TRASHFUTURE - Rich Lists, Rent Seeking, and Subsidized Royals ft. Grace Blakeley

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

The Trashfuture crew welcomes back Milo (@milo_edwards), who managed to escape his FSB handlers and return to London unscathed. He and Riley (@raaleh) are joined by think-tank researcher Grace Blakely (@graceblakeley) to discuss the Sunday Times's 2018 Rich List and the implications of its members' rent-seeking behaviour for austerity Britain. They also got more than a little sloshed on wine, so you'll have to forgive the, uh, strident moments. They also discuss the topic on everyone's minds: why we both want to abolish the monarchy and also understand that this country defines itself by paying a small, inbred group millions of pounds for what amounts to an extended and elaborate bout of fancy dress. Hussein (@HKesvani) was unable to attend as he was on assignment reporting on the secret Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments of Raqqa, but he'll be back soon. Riley forgot to give the t-shirt shoutouts yet again, but that shouldn't stop you from commodifying your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. Please support our comrade's business! Nate (@inthesedeserts) produced this, and he's going to need years of therapy as a result.

The recent Simpsons. You know that there was one the other day where they were like, there was like a thing about, it was like a riff on Gone with the Wind and Marge was reading Lisa a book that was like premised on that. And then they like, and then Marge gets really pissed off because it's all dated and it's super racist. And then Lisa looks over to like a portrait of a poo she has on her bedside and she's like, yeah, I mean, it's terrible when writers of shows or novels are unable to make jokes that age well. I mean, I just think that's very inclusive because I also have a portrait of the nearby convenience store guy on my bedside table. I think it was like a thing. I don't think it was like

no. No, of course it was. I mean, it well, all what it means is that also it's good because all of those conservatives and intellectual dark web guys who say they keep getting silenced finally have clearly got a writer on the Simpsons. And that's really good because those guys need a voice, right? Exactly. The only person that's been listening to them up to now has been you, right? On your little weird forums where you talk about what was it you were talking about earlier? Oh, right. Busting. Busting. Busting. Busting. My favorite band of the 2000s. No, I was talking about a thing related to a bus. God damn it. I'm so sorry. I was talking about demoting people in the military. And actually, if that's what busting someone down actually meant, like they is what

that means. No, it is. It is what he knows in like, but like the process is like, okay, you're a sergeant and now you're going to be a private, but someone just jizzes on your face. It's literally, it works though, because private, right? A private busting you down. Busts you down. Yeah. That works on every level. Well, a private doesn't bust you down. You get busted down to private as you're a private. Okay. No, I'm going to bust you until you're a private, they would say. That would work. That would work. Bust you repeatedly and with malice. Welcome once again to trash future, the podcast, but how if we do not implement fully automated luxury, gay, space, communism, the future is and will be trash. I got it right for the second

time in a row the first time. We are, we are, we are a long way into this podcast. I've never gotten it right except for the last couple of weeks, which is astonishing training hard and showing results. And today we are talking about a bunch of shit and who am I with from my right? It's me, Milo Edwards, the original, the original boy, but back, back in the goddamn west, where fascism is merely something they're trying to do rather than something they've already done, like in Russia. So that's good. It's good to be here. It's good to be back live and, and talking about the bear marks in my favorite caliphate of all the caliphate of towel hammers. I don't actually think the bear marks was good. It was, it was all, it was about a humble gag.

It's all going to get put in. All the original stuff is going to get edited out and then people are going to wonder what it is you said. It's going to be like the Utah story. DM Alex Keely about the Utah story. Again, stop DMing us for the Utah story. Sometimes it does feel like when you listen to this that you just missed out on like some sort of big end joke that you guys have just neglected to tell everyone, but actually it's just because everything you said has been edited out. This show is canonical. It's like the Sopranos. You have to do all of it. It's canonical. Yeah. It's like, like Livy, Pliny, us and this. Most of us should be fired out of a cannon in that

sense. Well, we just did three different definitions of canonical. Hell yes. No, my definition of canonical did not include Virgil and it never will and me Grace Blakely. I'm here to mix up the generic white boy vibe by adding a generic white girl vibe. Absolutely. You know, we are going to say of all of the ways in which people tend to criticize stuff in as much as everyone's like, oh, you're just a bunch of white boys who were at Oxbridge. That's all true. Yeah. You're changing precisely one of those demographics. Yeah. It's called diversity. Exactly. With the fucking program. Are we allowed to swear on this, by the way?

Yes. No, keep my timeline pure, please. No, it's 2015. Okay. I'd like us to get some diversity. You're allowed to say what the heck in a heated room. You have to say you can say you can say what the heck, but you have to caution all young children and women and people with heart conditions to leave the room first unless they're Amy Schumer and can handle swearing. We're professionals. We can say heck. You kids at home, don't be trying this. It's like, it's like entirely linguistic jackass. We've made our peace with God. Whoever she may be, Justin Trudeau, peace out. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that shit.

Wow. The whole jig. His whole thing is like trying to be really good at Tinder. Like what you would say if you wanted everyone to swipe right is like Justin Trudeau's whole vibe, like centrist, liberal, like crying about refugees. Jordan Peterson, crime and individualism. Yeah. And God is a woman. I mean, it works. Okay. I do want to, before we, before we crack on with the content of the show, I do want, because we have a lot of wonky shit to do today. If anything, it's going to be a danger wonk, but I'm pleased that you managed to get that in there. Well done. I wanted to say before we get into the rest of the content that you said Jordan Peters. There's a huge article in Jordan

Peterson in New Yorker where I can't remember who it was, but a journalist went to go interview him for a while and just came off with the impression that he's a vacuous dullard, which is true. I mean, is that, is that news to anyone? What's the point of the story? There are two points. There's a major point, which is that no one has written about Jordan Peterson like he truly is a vacuous dullard, except like current affairs in Jacobin they have, but most, most like mainstream like portrayals of Peterson are that, oh, he's a dangerous intellectual who's telling truths that people don't want to hear, but that's because like most of the mainstream press are staffed with the kind of morons that Peterson is speaking to.

