get through.

Pete Buttigieg's agenda, which is like far less serious than Warren's, couldn't get through the Congress that's probably going to be next. So the question is, what do you do about that? And Bernie Sanders is the only candidate in the race who has a plan for, and a strategy for figuring out how you actually game that system and overcome those obstacles. I hate it when Elizabeth Warren's presidential program is cancelled by Supreme Court judge Hamburglar. So I've, I've indeed, I actually speaking of this, I have Sanders plan,

or at least the highlights out in front of us. And I think you'll see a much larger, a much more ambitious plan, because here's the thing, Warren's program of intense regulation. America tried that. America tried that in throughout the sort of 1950s, 60s and 70s, when they're, when we had like the remnants of the New Deal. Yeah, Richard Nixon tried that. Yeah, it was protected by the remnants of the labor movement, which was crushed.

So like, you can't do it again. Because if you re-regulate, then give it 20 years of alternating Republican, Democratic, and centrist Democratic presidencies. And then we're going to have like the financial crisis too, except the amount of habitable land on the earth is going to be able to fit in a postage stamp. So. So that would protect actually house price value is probably mitigating the effects of the financial crisis. Come on, come on, leftist, do you reading?

So here's Bernie's corporate accountability act. It requires workers to own 20% of the company, which I note is twice the size of labor's proposal, which is that workers should only own 10% of the company. So McDonnell, Corbin, let's double up. I don't like to be made to look like a chump. I'm 100% of the pussy. Well, I also like owning things.

Oh yeah, we haven't told that so much. We like to rent. We like to rent companies. Yeah, we should all, Bernie, if you really, no, Pete Buttigieg is going to make an app where millennials can rent shares in a company so that they can vote on crucial decisions. I feel like that is actually something Buttigieg would do. I hate that you're right. This is going to be at the episode in like four years time.

Lath of heaven. We're going to Lath of heaven union within no O into existence. So here's the next one. He wants workers to elect 40. He wants workers to elect 45% of the board, but come on, we can get to 51. Surely we can get to 51. Ban all outsourcing without compensation, which I think is huge. That is an enormous.

It basically means that when a job gets back, is created in America, you can't ship it off to China or Mexico or whatever without paying out the ass for it, which like actually is one of these things. It's going to lock in gains, any gain that he makes. Love to lock in gains. And to establish a US employee ownership bank to finance employee takeovers and guarantee right of first refusal for employees to buy their businesses. These aren't like regulations.

These are programs that are going to create their own constituencies really fast because they're just going to put a lot more money in people's pockets. It's why the NHS is hard to privatize. And I feel like this is going to be very difficult for anyone to undo at a later date. Even the greatest minds in the country like Matt Hancock have so far been unable to privatize the NHS despite coming up with their best like Wiley Coyote app-based schemes and doing parkour over a thing that says patient waiting times. What's happened is that Matt Hancock has been told that he can privatize the NHS as long as

he can like parkour right over the Royal London Hospital. So he's trading for that right now. He's just having a full under armor doing like hula hoop in front of the hospital. Ooh, limbering up for this one. Come on, I prefer to think of Matt Hancock in a full Assassin's Creed outfit ready to like do an Altair up through the Royal London Hospital. You're putting all this straw here. I'm just reminded of an animated gift that I saw recently of a clip from The Punisher in which

a guy is trying to do parkour like a villain or a henchman is doing parkour and Frank Castle shoots him with an RPG. But also something I want to point out too is that we may have talked about this before on the show, but the whole scandal of the Monica Lewinsky thing and Clinton's impeachment actually derailed his legislative agenda for that Congress, which one of his prime goals was to privatize social security because that was a thing that the Democrats wanted to do under Clinton after gutting welfare. And so it's like you were saying Riley, social security, they've managed to keep it nationalized,

but only not because there was one party protecting it and one party trying to confront it. There were a lot of people even on the Democratic side who thought, oh, this would be great. What if we invested the fucking entirely of social security in the stock market? And I think that similar what you're describing here, it's hard to privatize. It's hard to get control of because people have so much of a stake in it. But so many things that, I mean, I don't know, it would be hard to compare it to something here. I mean, obviously like they haven't managed to sell off the NHS yet, but like the British Postal Service, they did privatize and they haven't in the United States, but God knows they want to.

