TRASHFUTURE - The Wicker Mound feat. James Meadway

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

A great happening has come to London. A marker of power has arisen. Fell deeds awake as we enter the era of the Mound.   Also, James Meadway (@meadwaj) returns to discuss the fading of the neoliberal paradigm and it’s replacement with something different and worse.   If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Please consider donating to charities helping Palestinian people here: https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/palestine-emergency-appeal/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3oja5NbR8AIVSOmyCh2LdQ9rEAAYAiAAEgKM9PD_BwE and here: https://www.grassrootsalquds.net/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the free one every week. We are coming to you live, as a matter of fact, from on top of London's best new attraction. No one can stop talking about it. It is gathered here, I assume, to see us or this fantastic attraction, whatever it is. I think it's going to be a feature of our fair city for a very long time. It's the London Mound, everyone. We built a mound.

We built a kurgan or, you know, some kind of like funerary monument, but made of scaffold. We built the kurgan from the film Highlander in Marble Arch. And everyone's here. We've paid eight pounds to walk up the mound. I love that, literally, it's in a part of London called Marble Arch, so-called, because it has a giant fuck-off Marble Arch for no reason, and the dumbest architectural feature of Marble Arch is now a big mound. Yeah.

Well, it's, look. That's why they call it Mound. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome to Mound. It's very important here to build the Marble Arch and then dwarf that Marble Arch with an artificial hill. It's the man where we used to hang the nunces.

Yeah. It's culture. Simple as. On top of the fantastic London Mound, it is friend of the show, returning guest James Meadway, who I believe now has access to free premium spirits and also 10% off at Bath and Body Works. James, welcome. Thank you.

Yeah. Just admiring the view up here. It's quite something. Well, there are some bins. For those of you who may not be in Britain, you may not be familiar with the British tradition of incredibly, incredibly shit public displays of sort of art performance. Various sort of awful installations that seem to cost millions and millions of pounds. And in this case, R is a big pile of a big scaffolding that will not that big even an

82 foot pile of scaffolding covered in some sod and some mostly dead trees. And yeah, there's a shortage of that at the moment. The thing is right. It's a raid in sort of a way that the slope is very high, right? Because it's a mound. In order to get the trees on this, what they've done is not plant the trees on the sod. What they've done is they've cut through, put the trees in a pot within the scaffolding and let them poke out of a hole.

It's just, it's a tremendous experience. It looks like. Tremendous. It looks like a hill rendered on like a PS1. Well, no, what happened is the S1 Hagrid is the game's keeper. The draw distance in zone one is actually very low. The ground is quite glitchy around there. It kind of reminds me of like the terrain, the type of like grassy terrain that you'd

see on like war hammerboards. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, flock. Yeah. Yeah. Model railway. You know, somebody with a real model railway fixation has been allowed to. Well, James.

So what happened? What's happened here is they've spent a prop. So Westminster Council has a hundred and fifty million pound plan to basically bring people back into the city of Westminster following the pandemic. And personally, I think building this scaffolding with some dirt on it was a great way to spend two million of those. Come and get the novel coronavirus on a mound. Everyone wants to see the mound because you have a fantastic view of the area directly

around the mound, which includes some bins and a traffic round. Oh, I live around the mound and like some and some big roads. You oversee why I was going to say was that like, I don't I thought people were initially a little harsh about the mound in the sense that like, if it was this public area that you could like maybe hang out in, like maybe you could sit on top of it, um, like not only have they like really fenced it off, really fenced it off, but it's like very likely if people try to use this mound for the kind of so-called public purpose it was designed for, i.e. to like maybe have some space to like hang out with your friends and everything,

like it's just going to be really heavily policed as they look for teenagers like they're not going to have like SO 19 repelling down onto the top of the mound and eventually like it will either be used is like some guy will either use it and buy like and build like a dumb house on top of the mound, um, or it will be used to hang nonces or like people suspect it to be nonces, but I feel like those are the only two logical like endpoints for the mound. They should conduct tests on nonces, I think on the mound. I think they should do like ducking stool, like putting them under heavy rocks and just

see what happens. So basically what you might not surprise you to know is Flora Gill coming up with some ideas. What to do on the mound? Additioning for the role of nonce finder general. That's right. It might not surprise you to know that the mound is part of a, no, apparently it's to do with climate change.

Oh, but is it to give everyone investments to some sort of like frown onto and higher ground when it. I think Muhammad al-Thayyad when he eventually dies should be buried in the mound. So basically, it's the closest thing we have to a fair. The founding partner of MVRDV, the architecture behind the project. Well, the founding partner named Winey Moss. Excuse me. Oh, no.

Said, um, this is always called Mr. Mosse. It's a big pity that the hill didn't appear fit finished, saying the vegetation was a bit modest. But the dream behind the project was to create a space that would make people think about how the city could be made greener and used to combat climate change. But that message seemed to be lost this week. And by greener, we mean sort of grayish browner. Yeah, that's right.