Exactly. So there's now we have a mainstream article about Peterson that says no, he's a dumb ass because it's a mainstream thing. Whenever Jordan Peterson is talking, it has all the other muppets agreeing with him. It's all the same guy. I was thinking about this the other day. Is he supposed to be like a philosopher, like a kind of Chomsky-esque figure, like a public intellectual, or is he just like a journalist? No, he's supposed to be a public intellectual, but he's a stupid person, smart person, but his relation to political theory is like he like Chomsky's a linguist, but he's also now just a political thinker sort of just by having done it, but I'm making an analogy. So much like much like Chomsky is a linguist, but is now a political

thinker just by what he said. Peterson's a clinical psychologist, but is now just a political thinker by what he said. He's not like a journalist. He was a clinical psychologist. Yeah, but he's an evolutionary psychologist and young, so he basically thinks there should be no redistribution because all hierarchies are natural except sexual redistribution because the government owes him a girlfriend. So there is this weird strand of like mysticism in like that's linked to young in lots of different religions that is all to do with how like spiral dynamics about how like human, like it's kind of a alien in that it's like human society is slowly evolving based on learning from previous kind of iterations and that learning happens like over the course of

an individual life and like throughout the whole of throughout the whole of you know human history. And so there's this like they have like like the spiral dynamics thing is really really weird. They have like colors for like what stage of development you're at and it's allegedly linked to like young and like you know they like how you know you achieve the like levels of self-actualization through like mindfulness and Buddhism, but it's actually just like this like super freaking freaky elitist shit. It sounds like Montessori. Kind of I guess. Baby signing for the human race. Yeah. I mean it's all yeah it's very very strange. What is the baby sign for? Well if you start shouting you're already losing the argument. No it's I love when my I love when my infant child

owns me with logic. Hell yeah. No it's not hard. Jordan Peterson. Not because of you because logic is dumb. Oh you're poor. No logic is stupid. Freedom of speech is the worst possible virtue and property is deserves to be a social construct. Anyway what I want to say is that what Jordan Peterson did is he's so angry at socialist realism as a version of as like an art that is what I saw yeah that he has purchased hundreds and hundreds of pieces of socialist realism to have in his house. Push up the price of socialist realist art. Jordan Peterson's an art pump and dump scheme. He's a cryptocurrency scam from the internet. It's the new tulips. Jordan Peterson likes to think he's like hard and masculine. My man a tulip. The most alpha

thing a man can do is get involved in multi-level marketing and if you're interested I actually have a lot of paintings you can buy and sell your friends. Is that what Jordan Peterson sounds like? No I actually think that Jordan Peterson sounds a lot more panicked and a little bit more like he's on the verge of tears. Like Alpham like masculinity and shit. Yeah but he sounds like Kermit. Makes sense right. He sounds very scared and panicked like he's about to like he has this very fragile grasp on his own masculinity so it makes sense to kind of project that on everyone else. Okay this all makes sense now. I mean I've never actually bought a listening term but from the description that you guys have given me he sounds like a really good guy.

Jordy Pete. Yeah Jordy Pete's the main the main boy. We're not technically here to talk about Jordy Pete's. Oh yeah I forgot about that. Let's talk about wonky stuff. Jordy Pete's makes me think about a guy called Pete who's from Newcastle who just really loves destroying women with logic. Like well if you if you if you had severe shouts like you're already losing the argument. I know the person that sounds like every man I ever met. That was a Yorkshire accent. What a guy from Newcastle who loves destroying women with logic. That wasn't the right accent. That's the worst part. Just destroying women with logic. I mean I don't know why women specifically they mainly like destroying other men with logic but like it's less easy

to do because if you're a woman listening to that shit you'll just be like lol and walk away which to him is like a win whereas if you're a man and you're engaged you're just like well actually I'm not this angry I'm this and former logic stresses that. Well I remember doing all the little you guys would have done the the weird symbols right for logic. No? No yeah I yeah. I mean what always gets me what always gets me what always gets me is that all of those logic patents only know one fallacy. They only know ad hominem. So you need to know because you can reduce everything to just one chain of reasoning. Well it's like it's like there are tons and tons of different kinds of fallacies like the fallacy of the undistributed middle

or you could be you do engaging in the affirmation of the consequent and it none of them know what those are. What's your favorite fallacy? I know one minus but I'll let you go. Wait what's what's your favorite fallacy? Oh fuck I can't remember the names of all the fallacies. You can describe it we'll get we'll we'll tell you what it is. I don't know I don't have one. Oh wow. Sounds to me like an argument that absurd. What's your favorite fallacy? Oh it's the undistributed middle. Okay okay that is a good one. Yeah yeah. What's yours? The St. Kors fallacy. Oh I mean as a wonk. Yeah yeah it makes sense. Yeah yeah it describes a lot of like government policy failures. Oh man in terms of I mean we were we've been talking about in terms of we've

