TRASHFUTURE - Midden’s Advente

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

We tried to do a full cast episode but Hussein was busy with a ‘real job’. So we got Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) to discuss a few things. Firstly: Keir Starmer’s desert island discs (yawn), plus a startup that does what you might call a novel riff on the idea of digital nomads. Behold, an episode of nothing but van lore. Van content. You will love it. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.  *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, welcome back to this episode of TF, that podcast you're listening to right now. I am noticing, given that we've spent sort of like 10 minutes futzing with various recordings, how much I drop into drivetime radio DJ voice as soon as we start talking in a way that's intended for public conception. Taking you through your commutes, it's trash future FM. You're listening to Riley and the Gooch. The three co-hosts with me today, Alice Milo and Nate, are collectively the Gooch. That's right.

Yeah. That's right. And I think personally, I'd like to just jump right on in here because another certain figure who, while we have sworn to not talk about the organization with which he is associated, has released his personal idea of a perfect Sunday on a desert island that involves what he would like Riley and the Gooch to play for drivetime morning radio in London. That's right. The former leader of the British Labour Party has released his desert island discs collection.

We should explain what desert island discs is, right, if you're not familiar. Well, this is a mini-Britanology that we're doing right now. That's right. Desert island discs is this thing that like it's this rite of passage that like every public figure and like every politician does, where you go on the radio. Alice, not every politician because he's the first Labour leader since Miliband to do a desert island disc. Yeah.

Jeremy Corbyn didn't do desert island. Interesting. Yeah. How interesting. The gist of it is, like you go on this kind of quite cozy BBC radio show and you say, if I was stuck on a desert island, right, these are the songs. This is the music that I would take with me. In the American Virgin Islands, for example.

Yeah. If I were on Little Saint James, I would take these discs because that's how old it is. These records. Let's say hypothetically, you're stuck in a mosque. Step leader of the opposition stuck on desert island. James Bull finds it. So, now we're on a desert island and we have some discs, right? That's where we are so far.

We're just hanging out on the like temple, on this desert island, listening to, what are we listening to? So, we're all hanging out on this desert island. We're on a desert island with Keir Starmer. We've been shipwrecked on the like soft rock cruise that we all went on and Keir Starmer has decided to be the Oxcorp DJ and he is going to put on three songs and he says these are entirely my own choices. Derade Sandstone.

If you run into anybody I've known for a long time, they will tell you this is a genuine Keir Starmer list. Wow. Okay. Is that a KS? Number one. 100 Gets. Keir Starmer boiler room set.

Can I get a legit check on this Keir Starmer list? So what Keir Starmer is playing on his boiler room set, just like grooving while a bunch of the sort of snarling reactionaries that he's empowered are all grooving beside him. He's starting with Out on the Floor by Dobie Gray, a classic of Northern Soul, which Starmer says reminds him of his early days in London where he built lifelong friendships. Cool. Yeah. Okay.

This is all going to sound like one long university personal statement, isn't it? Well, everything he does is basically a university personal statement. He's unable to speak to the media. A man trying to get elected on UCAS points. Yeah. He's getting into different clearing. I think that's the best criticism of Keir Starmer that I've ever heard. Yeah.

So he... Um, I've actually got a Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award. Um, so a classic of Northern Soul. So he's picked something from the former Red Wall. He also picked... Which he says reminds him of London, which... What? What's up?

Okay. Um, Bridge Over Troubled Water by artist for Grenfell, specifically the Stormzy Track, because it reminds him, in the end, politics is about people and that the Grenfell tragedy brought a shudder to all. Yeah, a shudder. Yeah. A shudder and then nothing else. Yeah.

I was going to say, I mean, I appreciate that he has decided that after, you know, after sending a bunch of people who are of the same demographic as Stormzy to prison for five years for stealing an ice cream bar in 24 hour all night court sessions when he was director of public prosecutions, I imagine he might be like, oh, well, maybe, maybe they'll like me if I name check an artist I absolutely haven't listened to, but you know what, I mean, hey, that's Britain in 2020. That's right. It's like, all you got to do is just make the right noises and it's okay.

We don't have to think about the stuff you've actually done with the entirety of the rest of your life. Yeah. But politics is about people. Yeah. Places are things. Yeah. It's about one-third of the nouns.

God damn it. Politics is about nouns, but it's not about pronoun. Okay. We have to make this clear. I mean, yeah, politics is you're in the noun business. So basically also, right, like pronouns after you've served out your term as a noun. That's right. So he also says, right, Grenfell, the Grenfell tragedy brought a shudder to everybody, which

again, should just show you like how far, how far the sort of idea of that things can be political has fallen, which is that no, it didn't. It absolutely didn't. Because if you recall, a lot of people covered it up. Yeah. Remember when Theresa May went and refused to visit with any of the actual people that politics is about? Yeah.

Or how many of those people were in temporary accommodation for years after, or how the Lib Dems tried basically like conspired to get a Tory elected in the very same seat where it happened, who almost just doesn't seem to want to engage with the reality of it. The idea that somehow this was a universal tragedy for everybody, and that there aren't people who basically don't care, or there aren't people who's profited off of systematically making that kind of thing happen, is completely asinine. It is so surface level. If you've been keeping up with the inquiry, you may notice that one of the companies,

one of the contractors that did the cladding, lost a bunch of emails because a guy claimed not to know how to work a laptop. Well, he should listen to the Stormzy song. Yeah. Why didn't it bring a shudder to him? Yeah. But here's my favorite one, the best one of the three. Incredible.

Or how to lose Scotland for another generation in one Labour leader. He picked three lions or the footballs coming home song that everyone listened to in 2018 by David Bedeal Frank Skinner in the Lightning Seeds. Awesome. What? This is just purely to win back David Bedeal personally. And it only sort of... You're not very happy with the current iteration of the Labour Party.

It only sort of works. David Bedeal tweeted, well, I think he's almost certainly got my vote and I'm like, well, he's being a bit coy given that this was just for you, David. It's very micro-targety. Yeah. Also, I think it's so cool to do a specifically English football song at a time when Scotland is entering Euro 2020 for the first time in something like 23 years and everyone up here is going to be completely fucking feral about it.

And you're just like, yeah, no, three lions. It's awesome. It's fine. Yeah. That's the main football song. It's not like there's an election coming up that the SNP is going to like brutally, brutally own. So, yeah, that's fine.

Yeah. That's fine. It's pure. When you say one nation conservatism or one nation liberalism, it turns out the one nation is England. That's right. Well, quite frankly, I would have been a little happier if he had done it while wearing black face.

But I'll take it. I suppose you can't see that on the radio. So, what would be the point? But also, right? Like, honestly, how does that, who is that impressing? Like, hmm, he picked the football. David Bedeal. David Bedeal only.

One man won a deep deal. Yeah. But there can be only one. David Bedeal is the electoral highlander. I like the idea that he feels as though the way that he wins back labor's, you know, position in terms of polite society, i.e. appeasing right-wing British media, is to give some sort of a reward cookie to every single one of the most unhinged critics of the last five years.