And it's things like that where if you can just give people a chance to like start getting more things that actually belong to workers that belong to employees, then it's going to be harder for them to achieve this. But where we're at right now, if someone came out tomorrow, if Donald Trump wasn't senile and said, I want to privatize social security, Republicans would be on board with it. And we might legitimately, had they not lost the house, see something like that, had it been his agenda instead of just graft crime and weird racism decrees. Shout out, by the way, since you mentioned Royal Mail to the Communication Workers Union,

who just voted 97% in favor of striking. Oh hell yeah, we love that. It was something like a 75% turnout too, so like, that's hopeful. I'm very excited for the Queen to be replaced by the Postmaster General. So, Luke, any final thoughts on the Sanders platform before we move on to the life and times of John Tamney? Yeah, so I guess just one last thing I wanted to say is there's all kinds of ways that you can compare Sanders and Warren, but I think at root of the divide is actually just how serious

you think the problems with American society are or just with western capitalism in general. If you're a liberal, you tend to see things in terms of ethics more than you see them in terms of morality. You think that there are these systems that govern our lives, that guide our policymaking, and as long as they conform to certain rules, things are basically fine. And this makes sense because liberalism is basically, it's an ideology that came out of bourgeois professionals, right? People who are proceduralists for a living, lawyers and merchants and things like that. And I think socialism, there is such a thing as socialist ethics, but I think socialism ultimately has a lot more to do with morality.

And when you look at the difference between how Bernie talks and how Elizabeth Warren talks, you can really see that. All of his language going back 30 or 40 years is ridden through with this moral outrage at the injustices of unequal capitalist society. I don't think you find that in Elizabeth Warren. So at the most basic level, all of the specific proposals or whatever aside, that's really what it comes down to. Do you think that the system kind of needs a few course corrections or do you think it needs to be overhauled and overthrown? Yeah, it is her hate pure, as used to be asked. Actually, Ed Miliband could ask that once when he was a young journalist and he said, I don't hate anyone. But Frank Castle hated some people,

all right? So just keep that in mind. But I want to move on now to a story about another man who will change the world, probably the person who has no hate in his heart, who is all love. Ronald McDonald? This is a story about a man named John Tammany. Now, John Tammany came to my attention because he wrote an article in support of Elizabeth Holmes entitled, Elizabeth Holmes is a visionary and we need more like her. That article says a lot of the standard stuff. It's also correct. We have to defend women with voices this deep. Dr. Girlfriend action. It's not her real voice though. And this article said that, my take is that with times, Holmes will be vindicated as a visionary

whose main quote unquote offense was believing deeply in technology that will eventually help save many lives. And that still in future may. I would find myself believing too much. You're in a shitty turtle neck. This is basically the Ronald Reagan Iran Contra defense. Like in my heart, I thought it was true even though actually it's very obviously a lie. No, it's worse. It's history will vindicate me. Yes. And it's that like, look, we all know that in the long run of science, eventually we're going to discover a piece of technology that can analyze everything about you from like two drops of blood. It's just she didn't get it right. But without her, how will we get there in the future? And he says that the

world would be a much better place if Holmes were innovating rather than having to defend herself. Less readers forget credit cards were not invented by banks. Uber not created by a grizzled taxi dispatcher. And Jeff Bezos didn't work at Walmart before founding Amazon. No, we were going to fucking hedge fund. I wonder why. You didn't build that? Yeah. So here's the thing though. I don't really want to talk about that article because that article has been drained by everyone latching onto it and pulling all the content out of it. It's only a couple of drops of blood each time. It's a picked clean skeleton and I will have no more part of it on the show.

I actually decided to do what I do as a podcaster and dig a little bit deeper into John Tamney and I really analyze it in the sense that I read his writing. Yes. Because John Tamney, he wrote this because he lives in the same building as Elizabeth Holmes' parents and he disclosed this in the article and writes professional op-eds as a job. He'll just write an op-ed for you. They're going to evict me if I don't do this. Yeah, combat landlords. I like that being his way of saying that it's not on a apartment building. They just live in a house together in some weird The Waltons-type family set up. He lives in their shed. He's the uncle Jesse of this situation.