been talking about government policy failures. This is a little preview of an upcoming episode but I think that like anytime the conservatives are in government the position of DCMS minister is just a way to humiliate someone. So the app we're going to talk about the app right? Not just the app but Matt Hancock had to meet a bunch of grime emcees. When did this happen? A couple of years but you know how grime got like really popular again a couple of years ago? I'm aware vaguely of the phenomenon. You're talking about artists such as Stormzy. Would I be correct? Yes okay. It's the grime of the ancient marinade. My question led way of talking is seeing a lot more patronizing than I'd like it to. Okay so in as much as when grime got popular a couple

of years ago the a lot of the grime artists were invited to Whitehall to like partake in some kind of ceremony where some of them were like getting OBEs or whatever. Yeah and then Matt Hancock I think went up to JME and then said oh yes grime represents you know it's wonderful and very critical and represents individual achievement and not relying on anyone else and it's like he tried to make grime thatcherite. Oh that's so cute and sad. It is like your dad's trying to talk to your slightly urban boyfriend. Look have we all had some wine? Yes. Have we all basically forgotten why we're here? Yes but everyone listening. I haven't forgotten why I'm here but the thing is everybody listening to this is hogs and you all fucking love it. Oh my god it's like it literally

couldn't be more than me by scent. What it's like to listen to a podcast. Oh yeah everyone here thinks that we're all like hanging out. We're literally in different parts of the country. Absolutely. I would never. I normally am. Well he's normally in a different country. Oh you're normally yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. I'm normally remote. Like deep state stuff. Yeah he's the deep state. Milo is actually short for MISet. You've made that joke many times. It's both longer and doesn't make sense. I actually haven't. Really? Yeah this is time number one. I'm not very smart. That's not fair. She has a team of writers. He's already used that joke on me. No I have a team of writers today. Oh oh. Thank you. Anyway. I don't get it. Riley did a gesture for this audio medium

for the benefit of the listener of the three brackets. Oh I see. Yeah you did that. Yeah that worked really well. Anyway so the Sunday Times recently came up with a rich list. That's bad and we're gonna find out why. That's my job. Let me get my statistics out with my phone. Wait are we gonna we're gonna find out why they're rich or why the Sunday Times did the list because I think the latter is much more applicable. I mean I mean I think I think they're they're okay. Switching slightly out of like you know drunk idiot mode and into drunk idiot with a point mode. I didn't agree to this. It's like that it's like it's there's why are they so rich. Why have they gotten so much more rich and why do we valorize them for being rich especially when some of them

are just rich because like they're related to a French person from a thousand years ago that killed a lot of Saxons. I mean I can do all of those. We'll start by just saying that the top 1,000 people have about £724 billion worth of wealth this year and it took it took the members of the Sunday Times rich list because they do this every year. They look into how much wealth they have and the way they do it is like estimating the value of the assets of all the like super rich people which you can vaguely do because a lot of them own like a certain stake that's known of like you know publicly quoted shares or they have a set of our property and whatever. So this guy exactly the guy at the Sunday Times like estimates how much they're worth and then they actually call

him up and be like oh what are you talking about I'm not worth that much I'm worth this much and then it's this whole thing. So apparently this year they have £724 billion worth of wealth. It took them four years to recover from the financial crisis and it took nominal wages. So I mean the average wages of sorry real wages the average wages of most people in the population they still haven't recovered to what they were in 2007. So rich people are doing pretty well. The shocking the top 1000 people have when you compare that to the wealth and asset survey 5.7% of our nation's wealth. Guess how much the bottom 50% have. Can I make a guess that is less than is it less than 5.7% it's more slightly. I bet it's an insultingly small

amount more though are you going to guess like because there's going to be a prize 8% 6% wrong it's 8.7% hell yeah I'm the best boy I was always the best whatever the bottom 50% is doing slightly better than the top couple 3% better no no actually yeah wait 5.7% they say the rich have it tough they have to manage all that money it's really hard who has time to organize that many ivory back scratchers it's like this one guy who's a hedge fund manager so I was looking into this video I was writing this article and there's this like the richest hedge fund manager in England who has I think it's like three billion pounds worth of wealth and I was like looking up his like hedge funds annual report and being like how much does he earn how much would this

give him like year on year and so I looked it up and it was like oh the hedge funds making like a 7% return so it gives him like you know a couple hundred million every year and then like the editor came back to me I was like oh this reports from like 2014 so you know we don't know that this is the actual rate of return of this hedge fund I was like okay no that's a good point I'll like look it up and the reason I couldn't find any more recent annual reports was because it went private so this guy decided I'm just going to manage my money and like some money of my my pals and it turns out that the year he went private he made a 50% rate of return on his the amount of money so it wasn't like his whole three billion but the amount of money invested in his hedge fund

so had he invested all his money in that hedge fund he would have made half of that back and the next year it was 30% it's like insane the amount of money that you can make just by having money and then just watching it expand they bought bitcoin they probably didn't buy bitcoin although they may have bought bitcoin no I'm kidding it was slaves JK say what you like about slaves much better for the environment than bitcoin technically true I mean at some point their money probably was so they will have put money in banks that will have also received money from people that will have been doing people trafficking so that's also like how like the you know the it's it's and this is actually

almost a preview of what we're getting into in the second half of the show but it's like how the queen invests in bright house yeah and everyone's like oh well no she didn't invest in bright house she gave her money to an offshore trust that invested in bright house on her behalf as though that somehow better it's like people always bright house right house alone shark yeah it's a mud shock it's a low it's a that would be way cooler if the queen has a weird british swamp shark the queen is giving her money to endanger british swamp sharks would be so much cooler than what actually happened to make a kid's animated tv series I would love that no the street shocks of course I remember member screech screech oh my god skate sharks