So, it's like, well, today it was him saying that he loves David Bedeal's stupid football song. Tomorrow it'll be, oh, we're going to give this gun to Rachel Riley that she can shoot anybody she doesn't like on Twitter. Damn, he's so electable. Wait, haven't I already done that? It's like, Franz Francis Coppola is just going to have an enormous 18-wheeler of gin pull up to her house every day.

She's voting labor now, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, but even if, even like what he's probably thinking is, hmm, I've got a scene sufficiently patriotic. No, it's, listen, it's on his desert island discs for the same reason it's in the soundtrack of Watch Dogs Legion, in that somebody has thought, oh, that sounds quite English, doesn't it? And they've just kind of gone, yeah, fair enough. I just feel like when you focus group stuff this much to the point that it's so obviously

inauthentic and based on literally nothing, it winds up being closer to that terrible game about London crime shit that we played on Twitch that one time when, like, it's very obviously a bunch of game devs in like Nevada making a game what they think England is based on like a Guy Ritchie movie and Austin Powers. And it's just like nothing about his is authentic and slag off the motor. A direct quote from K.S. Dahmer on desert island. But like, it's if what's so bizarre, right, is even if he's, if the claim is true that

that hasn't been focused group, then there's just a focus group living in his brain and it produces someone that's just who he is. Yeah. Someone who doesn't like anything, doesn't connect with anything who's just there to be like, Hey, you like this, right? I'm doing everything that I can to be whatever you want. And no one gives a shit. And it may not apply to viewers in Scotland.

Yeah, exactly. The man that K.S. Dahmer's taken a limitless pill, but it just gives him the ability to like imagine Ipsos mori poles. I mean, we did ask K.S. Dahmer for comment, but all he told us was fuck off. Yes. And it's like, you know, what is and even at that point, right?

Like all of this stuff where he's it's bear you if you decided you can't offer anyone anything, all you can really offer them is a feeling. And that feeling is, oh, yeah, I like how it's a leader of the opera. I was going to say, can I borrow a feeling? I've got a heart that needs healing. But in my case, it's a labor party. Can I borrow an election? We are absolutely touched my hand with your glove of love.

We are absolutely not going to do the top. The realization that K.S. Dahmer is the Kirk Van Houten of opposition politics. So I'm going to move on. I got a startup. I got a startup in place. All right. Now, here's the thing.

I originally found one called Mindtickle that's just had a hundred million dollars invested into it by SoftBank. Excuse me. Yeah, I found one called Mindtickle. Yeah. Mindtickle Mindtickle. That's not my mind. That sounds like that sounds like sexual Minecraft.

That's right. But but like PG rated sexual. But the thing is, it's just another like non-sing parody for companies to like spy on their employees. It's a way to like combine training for down economics. It's a way to combine training for like sale staff with insights from platforms like Zynga to try to like basically spy on people and use AI to make sure that they're saying the right things to your customers.

But Zynga, that one's a little too samey. So I decided that the funniest thing about Mindtickle is the name. So I found a different one and this was sent to us by a listener on Discord. It's called Kibo. How are we spelling? Is it K-I-B-O or is it K-I-B-B-O? Second one, Nate. Two B's.

Does it dispense kibble? I was going to say, is it dog food? You're listening to K-I-B-B-O. With Riley and the gun. It's Riley and the gun. Well, actually, sadly, Milo, you're close. But American radio codes are four letters, not five. So it would have to be the first spelling.

Sorry, I'm going to be pedantic about this shit. But I'm also going to say, let's take, all right, kibble and it's not dog not in the slightest. It is a K, not a Q. It's a K, yeah. It's not a quib. OK, it's not a secret quibi. I'll even give you that.

I'll even give you a version of quibi. I will even give you a quibi. Quibi is exactly the same. It's just changed its name to Kibo this time. I'm going to give you the first bit of marketing copy here as well. Rethink your reality. Oh, OK.

Is it like a second life sort of thing for like AR, VR, just like video game version of teleconferencing? Because I know that actually exists. Here's the thing, Nate, I would say in your acronyms, you got the two of the letters you said are relevant, right? What, VR and VR? Two of the letters in AR, VR are relevant, just not in that order. What, AV? We'll find out.

Don't shelter in place. Shelter any place. Is it like an alert system for school shootings? That would be more useful than the thing that it is. Well, shelter in place is like when fucking shit's going on. And you have to like, yeah, run, hide, fight or whatever. So is it like, is it like a thing to do like a remote office set up? Like a sort of, I would guess, like an all in one sort of

video conferencing, void sort of thing. So you can, you can like monetize a platform for people working from home, like an all in one for working from home. Nate, I'd say you are not in the right ballpark, but you're in the right sport. What does that mean? Well, it means it means that it means that you are you have gone to the right kind of category. But we've read too many of these coffees.

You're just like talking like them now. Maybe this will help. These days, when it comes to ballparks, we're all playing the same sport. That's right. That's why here at Kibo. So well, at Kibo, we are actively working to build a diverse and inclusive community. We want to create a more sustainable, affordable and equitable way of living that is open, welcome and safe and a safe space for people from all backgrounds.

OK, so I have a list of landlord shit. Yeah, my load's related to landlording, but I have a I have a list of their values. And I want to see if you can guess what they are based on the list of values. Rent seeking. There is rent seeking involved. Yes. We are kind by means of seeking rent. Yeah, we are we also like inquisitive. We are well, we are adventurous and we are explorers. And we are curious to just asking me if I've ever thought of trying wife swapping.

Is this like is this like a set up a fucking workers dormitory sort of thing? I is now that, yes, that's the correct ballpark. But there's still one thing that we're missing, which makes this worth highlighting. So far, this sounds like a GCSE history textbook, explaining the empire. So is it like is it like a thing for startups to like have a co-working co-living space thing where you can you can use this thing to like all rent the same house and that's why does the kibbo so resemble the prison? So I'm going to take a few more.

We take responsibility for ourselves. We help others. We welcome strangers. We leave things better than they were. We respect privacy and value community. We are active. A lot of values here. This company has an enormous amount of values, very value. That's good. Yeah. That's that's the more values you have, the better you are.

Well, we take an active interest in others, you know, so that's I love when that happens. Is this like social networking for landlords? We ask others to join in. Maybe that should clarify things. We joined in. Oh, is it group sex? Yeah, this is such a group sex. We take this is like we've invented dogging.

We take the time to listen and to explain. I would say there's a lot of similarities between what this is proposing and dogging, which will become clear as we as we finish this list. Well, is it like matching this for startups, people? By the way, you might not realize this. I'm intentionally taking a long time with this list of values because there are so many and they're so stupid. We take care to not let others feel embarrassed,

but we are ourselves not easily embarrassed. God, you're right. It really sounds like dogging. Yeah, yeah. We are. Join me in the lay by Mr. Chaffos. We are adventurous.

We are explorers. We are curious. Are you familiar with the toilets at Junction 26 of the M4? Mr. Chaffos. We are doers. We take initiative. We are honest, open and direct pioneers or pioneers.

So basically when we said, oh, what is this? Some kind of like a new dormitory thing. You were sort of very, very close. I want to take one more mobile dormitory. Yes, like you live in an RV. Yes. Fuck. Yes. That's right.