They rented the backyard to him. So here's the thing. Some Austrian guy in the basement. I don't know what his deal is. Here's the thing. Actually, we have new basement content because they just found that. Was it Dutch or Belgian family? It was Dutch. The Belgian were too perfect, but Dutch. The Belgians would never be called. It's an Austrian family in the Netherlands. Are they? Jesus. What is the Austrian's? I just bring that out for Milo's benefit because I know delight him. Incredible. Another Austrian has kept his family locked in a basement for many years

in anticipation of an apocalypse, but that is not... That's happening. Austrians just love bunkers, don't they? Pulling things back on track voice. This writer writes op-eds for a living, and he lives in the same building as Elizabeth Holmes' parents. It's not a big leap of logic to assume that Elizabeth Holmes' parents planted this op-ed to try and defend their very stupid daughter. It's not an Elizabeth house. It's an Elizabeth home. Indeed. But what's more interesting is the rest of his work. So here is the title of his book that you can buy that is published.

Popular Economics. What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James can teach you about economics. Absolutely fucking nothing. Next question. Here's from the inside cover of the book. Economics is pretty basic. In fact, it's everywhere you look. That's like saying quantum physics is basic. It's everywhere you look. It's stage two documentary that you watch in a geography lesson. We've already acknowledged that we live in a society, but you also know we live in an economy. The things are maths. The economics joker. Well, this is why he's the economics joker, because of this next line.

Do you know how I got this demand? Again, yes, kind of. You don't need a PhD and a graphing calculator, he says, to understand economic lessons that are all around us. Just the self confidence to see what's in front of your nose. It's a guy who took the line. It's economics 101 and made it a lifestyle. So it's like a presentation about economics, but kind of in the style of one of those things like, so you're going through puberty. There's no need to be ashamed. It's perfectly natural. Oh, is that a is that a sublime demand curve blossoming on your chest? So he explains economics through only four different chapters.

Only one taxes. Taxes are a penalty for working. This manifesto destroyed. But we can imagine one. If Great Britain raises Mick Jagger's income tax rate high enough, the Rolling Stones are going to find somewhere else to live in the amount of tax. Not the Rolling Stones, not the world's most decrepit men. We won't have to send them out. Honestly, I think if anyone could run up a medical bill as high as their tax bills, it would have to be the surviving members of the Rolling Stones.

Without them, who would keep our oxygen cylinder industry afloat? This is a particularly dumb version of this argument, though, because what percentage of Britain's GDP does this guy think the Rolling Stones represent? It's like he's specifically he's really saying they're going to move out. It's like, oh, what, then the property values in London are going to fall? No, there's also the who. There was Gary Glitter, but he had to leave. Britain's economy is just sustained by like aging 60s rockers in the homes that they own.

One of Britain's wealthiest pop stars, Gary Barlow, who famously spends all of his time avoiding paying tax. But I also think, too, I point out is that Britain used to have like a 97 or 98 and a half percent tax on royalty income as late as the mid 80s, like famously during during tax exiles for a year because they had a hit album. They're like, well, we don't want to pay taxes on it. But like Milo was saying, they cut all those taxes now to like a paltry amount, and they still do that shit. Because of course, you like become a, I don't know, a fucking tax island like Guernsey or Singapore or some shit, like you're going to be able to avoid it. But like just because just because some people did

that doesn't mean they won't do it. I mean, they're rich. They can buy private plane. I mean, we know a lot about private planes on this podcast. Like they can do whatever they want. So I mean, the idea they're like, Oh, God forbid the God forbid the Rolling Stones live in Mallorca or some shit. Like it doesn't change anything. And I mean, having said that, I do think that the some of those insane tax rates we used to have are a bit who was like 98% tax. How dare you earn any money from your work? Yes, it's like a hundred and two hundred and five. Negative interest rates on a world. So you're not allowed to create any money every time you make money again. I mean, look, the E and one revenue just really incorporating the idea of