shooting clay pigeons we have fins how would we even manipulate the controls of a shotgun shut up and shoot them clays boy okay so um don't worry what what what essentially I think the the sunday times rich list tells us is that there are some people who by virtue of having money have an extraordinarily enormous amount more money now because they made the choice to have money or to buy a house in london in the 90s well they didn't have avocados they didn't have avocados now they have hundreds of millions of dollars pounds pounds I mean buying billions of avocados which would have in retrospect given the high demand for avocados in various parts of london may have been a better investment would have gone off by now almost certainly that's a really

stupid thing to say go go have you met an avocado they don't go off very easily you met an avocado they're very bad gift givers go off king avocados are the go off kings hell yeah screw jesse farer and his like game screaming bros the go off kings I don't know what that is you guys are you you're too self-referential none of you guys spend any time on the internet even I don't know what that is okay so Riley's too self-referential being too internet referential guys which is the same thing himself I get it because I know all there is to know unfortunately that is sad for you well we're just close bros close bros bros bros who hang we're just we're just we're just hang bros just just hang out without I wish I could take a picture of you right now and both of your

faces just look at me like please please say something that gets us out of this loop um yeah I'd like to actually get out and get back into the rich list loop yeah so back into the rich list loop so what we were talking about avocados I was about to make a point actually before I was so really interrupted about how had you invested your so like when I looked at the top 50 people on the rich list there were 16 who were property moguls there were eight who were finances and there are about six here in like mining and commodities like two of them were in diamonds it was like you know very dodgy stuff so that's like almost a third of them who are in industries that just purely extract wealth from the rest of the economy they're like rent based

industries whereby you just take things you wait for their price to increase and then you sell them which is like don't worry feel free to interrupt me I am a woman oh no I was just going to say for the for the for the listeners a definition of like rent yeah actually okay so that's annoying that you called me up on that because it's a really difficult thing to define but like the difference between rent and profit is essentially productivity so if you are a small business owner you have like you know a couple of thousand pounds in savings you invest that money in starting a business that business grows you eventually end up employing people and you make profits you've made those profits from doing something productive if you instead because the

rate of return on just investing in property is higher if you instead choose to take that money and put a deposit I mean I know I said a couple of thousand pounds but say it was like a couple hundred thousand pounds and you decide I'm going to invest in property and just wait for the value of that to increase or I'm going to buy up already existing assets like equities and wait for the value of those to increase there's a difference between the increase in kind of capital that you've gained from one thing or the other and it's basically like whether or not you've added anything to the economy and like largely speaking we've moved away from a model whereby people invest their money in things that make stuff and employ people towards an economy in which people invest

in things that just go up in value largely because and I mean really the big thing that's driving this is it's real estate largely because banks will lend money against real estate that will push up their value and give you a massive windfall gain and ultimately that ends in 2007 and it's restarted again afterwards and the rich list somewhat reflects this sort of the fact that rent seeking is basically the best game in town exactly and so like if you invested your money in property in um so I'm doing a report on this at the moment actually if you invest your money in property in 1979 it increases in value by 10 times by 2007 consumer prices increase by about five times over that same period and wages increase by just over two times over that period and so

this really gives the lie because here's the thing one thing that like I find sort of happens quite often especially especially in sort of a lot of mainstream discourse in the UK comes out around a lot of people who say well I'm working class but I'm rich now because I worked hard and everyone who is trying to create a more fair society is actually just patronizing because they're saying oh well now we're the working class can't work hard whatever the Brendan O'Neill point of view Nate edit in the Brendan O'Neill theme song but that's the thing it's it's it is there is a stonk there is it's it's a weird almost cultural schizophrenia where there is we are at the set up once unwilling to accept that a lot of these

people were sort of buoyed to the great heights well it's not schizophrenia if anything it's actually more consistent it's the opposite of schizophrenia functional to the system right because I mean the reason that it works is because it's associated with a particular form of political economy yeah which is pension fund capitalism and property and even democracy so most of the people that now support the system are older people who've made massive win for gains on the increasing value of their property since 1979 and so how are they just like why they're always Polish people around here well yeah maintaining the property yeah literally so it's associated with you know a particular kind of alliance between the people that make the most

money out of the system which is the kind of top 1% and the top I mean largely the top 50% of the electorate not the top 50% of the population in socioeconomic terms because they always imagine that they are almost about to be part of the top 1% I think it's partly that and it's also just partly a very rational thing of like voting for the conservatives in the 1980s based on the premise that you would become very rich very quickly was true but that was based on this model of like debt fuelled consumption which ultimately led to 2007 it was able to you know go on for an extended period of time partly because of local interest rates partly because of like the massive deregulation of the banks but eventually it reached its apogee and by that point a lot of those people have

cashed out so it was rational guys all we need to remember about 2007 is everything would have been fine if instead of laymen brothers we'd had layman sisters am I right guys it's so true you know what by what was the the thing that was on twitter the other day was like it wasn't the other day was ages ago it was like liberal feminists no no no marxists five people are going to own the world by 2050 liberal feminists fine but three of those need to be women it's the high more women guards that's the tweet of the whole internet high more women guards but that's the it's the um well but all of these I mean these things are all women in the vermox that is now the official these are not I mean obviously these are not natural forces I mean a lot of liberals I think