And it makes pizza at the same time. Yeah, I love to live in a pizza oven. I mean, I mix so what you're basically saying, Riley, is that this is this is like workers, co-working space, dormitory, but in an RV, in many RVs. In a distributed RV. I love to have the experience of like living in the Humvee from Generation Kill, but like we make JavaScript.

That's right. Oh, yeah, there's no radio, but there's a guy singing. It is weird to me how they've managed to make living in a van down by the river aspirational. So the one other. So the interesting thing here, right? And now it's one thing. This is not their, their client isn't like a company

that will rent vans for all its workers, but like give that a year. It is simply just, they say, Kibo is a new way to live. Our vans replace your bedroom. Cool. Talk about the great replacement. I come home with my bed from the van now. Yeah, just all of the van startups merge seamlessly into one and you live in the back of an ambulance that cooks pizzas.

It's amazing. This company is completely plopped in the bay area. They say this company has flopped or in the bay area, but it's had knockout success in the greater home counties area. It's just every man with a white van is like, hell, yeah, I can be another kind of landlord. So our vans replace your bedroom as a mobile. I love to love that.

I don't want to. We've been watching. We've been watching Blue Van Man on the stream, but like, we don't know that he's got like six JavaScript throughout the back of the van. So our vans replace your bedroom as a movable, tiny home connected to remote locations and urban cities across the West Coast. So it's a state's thing. Our Kibo clubhouse is also a detective van for the TV licensing author.

That's right. You have to like crank the fucking radar dish on the roof every so often. Our clubhouses are your home basis where you can relax, recharge, hang out and be productive. So basically what you do is. Oh, fuck me. What we've what we've done is we've done some human trafficking like you're docking with the fucking International Space Station,

but it's just a fucking common room. Yes, that's right. Don't give them that idea because they will start calling it that. Yeah, once again, it's amazing to me. It's like the International Play Station. Your room is a van and you have you have smart hubs in like the parking lot above the FW or something like that, but they've managed to give it this slick branding, you know, like the kind of shit that they put all over one single

subway car in New York City. And all of a sudden it looks like something to aspire to. I mean, this reminds me, I had a soldier when I was in the army who said his goal was to get out of the army and open a mobile tattoo studio in a Winnebago and go across country tattooing people. And then it kind of dawned on him after the fact when people pointed out that you have to have a license to do tattoos in literally every state and they're different in every state.

So this kind of defeats the purpose of the Winnebago to travel around the country. And then he got kicked out of the army for heros. This mobile tattoo studio is highly illegal. So he should have done JavaScript instead of tattooing a heroine. That's right. I mean, I'm googling this because I need to know what their vans look like. Also, is it called Kibo because it's like a kibbutz or I don't I do not know. Oh, fuck, that would be incredible.

Oh, God, kibbutz fans just sounds like I have we told you about the the Hasidic thing in like really Hasidic areas where they have the RVs to perform like religious ceremonies. They call them mitzvah tanks. Yes, I've heard of that mitzvah tank. And you'll see a fleet of them going down Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, like in and around Yom Kippur and stuff like that. But dead serious, they and they'll sometimes sometimes not only do they go

down in fleets down the street, but they'll be playing like what I might describe as sort of fun songs in Yiddish about why you should be more religious and why we want Moshiach now. And like so to me, the idea of a kibbutz van is just sort of that. I had not envisioned a sort of West Coast, sort of like I'm a hippie, but for tech shit living out of a van. It's also even a good van. It's quite a small van.

Just posted a couple of pictures. It's just a Mercedes Sprinter. Like it's not even a good like it's like a proper conversion. It's not even the long wheelbase one. It's the short wheelbase one. You like to get to live in a small van. Would you like to know how much it cost to rent one of these vans? I have the price sheet in front of me, actually.

Hang on, let me just bring it up. You know what's amazing is that picture, the second one you sent Alice of the guy in like the shearling jacket and the girl in the jean cut off jean shorts. That basically looks like a slightly happier version of Grimes and her then boyfriend defeated on their fucked up houseboat. It's only a matter of time before there's a houseboat kibbut. So basically, here's what you get to be a membership of Kibo.

You can pay four hundred and eighty five dollars a year. And that's five twenty four hour passes for use at any Kibo clubhouse based on single occupancy van not included. So how much is the van? The van. A thousand dollars a month. Sorry, Alice, the options start at fifteen hundred dollars per month. Oh, fucking hell.

Oh, you could just rent an apartment. No, no, not not on the West Coast. You couldn't not in San Francisco now. Not in San Francisco, but like you can't fucking park that in San Francisco. You're going to be stuck in Merced, whatever the fuck. Here's the other thing, right? Yeah, your van is fifteen hundred dollars a month. Then if you want full time access to the Kibo clubhouses,

that's a further nine hundred ninety five dollars a month. The tech crunch on this compares it to two other startups. Hipcamp and enter, which has a lot of us. Oh, God, this is how we're. That's the thing, right? Democratic governors are never going to do anything like, you know, implement rent control or Democratic mayors aren't going to do this either. They're never going to do anything but like ban sodas and keep giving money

to police unions. And so this is how we're solving the housing crisis in the states, I guess. The company, the company tend to actually have a very interesting system where they get more people in the vans by hanging you up to sleep on hooks. Worth like they got like an they got an eleven million dollar valuation this year. Sure. Yeah, because they're solving because what they're doing is they they are providing a terrible product in response to a real crisis where your alternative is nothing.

Yeah. And like the main thing on their website right now is become a campkeeper, earn extra income by hosting guests on your land, which, you know, lays out the which we're bringing serfs back. It's awesome. Have you ever become a campkeeper? So here's the other thing. If you want a second person to live in your kibble with you, that's $50 a night. Why? Yeah.

How do the how can they tell? Well, because there will be RAs stationed in each van. This is for like this is for your clubhouse. So you can you can like get access to the clubhouse for yourself, but then get your like partner so she can't come in. Sorry. Can you can you sleep in the can can can your partner sleep in the van with you? My goodness, no.

That's a big enough van. Anyone could do anything cares. What are they going to do? Call the cops. Yes, they will do that sex company. Yeah, of course it is. Do not get horny. Do not. Sorry.

I mean, if you're if if I if I'm issuing a life on in fixed buildings to be a mobile fucking JavaScript coder in a van, going to be fucking at work. All right, would you like to like issue all worldly needs and wander the earth as a kind of JavaScript monk? This company would be very cool if they only let you have gay sex in the van. Yeah, I love the idea that invariably. So, I mean, OK, I mean, I get the appeal in the sense of like a sort

of this being kind of the same stupid digital nomad shit. But it feels like instead of it being like, oh, I'm going to work in New Zealand for six months or some shit illegally. Obviously, Dave Courtney voice instead. It's like, oh, I'm going to I'm going to travel around the West Coast in a van, which I mean, could be cool, sure. But yeah, that's that's what that's what people that's what young people did in the 60s in between like getting into cults and stuff.