entropy. But like, of course, obviously like Mick Jagger, if you looked at the tax rates in Britain in like the 1960s and 70s, if he was studying at some university, like I don't know the London School of Economics, he just wouldn't have bothered to become a multimillionaire rock star. But anyway, let's let's continue. Chapter two, regulation. The smartest people in any industry aren't the regulators. They're the people making a living at it. Regulation is based on a fantasy that the mediocre can effectively direct the best and brightest. That's like expecting the Appalachian State football team to be Michigan every time they play. Okay, so we're into naked fascism. The best do what they will and the weakest suffer what they must. Awesome. Yes,

absolutely. If why make what we should do, you finance guys seem really good at the economy. Why don't you write the rules? I hate those people over at the podcast regulation office. Those squares. Levison is coming over to our cool podcasting basement and trying to stop us having toga parties and stuff. Levison 3, baby. Offcom is going to get podcasts into its remit soon and we're fucked then. Oh my. But also, yeah, that's the whole, again, we did do that. We had people from the finance industry write the regulations and then 2008 happened. By the way, this book was written like three years ago. It's great. This guy's like an era dentist from 2008 era conservative

blogs. I love it when Goldman Sachs wrote all the financial regulations and they say, Oh, don't worry about it. Um, trade. LeBron James could make a pretty good tight end in the NFL. I love LeBron James is tight end. Yeah. He's gonna make a pretty good player in the NFL. I'm sure LeBron James could play football if he wanted to, but he's a big dude. But in basketball, he's the best in the world. So it would make no sense for him to play football. That's called comparative advantage, and it's the foundation of free trade. It's also the foundation of the movie space jam,

where Michael Jordan was going to become a baseball player. Space Jam was based on Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. You know what? You know what? That's the most stupid facile argument because you know what? Fucking Jared Kushner would make an excellent fucking birthday party clown for children because he's a fucking facile moron. And yet he appears to be in the government of the United States because he's married to another facile moron who's just hot and the daughter of the world's most like burger brained man. Like none of this makes it, it assumes that somehow magically in capitalism, like being good at something means you get put in charge of it. That is not the case. Who thinks this guy, the guy, the guy who says what if

Elizabeth Holmes failed blood test device was just the first of a hundred blood test devices that eventually work. The guy is allowed to write a book despite clearly not having passed like junior school. So here's the so title, The Wealth of Space Jams. So here's the fourth space jam, Steven. Here's the fourth one. Money. Imagine playing football if the length of a yard changed in every day. This guy didn't write a book. He just like fell asleep with ESPN. He's doing like his mid and sad vent again because he's remembering when a foot was determined by the length of the king's foot. Okay, but what is the fucking point he's making here? Yeah, that's how we run our economy. The value of the dollar, the economy's unit of measure changes in value every minute.

Government tries to convince us that free markets are dangerous, you know, because they keep on creating all of these markets by force. Which government? North Korea? Like what government? He just thinks that even if the free market doesn't work right now, eventually it will. Yeah, exactly. The free market's all about failing forward and believing in yourself. Elizabeth Holmes may not have invented a blood human reading device, but eventually we'll have try quarters from Star Trek the next generation and it'll be because of her dutiful research. We know there's a straight line between those things. Also, there'll be a holodeck and I can have weird sex fantasies. Yeah, no, Elizabeth Holmes is just doing

Ben Sisko from DS9 going back in time and starting the riots that lead to the revolution. This article is so... It's a Star Trek deep cut, but three people laughed at it. I got it. It's a great episode. It's not an article, it's the inside cover of a book. This is a book length idea. This book is so dumb and so like just a guy stumbling drunk down a corridor at midnight, one concept into another that I'm sure that at some point in this book, he's going to accidentally quote a Nazi. Not even like a modern day Nazi, like a full on Third Reich did experiments on twins kind of Nazi. But like an obscure one, not one you would have heard of.

Yeah. So he says, government tries to convince us that free markets are dangerous, but to believe that we have to ignore reality. But popular economist tells you that you're an economist too and a better one that you think. No, it doesn't. That's not what it tells you. No, it just says if you have common sense and like watch sports, then you're also an economist. With this one weird trick. I wanted to bring another couple of his articles into the four here. And he's written for the Mises Institute, the Climate Change Denying Heartland Institute, the American Institute. Just Heartland Institute. It's exactly as fascist as it sounds.