like to pretend that it is natural forces it depends how you define natural right it's a natural part of the adaptation of capitalism to the prophet squeezer the 1970s well if I mean I'm doing one level up almost where I'm like a lot of these up here I'm just like fourth dimension right this guy this guy living in 3018 right here my man one more level of abstraction my man putting his hand his head in his hands because he knows oh my god look at her butt it's no um what I mean is it's if you go one further level of abstraction I think there is a lot of desire on the part of people who are generally liberals to say that more or less the society we're living in now is basically natural yeah and that and any

attempt to manage it further any attempt to change it is going against human nature and they would say and so as it sort of logically follows in their conclusions that this level of inequality is basically natural and basically good because anything if we try to do it make anything better it will make it worse and so we end up valorizing the people at the top because we assume that because the hierarchies are natural that they're naturally brilliant except today Elon Musk tweeted a fucking snail and then said his name is Gary as though this is 2004 and we're still doing very random humor I mean like SpongeBob is really good so I don't know what the fuck you're like negging SpongeBob about because that hurt my feelings negging SpongeBob implies that we're

trying to fuck SpongeBob I don't know I don't know any hole is a goal as they say who says that naming one people naming one person who says that wait I bet they love Jordan Peterson I bet they love Jordan Peterson Stephen Hawking wasn't he kind of yeah that's a great yeah because he both fucked a lot and also spent his whole life studying black holes and okay I have an apocryphal tale an ex-girlfriend said that she you're saying that it's a lie before you tell the story well I think it feels apocryphal but an ex-girlfriend of mine said that a couple of her friends pennied Stephen Hawking and were thereby banned from no that's true that happened while I was at Cambridge yeah oh shit yeah that's real no she was at uh Queens this happened at keys yeah well I think

they went to a keys high table pennied Stephen Hawking and were banned from keys did he go with it though I know I don't think he's physically able to or was physically able to yeah I genuinely think the most important thing I think if Stephen Hawking were to try to like I didn't know when I wasn't given a date about where this was okay we're Stephen Hawking to try to neck a drink I think he'd need a foam dome I've seen the theory of everything he was at one point able to neck yeah oh my god he was able to fucking crush a brisky yeah and he was fit as well according to that I heard yeah he was any red man yeah Stephen Hawking official position of the show very cool guy very nice uh low-key socialist and cool guy yeah generally great guy he like worked with my

my good pals IPR like Laurie on this NHS campaign stuff but generally very very exceptional man but genuinely the most impressive thing he ever did was cheat on his wife multiple times that's not drew all funny my whole career ruined in one sentence anyway so what I what the point I want to get to is that we valorize these rich people right we put them on lists and we say that they're heroes and we say they're job creators and we imagine that they're somehow important to the system continuing on as it is which they only are in its worst respects I think I would the world of crime be without Donald Trump Jr way less obvious it's also like any child of any like horrifyingly bad politician you know the

Hawaiian shirts be with our favorite fancy boy can could just any average Joe make a show that's perfect for the boardroom and the yacht no the disco techa where what would you wear the disco that's that's that's so the Charles Murray argument comes in you need the jeans of a rich man to be able to make a shirt that can effortlessly transition transition from the boardroom to the disco those shirts go perfectly with jeans I am so lost right or slacks you remember Wyatt Koch the guy who made the bad Hawaiian shirts no one of the rich the Koch brothers like the Koch brothers yeah one of the Koch brothers that's how they made their money no no they made their money from Hawaiian one of them had a kid

or like one of their and the kid uses infinite money to create a company that makes Hawaiian shirts that just have bags of money instead of Hawaiian designs that's really good we did a really into old-timey bank robbing we kept we kept trying to do an episode that wasn't entirely about that but we just ended up doing an episode about that it was like okay so this is really lame but i was watching brooklyn 99 yesterday and one of the checks out so far one of the recent episodes is like they do have you guys seen the godfather because i definitely haven't oh yeah they do a joke about i mean like oh like this is like more than Oxford Milo no there's another twitter thing which is like going on a date with random white men is just a series of conversations

punctuated by how have you not seen this like i said usually about with null and i what exactly goals to this to me about the lion king because until recently i hadn't seen it that's fucked up i'm not a disney fan that's like a big part of what like should be your emotional development no that's why my therapist had to give me a list because i never saw disney movies like dark this is you've been watching like clockwork orange and the godfather and your brains are like turned to like violent somehow i was able to turn into a completely normal and functional adult without it as we all know just don't say anything to that i was being sarcastic i'm a deeply troubled individual yeah i mean yeah i have no income you need jordan peterson i'll tell you how to make

a string imitate a lobster clean your room but become able to replicate yourselves without aging right still don't get any of this stuff but anyway why do we make these people heroes so i think firstly your whole spiel about how liberals are obsessed with the idea that the government shouldn't intervene in the economy because these people know exactly what they're doing it's probably right i think in the states and before the financial crisis but today they are increasingly on board with the idea that capitalism doesn't work when left to its own devices because it's just so like obvious right so there is an element of they're like a small number of people really like crazy libertarians and extreme liberals who think that if you just leave men

to compete with one another and like gouge other's eyeballs out until someone emerges as king then that's a good way to run a society but i think the vast majority of people actually do realize the privilege begets privilege and money begets money and the the way out my tender bio so then why do we worship these people as heroes then i don't think we do like the you know having like i've done this stuff on all these talk shows recently and people call in and they're like some of them are like well some of these people have left their money they've made their money themselves so leave them alone and i don't really care that's the lord sugar made is lord sugar came from a council estate that argument you know and the guy who's the most