Fine. Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, you do this for six months. You then you put down in Los Angeles. Yeah, you put down roots in Los Angeles. You get murdered by Charles Manson. You go to Alta Monta and get stabbed. I mean, but it's just sort of like you can't really safely or legally park a van overnight and let me you can't in like highway rest stops.

But like that that might be cool for two weeks. That would get really grim for a year. I mean, I've driven all up and down I5 literally from where it starts like at the border with Canada, all the way to where like it continues to go down to San Diego and like or splits off to I10 to go to Arizona. Like you can't only do so much and anywhere else, you're literally risking being towed or getting murdered if you try to sleep overnight in the fucking van.

The main place where you can park is a Walmart, right? So you just spend the year of your life. Yeah, there's a brand Walmart tour. So look, I mean, if Kibo wants to get big, what it has to do is create like some kind of franchising deal with like dead malls and dead Walmart. It's all across the country. So but also something I point out, too, is that surely you can get a van

if if the whole point like Kibo isn't giving you a fucking job. Oh, heaven. So like in the grand scheme, and if they're charging extra on top for like the clubhouse thing where you can, you know, go and it's not even like a luxury van, either. Like we've seen the vans now and they're not great. I mean, because the idea being like the whole point of being like the person who lives in a van down by the river is that you're not spending $18,000 a year in rent, right?

Like surely that's the point. And surely you could get a sprinter or some other like a van similar to that for less than $1,500 a month for a fucking car payment. Because I'm assuming that also doesn't include fuel, right? Really? Like they're not they're not subsidizing fuel. They're not any of that. Oh, goodness, no. Not at all. Or maintenance on the van. Maybe maintenance because they're kind of a landlord.

But that's it. How cheaply you can buy a fucking camper van in America because I reckon it's fucking cheap for a used one. I reckon you could buy a good camper van for less than $10,000 used. So if you go out on a loan for five years, the payments would be like $200 a month. I've seen Volkswagen combies, like good ones from the 90s, like not even the really old ones, but like ones that would are 90s, early 2000s, like ones that would have power steering, you know, automatic transmission, all like the shit would not be like, you know, vintage hippy vans would absolutely be like a car that you could rely on

for, yeah, like eight, nine thousand dollars. Yeah, like and cheaper than that if you get one that needs a little bit of work. I mean, like, yeah, the idea being that you would spend, I mean, you would you would spend the equivalent, like 18,000 to $1,500 a month. That's like what I paid in a rent and a studio apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Not that long ago. Like the idea of bat being your fucking car is just it's like, are you leasing a bugatti? Also, otherwise, like, if you have a partner and you want to have access

to like laundry and stuff, that's actually $3,000 a month. Yeah, which is literally San Francisco rent. Yeah. Do they cover car insurance? They don't say if they do. So I assume they do not. Yeah. So like, I mean, here's the thing, right? Like, unless the appeal is to eat an every fucking gross jack in the box on I5, like, that's how you're going to spend your gap year while coding for like fucking,

you know, like the remote dick sucking factory. Then I just don't see what the appeal is. Like this seems to me like the idea of selling an experience in a way that can be sort of built and itemized as opposed to someone just giving like, I want to live in a van for a year and then just doing it. Yeah. Well, it's it's it's essentially this is like a package. It's like a package gap year tour, but for living in a van down by the river. Yeah.

Years ago, like 25 years ago, there was a thing. Have you guys ever heard of the the American car company Saturn? They don't exist anymore. I remember them, but they were really shitty, like boxy looking cars that were popular kind of in the in the 90s. And then I think they went away by the early 2000s. And I remember this commercial that they had, I want to say in like 94, 95. Maybe I would have been a little kid, but like old enough to remember this stuff.

Where the whole point of the commercial was like, oh, yeah, this is the recap of like our Saturn jamboree where like 10,000 Saturn owners just like came to like a camp together in Tennessee to be like, hey, we love each other because we all own Saturn's like this is the whole play. Basically, for some reason, we all own these really ugly cars and we're going to get together for a weekend to celebrate our weird car ownership status. And it's like people actually did this. But I feel like this is just like a way more expensive and deranged version of

that, because those people, as insane as they are to spend a weekend being like, hey, let's go do Woodstock for Saturn owners. At least they went home afterwards and like had a normal house to find that they went home and found their bedroom had been replaced with a van. Well, yeah, because like this is this is a classic example of what if we monetized the rot because you know that there needs to people need housing and the market certainly isn't building any or it's not certainly building anything approaching the right type in the right place.

No, but you know what it is building? Vans. Yeah. And so instead it's just like, hey, I guess I guess we'll just try to get the pure ideology here is branding. This is somehow aspirational. But it's the whole thing is it that classic thing of all that is solid melts into air, the idea that you might live somewhere that is solid melts into vans, right? All that's in the van. Kirstama would do this to prove that he is a white van man. Yeah, that's right. It's true.

Well, living in like one of these horrible fucking, you know, like temporarily embarrassed future startup billionaire dormitory in San Francisco, you know, somebody just sweating through trying to figure out some way to make money and then sees it like two juxtaposed, perfectly juxtaposed news articles in the Los Angeles Times. This is basically like California Housing Shortage, California Vans. That's right. Fucking Eureka.

The very idea of like having a community, having having a kind of home where you could have kids and so on and so on just doesn't exist. And sorry, you need to have your. Oh, sorry. Your community is all work now. And your community is in the base station or whatever. There's there's a hospital fucking markers on highway exits. And we are fucking in the van and I am not using protection. So we're going to have kids in the van when we are the other.

All right, it's going to happen. If you take pill, everything will be as it was before. You will have a wife and children and an apartment. But if you take the red pill, you will have van. You may say to yourself, this is not my beautiful van. Look, here on TF, we've all taken the van pill. That's right. We're all driving around in circles and now recording van.

Yeah, we're all we're driving around our country in circles that we have to live in. We're just living in a series of dead malls, which are the new like hip urban districts are just going to be the parking lots of dead malls filled with JavaScript professionals. Something that I think too about this is like, you know, if you were in a situation where this made sense to you, like, hey, I don't want to live in a city as insanely expensive as San Francisco and I have a job that I can do remotely.

So, I mean, to me, like, I would say if you're going to confine yourself to say the Western United States, I just don't understand why you wouldn't just get a place in, I don't know, like, if you're going to be doing work with like a 5G router modem or whatever, like a fucking Mifi, why not just go live in like, I don't know, Boise or Courtois-Lens, Idaho or like Nevada or Montana or like one of these fucking places where you can get like a house house for like $600 a month. Because you want that reflected glory. You want that thing of being like on the West Coast, right?

You want to live the, you want to be a boomer and live through a weird recursive interpretation of the 1971 The Who song, Going Mobile. That's exactly it. You want to be season five, Don Draper. I got a van, I'm going to live in a van, I'm going mobile. There is one, there is one more interpretation of this, though, right? Which is that any time you, you as a person, your rights as a worker or your expectations of having a house or property or whatever, any time those are

undermined, the thin edge end of the wedge is always lifestyle. Because people forget that Uber was introduced as a way for middle class people to just like earn a little extra money. Make some extra money, yeah. And so if you're saying, oh, this is living in a van that you rent from us and also you rent your access to a washing machine or whatever, all of that. Oh, that's a lifestyle thing. That's a lifestyle thing.