The Milton Friedman Institute for like South American Studies. And the American Institute for Economic Research. So I've got three of his sample post titles here, which all of which are delightful. Post title the first. What can Seinfeld teach us about industrial policy? Is his entire career just like SEO optimization? Oh, Costanza is dating the factory regulator. But then he breaks up with her just before Seinfeld's big factory review. And he's furious. Blaming gold for the 1930s is like Kim Jong-un blaming the foot for his height. This is literally like a company trying to fucking juke their Google results by having bullshit blogs. Blaming gold for the 1930s. Who are these people?

My primary person I've been blaming for the 1930s for the last 26 years of my life. And correct me if I'm wrong. It's Hitler. No, no. He means the depression. Oh, okay. Can we not put that on Hitler as well? I mean, this every like section and chapter just sounds like all these like PR emails I get where it's like they just take two random things and they put it together. Yeah, he's got slot machine brain. This is Pete Buttigieg's Corporate Social Responsibility Black Lives Matter. Weird web copy on his site. You know what this guy is? He's like one of those Japanese holdouts living on an island in like the 70s still fighting the Allies, except the Allies is the Bretton Woods system.

And his third one, why New York Times columnists should spend more time with billionaires. Because they don't spend enough. Hang on. Hasn't there been some problems with that? There was a billionaire that a lot of people in New York spent time with. Actually, the problem was they didn't spend enough time with him. Maybe if they had, they could have been better influences on it. Yeah, they could have been like Nicholas Negroponte from the IIT media lab. They would have grown to trust him. They could have done the responsible. They definitely did know a lot about comparative advantage. They could have done the responsible thing like Prince Andrew and gone to meet Jeffrey Epstein

specifically to friend break up with him. So I actually looked at that column and they were saying, people just don't understand how much billionaires do for us. If only columnists would get to know them a little bit more. They're people too. They have feelings. Exactly. They hang out with their dudes. I will say that billionaires and New York Times columnists have a lot in common in the sense that their billionaires are just as thin-skinned as Brett Stevens and will lose their fucking minds over the slightest thing. And like Peter Thiel destroying Gawker because they outed him, which I mean, maybe questionable decision, but still Peter Thiel's a horrible piece of shit. But you know what I mean? Like the thin-skinned reaction and the ability to

bend reality to their will because they have so much money that like nothing is real to them. Billionaires cry sometimes and that's okay. They should all have to go on the Joe Rogan experience. Also, before we go on, I do want to go back to that second title. Blaming to try and parse it. Blaming gold for the 1930s, meaning the depression, is like Kim Jong-un blaming the foot for his height. It's like he only has a reference pool of four different things he can draw on. The foot is a unit of measure, gold, and then like to the popular culture of the 1990s. What if Kim Jong-un actually does have one really small foot and that is why he's so small? It's like, damn, what if my feet were like five feet taller?

Platform feet. Just the same size apart from his shoes, which are just the size of the world's largest man's shoes. You know what's so incredible about this? These are op-eds that this guy's written for on behalf of other people under his own name. Well, I think he writes on behalf of other people, but he also writes, all of it's under his own name. Imagine being an op-ed mercenary. Yeah, that's exactly what he is. He's like an op-ed conditory. Right. So imagine- Imagine if it's for anyone who's paying good money and I don't ask questions. Imagine who's paying this guy, like this guy who lives in the basement in Elizabeth Holmes' parents' house. Imagine who's paying this guy to plant these op-eds in probably major newspapers

and stuff. Where did these run? Do you know? These are not running anywhere, major. These are running in reason or the Mises Institute's blog. Right. But it goes to show you how much of- If he was more successful, he would actually just have a column at the New York Times. Oh, absolutely. It goes to show you how much of the discourse around- The mainstream discourse around economics and stuff and taxation is literally just the result of- It's all just being greased by corporate money. It's these astroturf think tanks just playing the discourse like a marionette. And so we have to read these dumb takes about, here's why people need to stop being so hard on gold.