richest guy the richest guy is um jim something i can't remember i haven't i haven't my know what sugar is like a failed dad because he invented all these like terrible inventions but still somehow became rich like the amstrad email it's like it's one of my favorite things it is like the homomobile of phones it's like a guy like it was like that period in like the late 90s there's people like there's this new thing called the interwebs how will people access it we're going to put telegraph wire a landline phone i want can we get an amstrad emailer for the like to be fair that whole mindset is is is like a manifestation of capitalism because by like chucking loads of money into fiber optic cables that required a huge amount

of capital to lay down presuming that they would consistently increase in value they're like creating a bubble which obviously ultimately popped it's basically the same thing as what happened in between like 1979 2007 you just continue plowing money into things into assets that you presume will continue to increase in value with no reference to the underlying value of the actual thing that you're buying and eventually obviously it's mince key eventually it just it just fucks you it all turns into you know multi-level mark it's amway it all turns finance yeah except the people that know like cash out at the right time and then they're all fine and also i mean even the ones that don't you know because all the middle classes are invested in

this model because it's all locked up in their homes and their pension funds the government steps in and says we're going to do qe and reflate asset prices until and you know creating this kind of zombie economy that we're in now which has no growth like incredibly low productivity and like zero wages and so then the the sunday times rich list sort of emerges as a kind of like element of the superstructure of that right like we're just i mean it's very it's very much the structure it's the base right that is like the sunday times richest is the people on the sunday times rich list are both the like remnants of the pre 2007 model and the you know like seed from which the new model will emerge which is just going to be another form of as price inflation

which grant other asset like another crisis left hinder bingo dating left hinder men bingo card that's dialectics baby oh my god dude but i think when i when i said i that's part of this the the superstructure it's that suggesting that these people are special specially talented specially deserving or specially deserving of recognition by putting them on an honorary list despite the fact that that list is incredibly gauche is the fact of putting them on a list feels a bit superstructurey so i think the sunday times rich list is like symptomatic of a broader trend which is not just an increase in the share of national income going to capital rather than labor but an increased share of national income going to rentiers as in people who purely extract

wealth and income rather than those who create it over capital itself and of course there is a lot of kind of harmony between those two groups like into an increasing extent most firms most like traditional capitalists whether they're the googles and facebook's or you know the general monopolies of this world are also rentiers in the sense that they are like using their monopoly position to extract from the rest of the world so there is not this great separation between those two things but you know modern capitalism whether you call it monopoly capitalism whether you call it neoliberalism or financial capitalism is a system of extraction it is not a system that allows for the improvement of the lives of most of the people that are involved in it well sunday

times bitch list am i right so put it in the bin so there's i mean there's another enormous and sort of throbbing scab of inequality that's occurring in the uk wow that was vivid in this well i i that's how i think of it is it on boris johnson somewhere no that's a blister of inequality and there are many of them although true from what i hear wait is that libelous they edit that you said from what i hear it's fine they edit out the libel um no is the other the other sort of throbbing blistering wound of inequality on the uk is the continued existence of the royal family which is which some of which are enjoying a wedding uh this weekend now my brain is going in a lot of directions about this thing and i think there are two ways we could take

it i'd like to cover both but i'll i'll leave it to you guys not be boring and just say we're all republicans and we hate the idea of the royal family but we still think megamancle is really fit we have a royal wedding coming up which is highlighting one of the when you say we is that because you as a canadian remember the cornwell i'm a full resident i'm a resident of the uk at this point oh okay sorry that was super racist of me yeah so looks like you just did win rush sorry ember rudd riley's riley's just not feminist enough to be canadian that's the problem yeah that's the problem i wasn't feminist enough they sent me to this country um no riley's never protected me in an elevator their thing is by the time we're recording there is a royal wedding

in some point in the future uh when we'll when this episode will be released to the public there will have been a royal wedding at some point in the past oh the pageantry the royal wedding it's happening tomorrow it's bad why is it bad i mean like i don't have a particular economic perspective on why this is bad it's just obviously bullshit of course like i mean i am not the against either of them obviously i megamancle is stunningly beautiful and like i would 100 marry her if i could harry's pre-fit too and obviously he's got a lot of money so i'd probably marry him too but we shouldn't have to fucking pay for it especially when there's like what is it it was the whole thing today about how people are allowed to camp outside to wait for the wedding

except the homeless except they're not allowed which reminds me it is similar to the whole thing about how expats get to call themselves expats rather than immigrants it's like where you position yourself in the like line of respectability in relation to a particular event whether it happens to be a royal wedding or you're having left a country is more determinant of like your legal status than what you actually are which seems fucking insane yeah although i always feel like kind of you you can call yourself an expat if you're intending to go back whereas you're definitely an immigrant if you're intending to stay but surely like most immigrants leave their country thinking i am forced to leave my country i would obviously like to go back to somewhere in the

future i wasn't forced to leave canada i'd very much like to stay in the uk but you're an expat i think i think of myself as an immigrant because i think of an immigrant look this is slightly sort of this is almost joking about that right he's actually a poc person of camp this is oh my god no this is this is like this is like crushing that devil's lettuce this is like this is like troubling least sincere for me at this point no i'm sorry we were listening to which is that this is your acoustic album i left i left to remember the emotions i very much actually like to stay in britain because basically britain has become home for me are you proposing uh yes but mary eugenie beatrice yeah it it it i think i think of myself as an