If that catches on, give it a couple of years before all of a sudden it becomes some kind of, it becomes the new bare minimum of what like people who can't afford to like not have a gig job or people who can't afford to like live in an actual like static building get. Choose a life, choose a van, rent a washing machine. This is so fucking grim. Yeah, that's right. So speaking, I mean, it's also, it's crazy to me too, because I mean, I was just

looking at this yesterday, if you, if you're ever feeling particularly curious about when people talk about the housing crisis in California, for example, there's a neighborhood in Los Angeles called Skid Row and its name is 100% based on what it, what it's, what it is. Like it's basically a homeless encampment with like, there is some housing there. But if you go do Google, Google Street View, and I challenge you to do this, go look up Skid Row, Los Angeles and do Google Street View around that neighborhood. It'll, Google Maps will show you the demarcations of the neighborhood and try

to count how many tents you see, because I'm telling you, it's end to end every block. And that's just a tiny fraction. But what if we monetize those tents? There are in California, in just California, there's, there's estimated 70,000 homeless people that they know of in Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles is a city of about four million people. In New York, where I used to live, there was at one point and a Girl Scout troop comprised entirely of homeless children.

And this was, of course, reporting the news like a good thing, because it was estimated that there were, and I'm not joking, 110,000 children in New York City living in homeless shelters. And that's just, that's just, that's just scratching the surface. That's just what they know of in cities where like, they care to count. By the way, controlled by Democrats, across the board, controlled by Democrats. It's called incentivizing homeless to learn to code. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So that's, and this is, look, if the... No, not for that guy, for our guy, the boring guy. And that's the thing, right? The Democrat, the Democratic Party. I think by extension, you can say like, the probably we can, if you want to look through the seer stones, probably this version of the Labour Party, it has the only way it can promise you a better life is by its wiggish view of technology, that things get better because some boffin

invents something that makes it better. But they're inventing living in your van. And then the, and then the clever thing they do is they make it look like a lifestyle thing. And that's their solution to this problem, is what if we put JavaScript people in vans? I'm excited for like this to continue, but it's invented living in your van. I'm excited for this to continue, but it keeps getting worse, right? And we get like lifestyle solutions to climate change, invoked privation.

That's going to be, are you suggesting that TF in several years, I'll have like a same version of this conversation where I'll be like, yeah, but the thing is, you used to be able to live in a van, but now they're trying to say, oh, live in a station wagon as a lifestyle thing. But remember, the thin end of the wedge is always lifestyle. Yes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I can envision a scenario in which it's the same thing as repeated, except instead of having your own van, you have your own shipping container on

like an anchored container ship somewhere. And it's like, well, we do play squash between the containers. So, I mean, like integrants, give me things. It is kind of aspirational. We do have internet. You know, I think about this too a lot because I think if you remember in 2016, this was debated a little bit, but I mean, I was living in the U.S. at the time, obviously, and it was like maybe a little closer to it.

One of the talking points in Hillary Clinton's sort of platform, the Democrats platform in 2016, but before the event that we're not allowed to talk about the economic, the events do not mention the event was they basically said, Bill, you know, we help to help to strengthen a ladder out of poverty. And I think that that's really, there's something very important in that it's implicit in that is that the idea of the ladder out of poverty is that they basically want to create the the understanding in society that anybody who would like will allow you to ascend if you work super hard, harder than anyone

else and anyone who doesn't descend deserves it and deserves to suffer as much as possible. And maybe you could say I'm being overinterpreted with that. But like that genuinely is Democrat mindset is it's sort of like, you know, well, we will we'll smile and we'll offer you a helping hand, you know, internally rhetorically, you know, and then it will also tase you if you don't comply and if whereas the Republicans are just like fucking dial ready, you useless sacks and me make us money if you want to know sort of again, I try I think we

try not to talk too much about the U.S. election. But if you want to look at it from our lens, which tends to be through which companies are getting what positions where what's the future for antitrust. Uber, Lyft, Dordash, in addition to all like all the people that like the architects of the Iraq War, the architects of the gig economy, all also on Biden's transition team. So, you know, more, more vans, maybe vans are going to be top of the line. Just a trash, co-waste disposal unit.

But I do want something, something the accountant genuinely said to me this morning, the trash future accountant, when I was talking to him about some financial stuff, and I asked him, why would we pay someone five grand for arranging an arrangement that is entirely beneficial to them? And he just said, Milo, please, it's called capitalism. So announcing the new, the new host of TF, that guy. No, but I've got, yeah, I've got, I've got, he does listen. Hi, I've got a few, hi Nick, I've got a few more, more things for us to carry

on to, because given that the vaccine has been announced, and, you know, there is, at the end of their vaccines now, several, several vaccines have been announced, speaking of which, before we go into that, by the way, all of the, excuse me, three vaccines, because I'm being Russophobic by not mentioning Sputnik five. That's right. 92%, maybe fucking the Russian vaccine. 92% the ultimate troll.

Literally the day after they announced the 90% effective vaccine, Russians are like, well, I was just 92% effective. Yeah, mine's actually 95, but yours, your thing's cool too, I guess. So the, our vaccine is actually Aurora Borealis. But the interesting thing here, and don't forget, is that when, when, when socialists, especially certain former socialist leaders of the UK labor party say, damn, it would be great if we could make sure the vaccine was, you know, available to all, it's excoriated for saying, ah, you needed the private

companies to do it. Never forget that the only reason that the form of the vaccine is actually working, which works in mRNA, was even kept alive as a methodology, was people in publicly funded universities, and the pharmaceutical companies developed it into a mass product, only when they were paid billions and billions and billions of dollars in pounds by, by basically us. And I mean, the same thing applies to the past, which is, yeah, which is like, well, it's kind of funny how well everything works.

When you set these, like, massive resources towards a single public goal and then give them everything that they need, it would be interesting if we didn't have this, like, insistence that the government can never do that about anything else. Yeah, it's interesting. It's almost like, you could, you could say, oh, the tractor production going well, comrade, it's like, well, the government did order this, like, large number of vaccines, and it is going to then distribute them.

And it's, it did actually do that. You know, it's, it's way, it was capable of doing things. It just, I guess. Yeah, they've been a tractor, fuck it. Yeah, why not? This vaccine is delivered in the form of a tractor. It runs you over and you don't get COVID anymore. But no, so that's a brief vaccine digression.

But look, I wanted to, I was thinking right, because much of the talk is on returns to normal, the S&P 500 market concentration is now well above what it was in 2000 of its top five companies. So that's good. Where there are carnival cruise lines, a company that doesn't have any crazy debt issues at all. It's rocketing up to its former glory, American Airlines rocketing up to its former glory, General Electric, it's trading as though

it doesn't now routinely borrow debt to pay the interest on other debt. The zombie companies that we've talked about apparently have magically disappeared. And there is a gigantic, there is a gigantic market rally that definitely isn't any kind of, you might say, unwarranted enthusiasm on the basis that some time at some point somewhere, we're just going to be able to go back up to like 100% flight and cruise capacity at some point.