It's stop being mean to gold. Gold and billionaire. It's very soft and malleable if you hit it too hard. It'll bend. It's hard. I don't buy it on behalf of gold members. It's hard being right here in 2019. It just never reacts. I have actually two of his other incredible pieces that I've actually quoted from here. So here's the first. If Amazon is a sweatshop, why don't you tell me why so many people want to

work there? We read this article. Can't take up a second reason. One of the guys who worked there. No, he does an even better job than Mims. Because Mims' whole argument was, Amazon's not perfect, but you know what? It's a job and I made friends there. So stop being mean to Bezos. That's kind of like a, look, it's not perfect, but you guys are too hard on Amazon. What if the real Amazon was the friend you made along the way?

I mean, child slavery might be illegal, but people really seem to take advantage of it. So was it really bad? What he says is even further than that. This is what Tammany says, why Amazon's so good. Without an automated performance review that weeds out those that aren't up to the job, Amazon wouldn't be able to give a chance to the many individuals who are up to working for the Seattle retailer. Furthermore, how very cruel to the worker if the employer thinks so little of him as to not demand relentless betterment.

So this guy's name is Tammany, you said? Amazon opportunity. So he's basically, maybe this was just actually a clever ruse and he's just boss tweed, re-incarnated. Yeah, it's the same article coming round with a beard and then shaved. And throwing stones at Irish people for some reason. And as individuals, we all remember, often fondly, the people who got more out of us than we thought we had. So he's basically saying is it Amazon by paying you a pittance and fucking leaving your coworkers co-corps on the floor for hours because they're too lazy to call an ambulance

is the same as like your high school coach who taught you to believe in yourself. Exactly the same, no difference. It's like the movie Whiplash, right? Down to the look of the guy. Damn, oh fuck. J.K. Simmons to play Jeffrey Kisses. Jeff Bezos might have like a little dashboard on his desk that shows if any worker is dipped below the required productivity rate and then he just hits a drone and then that drone throws a

symbol from orbit down into an Amazon warehouse and cuts your head off. And that's how you know you can be the best picker you can be. Exactly. And then all the they're in the little cage and they're loading the boxes, but when they load the boxes right, it plays like the right bit of a drum set. When they get into a good rhythm of loading the boxes, it plays a killer solo. I mean, in effect that he is making the Whiplash argument, but for menial labor. I love to get world-class at loading boxes into other boxes from my cage. Because all economic activities are the same, they're just renumerated by either money,

which also is the same, whether or not it's wages or capital. And we all have to be the best that we could possibly be. That's the reason that the earth is there. Can you imagine if economies really work like that? Like if in a capitalist society that you could actually just get so good like stacking shelves that you could actually become a billionaire. Yeah, you're just like, I'm president now. That is kind of like the fallacy that a lot of people over the age of 50 seem to still hold.

That if you want to be rich, you just have to go work in the mail room. Well, there was a whole thing recently about like a lot of CEOs start out as fry cooks. It's like, no, they don't. No, they do not. They do not start as fucking fry cooks. Like that doesn't happen. Like some people, I used to work in fast food when I was in school and like, yes, some people do eventually if they work in fast food long enough,

we're talking a decade, get promoted like work in a regional office. It's like they don't have to like wear an apron anymore, but they're not going to be the fucking CEO. Those people get recruited from like CEO farms, which are like people who play squash. Anyone who's just had a normal job knows that's not how like professional mobility works. Like you don't start as a fry cook and then just get so good at being a fry cook that then you move on to the next thing and then eventually, you know, you're running Amazon. Like that's not how it works.

I think they all think of like the hot Cheetos story. You know the hot Cheetos story about the guy in the factory who like accidentally made hot Cheetos because he felt that the normal Cheetos were too bland. So he put like hot like pepper on them. Is that real? This sounds like the thing the Doritos were. It's like we smashed all the flavors together. It's the only example of meritocracy.

Yeah, the story itself is real, right? But it's not, it's real in the sense of like the mythology behind it is that this guy got a huge promotion. He became like an executive or something. I don't think that's true. I think that he got like a very small royalty on hot Cheetos when the Cheetos company or like the guys who could like create Cheetos thought that it would just be like a kind of one-off product.

I don't know whether he still gets it now, but he's definitely not the CEO of like the fucking Cheetos factory. But I mean, maybe a lie, but it tells a greater truth. In a similar vein, Mountain Dew's Baja Blast was actually just named in commemoration of a terrorist attack in Mexico. I thought it was how fun they all had going to see who let the dogs out. But all of our discussion of that last article, I just reminded me that we were doing the thing.