immigrant because i would like to in the next couple of years become legally british because i guess i hate myself the the much weirdest equal to legally blonde yeah with like way more just like fascist kafker legally british trying to prove that you've been in the country for long enough anyway yeah it all makes sense yeah so one of the what there are a couple of points about the royal wedding that i think are worthy of we's we's we's with a spoon we's with a spoon it's a with a spoonerism that was better because of the spoonerism that was good we should go to spoons yeah can we go somewhere with good food before we have so much wine here why don't we just stay and drink that and eat the cheese that's a great idea the cheese isn't going to be enough

you don't think so there's like there's like half a very small cheese left anyway um we can figure it out one of the one of the tropes that i okay uh prince harry who don't forget has put on nazi clothes before that's true uh you cannot forget that i do respect harry's life every five minutes not the nazi costume not the nazi costume that was obviously bad no i mean i respect prince harry's like not giving a fuck about like what he should do and say like what at least for a period there was that whereas like william has always been like oh the good boy do the thing whereas harry is like just have this just oh yeah i fuck it i'll do cocaine off hooker in las vegas and let people take photos of it what the fuck i had like i had a weird thing today and you guys

are going to judge me so much this i was on the tube and i was there was like some already judging yeah there was someone reading the metro and i like saw the front of it and i like saw harry and megan and it was like i like read a little bit of it and i was like oh and they clearly really love each other and he clearly respects her and then i was like oh they both get so much from their mother and and then i saw the thing about the diana dress thing and i was like actually you know what maybe they'd both be really good kings and then i heard myself say that and i was like what the fuck just happened to me you just got you just you just like got a shot of superstructure right into the main line literally into my eyeballs it felt so good though i felt

like i was in harmony with the whole of society like everyone was agreeing with my thoughts it was so nice you dropped a pill of superstructure i ejected it i ejected it that's not be real the thing is okay pulling us back slightly onto track is that the britain imagines that the royal family is key to its continued stability in terms of governance does it there is i think they just find like they think of it it's like a funny play thing but secondly it's like quaint but secondly it's imagine it kind of is but secondly it's imagined as at best or at worst harmless kind of fun and at best an economic boon for the country because people who think that are stupid though of course they are actually edit that out because that's mean to people who think that

people who think that do not listen to this right that's yeah and so we are in a situation but at the same time i have a suspicion that since the last royal wedding occurred the deterioration the guy who changes the sign day since the last royal wedding is in for a big day tomorrow as he resets the counter that's that is a full employment economy hell yeah that's what modern russia is like they've got a guy doing everything they've got guys who sit in cabins and watch the escalator in the metro it was so weird it's it's it when you but the thing is there are multiple escalators in each metro and so is the guy for each escalator that is like you know like minsky had this idea of an employer of last resort whereby just like

a lender of last resort whenever you had like a serious economic crisis the state would like employ people not to just build holes but exactly podcasting or watching escalators this seems like a really important thing you know you could have the royal family watching the country's escalator exactly so what we have is we have a number of people congregating in winzer to see the royal wedding who were allowed to and then a whole bunch of people in winzer a whole bunch of people in winzer who have been hustled out because they're camping yeah he's a big believer in hustle so i mean you know we already talked about this didn't we in that your relationship to a particular event that is happening royal wedding for example

is determined by a variety of other identity related issues whether it's like the color of your skin or you know your class or various other things and that determines your legal status with regards to that particular issue so you can camp somewhere in a tent be a posh white person and that's fine as long as your tent is a union flag but like okay so there's like some some interesting really early for the new iphone so there's there's like some really interesting like marginal issues here what if you are a very posh rich white guy that like has can't imagine it yeah okay so just imagine that you have a horrible tent and i do actually have one of those anyone who wants to get in that myles horrible with him please send to our curies

my dms are open oh my god so basically what if you're a posh rich white guy that like is camping and is indistinguishable from a homeless person that is also camping how do they deal with that that is something that i would genuinely like to know how do i deal with that like philosophy of art shit you know does it matter who's the original i mean if okay later i would say yes well yeah but like our homeless dude just needs to dress up in royal wedding here's some controversy platonism is the root of fascism wait is that controversial i mean it's not it relates to what we were talking about earlier i mean i think it's not controversial between the two of us here but it might be controversial oh yeah this way well yeah i mean because like literally philosophy

things i mean like yeah but i mean like the philosophy kings are not supposed to be fascist like but they can be if they want to spend so much time studying play dough that they have a vested interest in play dough not being a fascist would say well it's almost it's almost a massive place it like so do you want to know okay so hold on i would love hold on no no this is not only about the royal wedding this is now about this we're talking about this now because everyone around this table has extremely hard opinions on play now we're all we're all rock hard for this discussion i mean we're all being members of the classical discourse i don't even have a penis and i'm hard for this discussion like i'm so excited for it to get going well you do in a jar that's true

because of who gave me the penis in a jar uh we we were talking about yeah before we recorded that's an inside joke for everyone who was here before we record it it was just i always keep my penis in jar just in case someone wants to come in ladies and you're going to charge income tax you have to come into the jar where my penis is so why is play dough not a fascist why is play dough not fasc why is play dough not fasc well because i mean i presume everyone when they talk about play dough being a fascist which is actually new to me um usually referring to the republic i presume where he advances the concept of philosopher kings yeah but okay okay okay okay okay even outside republic okay if you want to talk symposium if you want to talk symposium he's extraordinarily

prescriptive and like what kinds of romantic partnerships should exist anyone anyone who suggests that the symposium is about anything other than how much they all want to fuck little boys is gravely misguided it's one of it's one of the worst things ever written in all of classical philosophy in my opinion plays we had to study what i always i always remember about this symposium is that he theorizes he theorizes an entire sort of category of people who lived like attached to one another permanently and just existed cartwheeling around the world it's a fucking bachelor party with a stenographer that's what it's a really gay bachelor party with a long ass time ago i feel like most of them were probably like you know on a very different wavelength at the end