OK, hear me out on this. I think that cruises are the greatest hubris that mankind has ever invented, because I think that's improved suck. And point two, like I recently found out how much of climate change is directly attributable to cruise liners. And it's fucking insane how much so that some aging boomers can like laze around on the deck of a ship and like take pictures of each other. It's like, I can't remember the figures now, but it's like

the emissions of cruise. It's like crazy like it like rivals air travel, which actually has a point. That's right. Well, no, seriously, heavy, heavy, like cruise ships and cargo shipping, genuinely, like you can you can get into double you can get into double digit, like carbon emissions for the entire world based on just like a couple dozen of the largest ships. Like it's just genuinely that there's no grade of bunker oil that you can burn, which is what these ships used to like power the engines that is not

incredibly bad for the ever like terrible. Like if they were able, if they were able to do, you know, electric motors, like say that was possible for something that big and like they probably will someday, but it will probably be too late for the fucking climate because, I mean, quite frankly, we're, you know, like, I mean, that stuff is not even really viable yet for like heavy duty trucks. So God knows it won't be for marine marine motors anytime soon. It would absolutely make more of a dent to just swap out the motors of all

these things to be to be electric than it would to if you like if you grounded all flights for a year, it would do less to reduce emissions than just fixing. Again, if only we had some kind of technology that we had used for centuries to propel ships, some kind of like, I don't know, yeah, but so that's probably nothing. Oh, well, what I'm talking about is the idea of recovery, because the point is that we have imagined, especially again, at the heights of media and politics, that this has been a time delimited crisis

that is now over, or at least the end of which is now in sight when we can all, you know, go back and start kissing each other in restaurants again. Finally, a group of like right wing politicians will be able to like gather without all of them just getting COVID. They love doing that. But I want to think about that. I want to think about the experience of actual life in the UK. And instead of talking about this from a company centric point of view,

like we usually do when we do macro segments, I want to talk about it from a little bit boring, but a kind of council funding point of view, the funding of things. Because if you remember, the recovery from 2010 was a jobless recovery. It was things were automated and casualized, returns were driven to capital, wages didn't go up, a smaller number of people got incredibly, incredibly richer. And I think if you start looking at just as an example case, what's happening with councils in England specifically,

your local councils, we'll explain what those are. You can look at that as a kind of microcosm, a case in point of what is sort of defining trajectories of the next few years are like. And again, why those are political choices rather than, you know, you might say necessary developments that can be treated like laws of physics. So local councils for American listeners in the UK are basically like they're they're the unit of administration of government that dictates most of your experience of interacting with the government.

So they deal with they take out the bins, which is the thing that like British people are most psychotic about. It's basically the best way I could describe it is it's sort of like a combination of city government and county government. Most Americans would probably experience one or the other. But like, for example, like like Riley and Alice just said, if you're getting your trash collected or your recycling collected, in some cases, you know, handling things like municipal stuff.

There is not a lot of I don't think there is any in England municipal like sewer, it's all privatized. Yeah, yeah. Also, they collect property taxes. Yeah. And then there's they also you pay them council tax. The hilarious most regressive tax that we've talked about in the world, basically is that you pay your landlords property taxes for them effectively. But also they run things like most of the stuff has been privatized. But like, for example, in the olden days, things like like

health and recreation centers, child care things, youth clubs, stuff like that, that would all be run by the local council. And I mean, we do like I live in a council that has active counselors and stuff like they do what they are doing things. But I mean, it is such a far cry from what it used to be in terms of it used to be entirely local local government run. And now the overwhelming majority of it is either entirely privatized or like public private partnership.

A lot of basically the UK won't do anything that's not either privatized or public private partnership. A lot of what they do is that they act as procurement organizations where they'll like ask the same five, the same cartel of five companies, you know, Circo or G4S or whatever to come in and come in and bid to do something. And then they'll be like, OK, Circo, you've won rubbish collection. You know, Palantir, you've won policing, all that kind of stuff. It's an organization of ways to like assign tax money to a cartel of profiteers.

And what's interesting about them is that there is a legal requirement that they always have a balanced budget. So if you want to know why like everyone talks, it just wets themselves over hating militant in the 1980s. It was because a Liverpool in order to like continue delivering services like a minimum standard of human decency had to set an illegal budget. And that resulted in basically the government more or less declaring war on Liverpool, which hasn't ended to this day.

Yeah, that's that that's never happened since. And so you said so you if you you must it's illegal to set to try this budget is highly illegal. It's yeah, we need a Dave Kourtney who is highly illegal. Scouts, Dave Kourtney, I've got a lot of flat nose geezers, mate. So basically, right? If you try if you try to set a budget that's not going to be slightly in surplus or at least balanced

based on what the government gives you to spend, so grants to local authorities, the property tax you're able to take out of people renting property in your in your in your in your local area or investments you've made. And to be honest, usually disastrous white elephants. Then you have to file for something called Section 114, where you cannot spend any money anymore and the government comes and takes over and basically runs you directly or through sort of closely appointed deputies. And Croydon has just done that.

So that's basically like if, I don't know, Yonkers, not Yonkers, maybe like a city in Long Island, like a city in Long Island close to New York City, just declared bankruptcy. I mean, actually, I think Yonkers or Mount Vernon is probably a better comparison. And yeah, you're right. Like basically, imagine a big city in Westchester County because Croydon is I live pretty close to Croydon. It's it's technically part of it is up technically a London borough.

And then part of it is not. But it's like a big commuter city south of London. And yeah, so it would be. Yeah, it would be like it would be like Mount Mount Vernon being taken into government administration. Essentially. Yeah. And we should get into why you have that. Why they went bankrupt, which was extremely funny. Yeah. Well, before we let Riley explain that,

the one thing I'll say beforehand is just that the only difference is obviously that in America, the administration part typically goes to the state first. And obviously in Britain, you just don't have that. It's either local council or the national government. That's right. And so what's what's significant about this, right, is that all councils, because councils control stuff like certain elements of health and social care, education, that means like if your class size are limited,

you have to hire emergency teachers like it's expensive because they provide all of the services that are needed in crisis, basically. And and so when crisis becomes widespread, then the council obviously has to spend a lot more money and yet and when people are being evicted from their houses, then council tax is or when when council taxes are frozen when government and the way that austerity sort of made it through to most people's lives was with slashing the amount of money that the government gave to local councils, you were essentially

asking them to do magic, which led a lot of them to then be approached by, you might say, unsavory property speculators who said, sidled up to them and said, hey, you have no you can't raise council tax except by a referendum above a certain amount legally. And that's also mostly taking off of renters in your area anyway. Also, you would you like to partake in a highly illegal fire sale of public assets and additionally, the government's not going to give you any money and they're basically going to keep cutting your budget until they're

not giving you any money at all, which means you need to be a semi private institution, which means you need to start investing in land. And so councils such as like Red Car did this, they bought a we work. Croydon bought like a mall like years after the whole all back to dead malls. It's all dead. It's dead malls all the way down. Yep. Absolutely. A property is my favorite dance music producer. And also a property development company that built homes in Croydon that no one could afford.