We were trying to persuade people like professional economists do that free markets are bad. And we forgot that Tammany, because he believes in himself, is an economist too and a better one than he even thinks. So let's talk about his second and final article before we close the show out. Final article from Mr. Tammany is, Americans quite simply couldn't handle life without soaring inequality. You suck a piss pig.

He lives in a Elizabeth Holmes parent's basement. I forgot that, it's true. I mean, again, it's fucking whiplash, isn't it? It's like the idea of it, like unless I fucking torture you until your knuckles are bleeding on the drum kit, you'll never be a good drummer. It is, no, Hossain, it is still whiplash, but not for the reasons you're thinking.

Okay, just a handshaking meme, but between this columnist and Joseph Ritzel's family. So I mean, the American, these supposed good old days of America that everyone looks back to was basically like one weekend in 1959, but like that at that time in which segregation was still around and all these other horrible things were still around, like the top tax rates for earners were above 90%, like the idea that America doesn't function without inequality.

I'm like, yes, in terms of like rapacious slavery capitalism, it might not, but in terms of like America being a stable society in which like gains are distributed. And I'm putting a huge caveat there that they were absolutely segregated along race. We had a much more redistributive system back then. Now it's just, I mean, put it this way, back then CEOs might have been like extremely Instagram personalities,

but they didn't have as much money and there were no Wyatt Cokes. Yeah. So for the small price of just bringing back racial segregation, we can actually solve, no, I'm checking. Oh, I didn't, I mentioned Moldberg, when did you come in here? Listen, I hate racial segregation as much as the next guy, but it's going to stop the billionaire. Um, man, that's a real, that's a real Nazbo.

Actually, no, the billionaires would probably love that. I'm fairly sure they would. So here is the argument. Americans quite simply couldn't handle life without soaring inequality. By Pakistani standards, Karachi is an advanced town. Not only is it the country's most populous place, it's also its most important industrial financial center. Most Americans, however, couldn't comfortably or even happily

last an hour in Karachi. The poverty would- Even an hour. Not an hour. Not an airport transfer. This man has never been to Pakistan. Like, there are rich people in Pakistan. Right.

And if you go to the rich- And if you generalizing, if Pakistan is worse than Elizabeth Holmes' parents' basement, then- And if you go to Karachi, what you find is that the rich people live in like segregated areas. So like, you know, if you go to like a rich suburb in Karachi, it basically looks like a street in California. Yeah. And in fact, if you want to talk, look, his argument here, right, is that Pakistan is very, very poor,

and the poorest Americans couldn't handle living there. Um, because it doesn't have enough inequality, because not enough innovation happened. But Pakistan's wealth is controlled like 98% by 22 families. Also, there's parts of America like in the deep south, for example, or places that are off the grid in like Indian country that are absolutely levels of deprivation that are comparable to airplaces in the world like Pakistan. So I just remember we're doing it again.

We're trying to say the free market's bad, but we forgot that John Tammany has the self-confidence to be an economist and a better one than he thinks. Can't believe we all can't believe we're doing being so Stalinist. Keep stumbling into that one. So here's actually doing like a weird like woke identity politics thing is like, well, what if actually my experience of economics is more important than the fact? That is kind of the only thing conservative economics has left. Yeah.

It's just I know this is wrong, but it still feels right. So here's what he says. He says, never forget what wealth creation is. It's the process whereby entrepreneurs mass produce the former luxuries of the rich. They make it possible for us to summon the world's plenty all with the click of a mouse to dial up endless amounts of information just by inserting what we want to know about into a search bar on a computer. Plus they connect us all around the world for next to nothing.

I'm just going to say this. What does that have to do with Pakistan? It's it's it's what's the link to Pakistan? I just don't get it. It's playing in front of your face, Nate. Pakistan doesn't have the internet. They don't have refrigerators. They don't have cars.

They only have the Muslim Bible. They just still like sell stuff out of carts. But they're all entrepreneurs and one of those people will end up growing up and they will end up being the new Michael Jordan who gives up basketball to play baseball with some cartoon characters. Well, that's the thing. Actually, when when SEAL Team Six shot Osama bin Laden in the face at Point Blank Ranch, he was like, oh, thank God, I like Pakistan so much.