of play dough symposium they have a sexy dance done by two slaves and they all get so randy that they run off home to fuck obviously because they were like this insane wealthy oligarchy who could do whatever the fuck they wanted all the time we have one of those now and as we draw near to the end of this podcast and like the behaviors are not like you know distinguishable from era to era but obviously you know the philosophy that they were you know they do on a private plane on their way to a sex island got them makers hey we're going to fuck children jeffrey epstein fuck some kids i think i think my venga boys a were going to fuck children was better awful okay but you know fine whatever no i

mean there's like a question right about like how much how much of like a platonism is unique to a particular society in ancient Greece and how much of is it just like rich people being cunts to everyone else hang on well now we're now we're conflating this symposium with the rest of play which i feel is unfair oh my god what do you want to talk about the apologia i'm ready to fucking go to battle with you and anything i just got some of your chair oh no it was it was lavender the apologia is like weird weird play toke is like most of most of what was actually the apologia as in like socrates defense speech was is recorded in xenophon and then and then play toes apologia is like a weird like kind of anachronous his own version of kind of what he thinks socrates

sort of shed you know he gets a bad rap based on the opposite of non-nominative determinism xenophon he's the only ever out of the polls that was a very loose pun that was the loosest pun i've ever heard thank you so much okay guys you know what we're going to do for the next like 15 minutes we're going to focus down okay but we we all are men and eels that have a hd so how we do that xenophon's anabasis are you going to give us that start open your lures to page 370 mdm well that or um there is generally a perception in britain that all of these that spent that the royal family is basically good for britain that the royal family even though we spend money on them from the taxpayer in the terms of the sovereign grant um they actually generate more

money in services per person than we pay to them yeah there are people that say they're all family tanzer prophet there are people that say that they're all lizards who come from the center of the moon and they both make very convincing arguments well i mean if we took the value of their assets liquidated them and invested them properly and they would turn a profit in bitcoin i mean we know why it's an utter distraction we know that wages are falling we know that fewer people are owning property we know that the sunday times rich list is controlling more and more of our society we know it's a distraction and yet there are people who insist that it's economically good for the country that it continues to function do you remember what we talked about uh fallacies earlier

yet if many years ago many many years if many keeps it in okay if nate keeps it in it's the same thing right it's when you believe something you have uh you have a cognitive investment in everything around you like reinforcing that belief that you want to prevent cognitive dissonance you don't want to simultaneously be invested in the idea that our economy works our society works the royal family is a good thing and everything's probably fine and also think oh yeah maybe actually the royal family isn't very good for our economy like you know there's no one actually comes out in any of these debates and says the royal family creates x amount in tourism revenues for the uk which i mean to be fair at this point in time because of the devaluation of sterling

like it will be creating more money for the economy than it did 10 years ago but the argument hasn't changed and i think that probably says more than anything else also like if we really want to improve our current account deficit then we should be doing a lot more to say like reduce the returns of financial services and invest in manufacturing but instead we're still talking about the queen rent her out to other countries you can have the queen for like a week yeah that would be a good export abby and queen but you know it's just like hundred quid a day plus cleaning fee it's conservatism it's just things are the way they are and therefore that's the way that we feel comfortable with them being

and that's the way they're going to continue being for an extended period of time well it's the the idea is among i know this is not something i believe it it's it's the argument that i see made which is that well the royal family is good for tourism it brings people in and ultimately even though we pay a certain amount to them in the sovereign grant they actually make us more money it's the same thing as like finance right which is like the finance sector brings us um it's 10 percent of the economy it brings us i i can't remember how much is in tax revenues but it's like a large amount of tax revenues and employment as much as like four percent um and therefore we need to keep the finance sector even though we spent

at least a trillion if not two trillion in direct costs on the financial crisis and the recession in sure this box park would go out of business it's very important the the indirect effects of the finance also all of the cocaine dealers they would be out of business all of these cocaine as well do they though can they afford it so what are the other things we hear is like yeah well look yeah we give the royals a sovereign grant but they're paying for their own wedding out of their own money they're not paying for their own wedding they're the only money that they get is derived from attack it's just like when you when your dad gives you a tenet by your mama birthday present when you're like well that is genuinely what it is he paid with his own money

oh it's just it's just a hangover from the particular constitutional settlement that we decided to go with which is this is essentially burky an idea that like maintaining a vestige of the past is better for the stability of society than transforming things into something that could be better and you know it's bullshit and so anything that happens at the royal wedding any any any fluctuation who's giving who away um the who who who wears like if you you should have told me to like give mega mark away oh my oh my god the liberals would literally die i think there wouldn't be any of them left they would they would just they would all ascend they would they they would literally be rapture it'd be rapture out of respect for women he would

then take mega markle surname so they didn't die out just in markle right nice yeah um okay i think we have to leave it a sec leave it a sec all right i think we have recorded approximately enough for all the hogs today yeah so i'm gonna say hogs thanks grace for coming here in your capacity as a private citizen thank you so much for having me it's been a pleasure this this was an absolute delight and thank you also thank you also to jin sang for providing our theme tune here we go you can find it on spotify uh and who else do we have to say thank you to nate for editing all of the things we ask him to add it thanks nate all the things we ask him to edit he doesn't edit all of them yeah um i feel like nate probably is going to get more overall general

like mental disorders from editing this than he ever did from the army he has to listen to everything