Cool. And a hotel house hotel, which has gone out of business. But they and they the only way they were able to make those purchases by borrowing that much money. So basically the way that most people, the state takes care of people, right? Those have been pushed over the last 10 years into making psychotic bets in the financial markets and then have seen this massive spike in expenses. And so and now are starting to go bankrupt. And 80 percent of councils in England are at risk of going bankrupt

or maybe England and Wales. I'm not sure about Scotland. 80 percent so literally got roped into Project Zeus. Where yeah, so you think about that 80 percent of councils are at risk of bankruptcy. That means that basically means does your rubber still get collected? Your kids still go to school. Does grandma still get taken care of in the home? Can they afford their payments to Circo? Or even if they are even if they have been allowed by the government to like keep

like, I don't know, patching up the crumbling infrastructure and roads. Are they going to rebuild the bridge to be as safe as it needs to be? Are are they going to rebuild? Man, this country is so fucking stupid. I just I lose my right. It just we have a national obsession with just punching ourselves in the fucking face. Like it just I don't I don't like it's maddening. Like they don't they don't take any obligations off local councils, which OK,

like I mean fair enough, because those things are important, like housing their constituents and so on. But they just like keep like playing kaplunk with the budget. Like, oh, what if this council, which already can't afford to do all the shit that it legally has to do? What if it just had less money? Like, well, obviously, like bad shit is going to happen. Like we don't need to like try it.

We know that's what's going to happen. Like just for. Well, if you like the economics behind this is is public choice economics. And that was something that we came popular. Boy, I love public choice. So that could be against that. Yeah. Well, public choice. And that one of the things in monopoly, it became popular sort of off the back

of Milton Friedman, because with with monetarism and stuff like this, so with neoclassical economics, generally you need to not just have your theory of why the private sector is great, but you need to have your theory of why nothing democratically controlled could ever deliver anything good. And so public choice economics was developed, which basically sort of said, well, anyone who isn't sort of doesn't face competition pressures is going to work as hard as they can to make sure they deliver as little as they can, whatever they're supposed to do at the highest possible expense.

So it's basically the flip side of the competition theory. And so public choice is just like, is basically, well, we're going to we're going to hire bad teachers because there's no one in the market who's forcing us to hire good teachers because it assumes like everyone. That's a fucking galaxy brain theory, isn't it? That like, like a monopoly is bad when the government has it, because it'll encourage inefficiency. But what if instead we gave that monopoly to a private fucking company

who that theory absolutely will not apply to for reasons? Yeah, that's right. Well, because then because the thing is, right, you give all your teacher, you give like, and this is even something Matt Ford talked about in his terrible book, he was like, I just couldn't understand why the residents of Stoke-on-Trent will worry about it. Matt Ford here being played by David Bedeal. I was just worried that the...

I just couldn't understand. The residents of Stoke-on-Trent didn't want private companies and employers in their areas to also fund their schools, because clearly the government wasn't doing a good job, but they never look beyond that. So anyway, what you have now is 80% of councils in England basically being like, we can't... The thing you pay for, the thing you pay your council tax for, and the thing you spend, and the stuff you pay all your taxes to the government to and stuff.

Sorry, I don't know, figure out what to do with the bins. Just maybe club together with your neighbors and do something. By the way, you still have to pay these taxes though, but we're not going to do any of the stuff that you like. Create a volunteer bin force. Yeah, we're not going to do anything. The Pido Hunters have to start taking out the bins. They're the only people we can turn to.

And so if you want to understand what the political implications of this are going forward, you just have to compare Croydon and Northamptonshire. Northamptonshire is a solidly Tory area with a solidly Tory council. It went bankrupt two years ago. Two years ago then, the government essentially swooped in, because the reason it went bankrupt, by the way, is because they were like allowed. They tried to run the council like Galt's Gulch, where they basically refused to collect council tax, except for the bare minimum that they were

legally obligated to do. They tried to privatize literally everything. They tried to make it so they're like no council employees. They tried to basically just destroy themselves as a public body and provider of public goods. And then the conservative, the government. This is King. Yeah, the government took over in 2018 and then essentially channeled money

in to fix things, forced them to raise taxes and forced them to basically keep functioning, more or less. Now, Croydon can't get a callback because it's a labor area. I'm not saying because of labor area, rather Croydon, a labor area, cannot get a callback from Robert Jenrick. Yeah, you're not implying that. You're merely like heavily suggesting that those two facts are connected. I'm merely presenting those two facts alongside one another.

I'm not even, no, I'm not even, I don't even need to imply that. Like there is, I believe it is, there's a 30% greater central government spend in Tory-controlled local authorities and in Tory constituencies than in labor-controlled local authorities and parliamentary constituencies. So with, if you want to put all the... And Riley, remind me which of those constituencies tend to be more deprived. The labor ones, yeah, yeah.

Oh, okay, so it makes sense. Yeah, so basically, if you want to put all that together, if local authorities in at least England, if not England and Wales, are about to have a much more direct relationship with the national government, follow me here. And if the national government has a proven history of basically paying off its own, paying off its own voters and sort of, and determining even COVID restrictions, they were determined, in many cases, local authority by local authority with preferential treatment given to Tory ones.

In that case, certain areas seem like they're going to continue to get bin collection and other areas seem like they might not. Bins are for closers. All right, look, if you can't afford a bin, don't make any rubbish, simple as. So, you know, you ask yourself, what will recovery mean for public services in the UK? Probably it depends where you live and it depends how brexity and boracy your local authority is.

Oh, yeah, throw your empty your bin into Boris Johnson's fucking garden. I love the idea that you can't have services if you vote the wrong way. Like, yeah, I mean, to be honest, this is not that different than the way that the American federal government treated both, well, Trump treated blue states or Democrat voting states during the COVID pandemic when it came to PPE and equipment, but also how the American government has treated states with large minority populations since since since New Orleans is a great example. I mean, many trashes your listeners, depending on how young you are, you may

not remember the story of Hurricane Katrina and in 2005 and the consequences. But one of the consequences was that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the total abandonment of their impoverished population and the just utter destruction that it brought on the city. There are no public schools in New Orleans anymore. They're all charter schools, every single one. There are no state run schools. They're all privately run.

And I can point you in the direction of a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, who I believe in a seven or eight wrote that Katrina was the best thing that ever happened in New Orleans. And she prayed for a Katrina moment in Chicago in which their public schools would also be destroyed. You got to get God back in there. A Mrs. J. Bull Chicago. So you got to understand that like this this is not a new concept.

It's just that Britain's way of doing it is going to be. Well, like more smug and condescending, perhaps, but also in a way, moreover, imagine attending the Tokyo Academy in New Orleans. Yet no one will be held to account because all of the people doing it are like, you know, secret, stick your dick in a pig's mouth club. Members, you know, fellow members with the people in the in the press. Like if you work in the British media and you're also privately educated and you also know all these people and you go to the same fucking

tedious so into dinner parties with the same people, like no one's going to fucking criticize this. They're going to say it's like those damn profligate labor lefties in fucking Croydon. I'm sure and I'm sure if you dig into Croydon's Council, it's like it would be to the right of the Tories in the 80s. Oh, certainly. But you know what? Nothing's ever good enough. No. And the thing is, right?