Bring on the sweet release of death. Do you know you can't even get dial up here? It's crazy to run a wire between two pomegranates. It's terrible. I've been having to get porn over a WAP phone. The only thing he he tried to think of all of the luxuries of the world. And he because he's looking at a computer, this I think John Tamney doesn't have object permanence.

He can only write about what he's looking at at the time. And so that's why his book is all just endless sports metaphors because you're just watching. It's always really distracted deeply into his DVD of Space Jam. It's like antenna TV. So he can only watch Seinfeld and just like the channel that plays Space Jam on replay. Well, it makes sense that he would compare this all these pop culture things because there's one hour of TV he's allowed to watch. Parents basement tends to be reruns of shows like Seinfeld.

So put in the coin and it keeps like shussing out. He concludes. If I don't keep putting in the coin, the TV doesn't the TV won't start again. Why can't America realize this? Whether it's Silicon Valley, Hollywood or Wall Street wealth, the greatest fortunes earned in each industry are much more often than not a consequence of mass producing former luxuries or financing the mass production of former luxuries. As the wealth gap increases, the lifestyle gap plummets.

You know, like how the Sackler family increased everyone's lifestyles by like flooding the entire United States. Previously, opiates were like a luxury good. And now you can just get them easily. Eventually, everyone will have a yacht. That's how it works. Exactly. Yeah.

They'll all be able to attack Irish singers. Even they'll have yachts. Yeah. They're saying it was a speedboat. Come on. We're going to do this joke. We're going to do it right. Finally doing the nautical episodes.

Like look, Tammany from his post in Elizabeth Holmes' parents' basement knows- That's so sad. It's so sad. It's depressing me. If you think about these as posts, it's even funnier. They're long Facebook posts and everyone comes with a picture of a different minion. Some things in America bad, sure, but things in America are also good. And if you go to somewhere like Pakistan, it's bad.

It is sturdy. And like, you know, some of them, you know, you can't even get a sex robot there. You know what I'm saying, guys? Gold standard minions. Anyway, so we've been going for quite a while here. So I think it falls now to me as it does every week to thank Luke so much for coming onto the podcast today. Yeah, every single week I'm here.

And you can thank me again. Thank you. Thanks for having me, guys. Just always thank Luke. And you can also check out- But thanks for soaking this time. Finally. And also, if you want to hear more of Luke talking, you can check out his show Michael and us.

Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a podcast. We're on SoundCloud. We're on Spotify. We're on wherever fine podcasts are sold. We also have a Patreon. So please give us your money. On coin-operated TVs.

Just coin-operated podcast. Absolutely. And also, we've got a Patreon. You know all about that second episode every week, five bucks. Make sure if you're in Canada, however, there's a damn election and you're supposed to vote in it. Please vote. Yes, vote. And again, vote NDP unless you have a big fancy vote, in which case we don't trust you to vote

NDP. So just go hang out on your boat. Exactly. I hear there are a lot of Irish singers in the Bermuda Triangle. Milo, do you have any dates? Do I have any dates? When's this coming out? Monday.

Monday. Oh, yeah. Monday, Monday, Monday. Monday, Monday, Monday. I have a smoke comedy on the 23rd of October, where Dan Muggleton, trash each champion, is going to be there. Victor Petrashkin, also trash each champion. Pope Lonergan, another trash each champion.

They're all going to be there. It's going to be compared by me. Come down to that. There'll be a link in the description. Fan, ta, stick. Anyone else have anything they want people to know? New episode of Well There's Your Problem on Do Not Eat To YouTube channel. Oh, it's got a name.

Yeah. If we're going to like, by this time, probably four. And the next one is going to be, what is the next one going to be? Oh, yeah. The Highency, Highacy, Regency, Walkway Collapse. Okay, perfect. So look, you've all got a lot on your plate now. Canadians, you've got voting.

You've got lots of podcasts to listen to. You've got to fly over to the UK. You've got to come to smoke comedy. And oh, no, what's that? I think the coin you put into the old podcast machine is finally run out of juice. So bye, everybody. Bye.