If you add that then together with like the sort of you look at the various controversies around like the Tory party unable to stop enriching itself off of sort of poorly supervised pandemic spending and and so on and so on. Then what's to say that when it comes time to like, you know, provide the population of Croydon, the bare minimum of you might say, this is the things you get from living in a modern state to keep them from like, I don't know, still bought into society enough to keep going to their like van job or whatever. That's going to be just becomes like a medieval town.

Shit. That's good. You have to walk in the middle of the road because people are throwing buckets of human shit out that's what everyone's going around on donkey for some reason. Yeah. No, Croydon Croydon is just the the last 20 minutes of threads and everywhere else down the road is normal. But but that's the right Croydon when it comes time for Croydon to like pick the sort of the waste collection company. Oh, gee, Wiz, are you saying it's owned by Liz Truss's cousin?

Oh, what another coincidence where, you know, yeah, they charge ten billion pounds a year and they have they have three trucks and you have to pay for it through council tax. We can now set. So awesome. You know, that's why I said, right? The recovery, the shape of the of the new normal. It looks like after this, it's not going to be post 2010. It's not going to be post 2000. It's not going to be post 1930. It's not going to be post 1847. It's going to be 1066.

That's what we're looking at. You're looking at a look, a message, a message to trash each listener's in Croydon practice right now. What it looks like is wearing a cloth cap and coarse woolen garments, shitting in a bucket and throwing out of your upstairs window. That is how we're going to win this. Yeah, because that's the thing, right? You get in this new scenario, you are born to one of a select few families

who came in and basically rode roughshot over everything. In that case, you are owed patronage and rents by people who basically work. But the only difference is it's not agrarian. You're your own. And then the council ties. Yeah, it's it's it seems to me that this is just something that you pay to go directly into the pockets for the enrichment of, I don't know. Yeah, like Liz, trust his cousin because he's born into what is essentially

a Tory aristocratic family or one of their outsourcing partners. And you are, yeah, you pay a tithe. And what you get back is not put in jail. Yeah, so cool. I think that's that's fine. Because I don't know, I mean, I welcome you all to challenge me about this. I'm sure Eleanor Yonaga, a friend of the show, is going to be raging and spitting and throwing her phone across the room when I say the comparison

is 1066 because she's a medievalist. But what do you all think? Is that is that fair based on what we've talked about here? I think it's very funny that the Magna Carta freaks are right, but in a way that they don't even realize. And that we've we've just radically redefined the way power works in this country on a very sort of technical basis to the exclusion of the vast majority of people again. I mean, I guess to me, the thing is, is that I think

one of two things is going to happen. Like I've seen some bright spots of hope recently. You know, there I want to say it was UCL hospitals, but basically like cleaners basically going on strike and getting a new contract and a pay rise where they're taken in house and paid directly and not paid via Circo or whatever the fuck. You do see those periodically and either you're going to see people start to realize that they, you know, that they have to agitate for their rights as workers, whatever their industry is, or you're going to see more and more of this kind of sliding

into more precarity. But I guess the point that I would make is that, you know, you're looking at a situation where this has continued to get worse for the last 40 years. There has been no real improvement, even under new labor. It got worse because they continued the same if anything, they were more enthusiastic in their application of thatcherism than thatcher was. And you find yourself in a situation where, you know, I'm 36. There are people five, six years older than me

who have only ever known this and things only have ever gotten worse. And when you get to a point where the boomers are dying off, you will actually have a large segment of the population of the United Kingdom. The overwhelming majority of these people basically watching their lives get worse. And I see that ending one of two ways. Either you see more labor and trade activism and you see, you know, that kind of solidarity building in order to force concessions and to reorient the system from extraction and, you know, rent seeking.

Or you see it continue to get worse, but you see that same kind of solidarity building take place amongst racists and xenophobes and then the country becomes even more hostile and violent while the economic situation continues to worsen. And I mean, I don't want to be too much of a doomsayer, you know, like here. But I do know British people decently well after living here for two years. And like, sadly, I feel as though my money is on the second, even if I hold out hope for the first.

And, you know, I think it's the thing is, right? Like it's, whether you say it's a sin to despair, you know, it's if you do. Yeah, very easy, though, which is true of all sin. It's true. It is it is a it is a sin to despair. But also it is a sin to engage. Personally, I think it's a sin to engage in muddled thinking when the possibility

for intellectual and moral clarity sort of sits right in front of you. When you can when you can see these things, when you can understand that these things are happening and when you can understand that you can, you can understand the material level, the baseline incentives as to why they would happen, who can make them happen and why you are you owe yourself and everyone else around you, who stands to like, you know, be on the wrong end yourself and everyone around you, you owe yourself and everyone around you.

Sort of the the the understanding, at least not even if you tell them about it, but to at least understand it yourself, what is going on for the people who are not going to be in this sort of rapidly coagulating, non-agrarian aristocratic class, like the financialized aristocrat, who even the premise that they are a knight that defends the land or that they maintain this farmland or whatever, that's gone. It's pure. It is even like the fig leaf explanations are gone. And to not see this is reactionary, to not see this is a sin,

but to not to not hope and work for the best outcome. Also equally, unfortunately, a sin. So very, very easy to despair. Worker's Revolution led by Dave Korn. That's right. All right. So I think that's look, I wanted to talk about Deutsche Bank proposing an extra tax on people for working at home. But maybe we have Grace Blakely coming on next week.

So let's talk about that with her then. Nice to see that. Yeah. So instead. Yeah. So instead, I'm going to say a very sincere this week ending and a very sincere thank you for listening to everyone here in podcast land and indeed to everyone who is also going to be doing the five dollar Patreon subscription as per usual. I think we have a Britonology and a bonus this week.

So get well, he getting is good. Yeah. Absolutely. And also, you know, don't live streams yet live streams Thursdays and Sundays at 9pm UK time. That's 4pm Eastern on twitch.tv slash trash future podcast. We basically just watch YouTube videos now because that's the most fun we've ever had doing that. That's right.

Absolutely. And that's absolutely right. And will the Milo, will we by the time this is going to be out tomorrow, we won't have shirts ready. Will we know very soon? Watch this space. Listen to this space. Yes. There we I don't know anything for sure, but we may have uncovered

another box of shirts in the old shoe polish factory. Why did we buy the shoe polish factory anyway? We're a local. It's a local. No, T.F. local council had to buy a shoe polish factory. And remember, if you're based in Croydon and you're despairing about the situation, there are some solutions, but they're all highly illegal. That's right.

If you're based in Croydon, we can sell you a rough wools bun leather jerkin or rough wools bun jerkin or a leather doublet. And a wooden bucket. We'll wrap the Johannes vonk and the clog heads to our dates on it. It's made of clogs. That's right. All right. I think that's about it for today.

Thank you to all my co-hosts. Thank you to everyone listening and we'll see you on the Patreon later this week. Bye. Later. Bye.