It fits, I think, into a sort of great British tradition of, um, of public art that is just sort of a bit sort of like massively overthought and incredibly shit. But we are amazing at this. We're amazing at like having a guy paying like 20 million pounds to like have a guy string up some fairy lights on Hyde Park to promote a conversation. Something is right. Like it's more dismal than any of our previous things, because like we have this history of public art, as you say, and especially in London, like whether that's new labors

sort of like circus projects of putting up a big ferris wheel and a big tent or like Boris is more grandiose things of just having a bridge with a park on it or like a cable way or whatever. But now Boris has been kicked upstairs. And we just sort of have, I don't know, how about we do a hell? Yeah. Come one, come all and look upon the weapons of mass destruction. Why not check in on the moor in his hiding place?

This is basically what the Millennium Dome was originally intended to be. I think. It's kind of one of those. It's in the tradition of those dreadful sort of, you know, every Christmas you get these kind of winter festivals. Oh, yeah. It's completely blow out and you charge 15 quits that wander around, look at some fairy lights and a half starved deer.

20 quits. You're getting in a certain area, fucking piss tight. It seems to be as well right that that there is a sense, I think that every council in Britain is just desperate to be defrauded, right? Oh, yeah. And they're right. Yeah. Absolutely.

Where like if someone comes up to them and just says, I'm going to create, I am going to create something that is so sort of magical and green and enticing that the people who live in the borough will be unable to resist flocking from their homes and stimulating the economy. It works for both of them. North Haverbrook borough council. Basically, yes. Every English council is a kind of like a bumbling medieval oaf, wandering around, getting sold

a different collection of magic beans. And I think really they are so in, I think most of them are afraid of being like sort of looked down upon by an urbane Dutch architect that they're like, yes, I'd love a hill. Please make a hill. I understand how it will work. Yeah. The energy of the average like kind of British council is they're constantly being like incredibly deferent to like sort of ridiculous con men.

And then as soon as you need a service from them, they're being like, no, fuck you. That's not something we know. We have to deal with this. I was dealing with Hackney council this week and they were pulling the incredibly weird power move of whenever I sent them an email, replying to my email, but in a way that made it clear that they had not read any of the contents of my email. And they're just sending me like, okay, well, we're not going to read your email, but have you considered this?

And it's like, well, I have considered it. And I wrote something about it in my email, which if you'd have read it, you wouldn't have said this to me. I think it's they were very busy, presumably buying like a big mound, a big man. Well, no, the Westminster, he did the man that the big mound is the excavation hole. The hackney hole would be our do it. Kick them in. Sparta style.

Oh yeah. We're going to build a big hole. We're going to have that. Yeah. Yeah. Spend eight quid to go and look at the hackney Saalak. I'm 16 pounds. Definitely don't get kicked in.

You can go to the area with the railing. The prison from the dark night rises is coming to Maer Street. That was my favorite escape room, sir. Bane was raised in the escape room. They say, they say, the company, which describes itself on social media as a team that creates happy and adventurous places, blamed the chaos facing the mound on London's challenging weather and the unpredictability of working with plants, vowing the artificial attraction will get better.

It depends. You work with plants. Never work with plants and children. Yeah. That's what they say. That's right. That's what a plant's going to do. It kind of exposes this like fairly big problem, which I think is like very evident in like

the council that I live in and like lots of other councils where like there's kind of like quite obvious gentrification going on, which is that like you have pressure on councils to make stuff that can be used for public consumption or like things that are like publicly accessible. And for so long, like because so much of how, you know, London has developed is one where it's like, you know, if you're rich, you buy land and you make it into property and then you like rent that out to people who work like shitty gig economy jobs or very low paid work, but all of a sudden, this pressure to now make public stuff, councils just don't

know what to do. They don't know what like a public, what like something for public enjoyment would be. Like, you know, it's because to me, it doesn't, it doesn't make sense that, you know, you have the very obvious things that could be used for public good things like art galleries or libraries or like museums and, you know, there are kind of like very, there are like tried and tested things that would be, you know, you could say would be good, like would be a public good. And yet they end up, they end up like doing gimmicks and these bizarre installations

like this one. Because, because how else are you going to impress a European finance guy called like Julian Fondet Funko? Right. And so, and so, and so it just kind of like, you know, we talk a lot about like how London is basically like a giant theme park and it's just filled with these like very filled with these like very stupid attractions, which people just find very funny or like they kind of go cap for a little bit before they like get on with it, you know, get on with whatever they were doing.

And these 10 and these are now conceived of as like these big public like goods or like this is what public space is. Like it feels like after so long of, you know, so long that I'm sorry, it feels like after so long of how like areas in London have basically developed in a particular way, which is designed for a particular kind of person coming in, but they just can't conceive of what public space is. I've often said this, that London feels kind of like a theme park for tourists and people on like graduate schemes.

Yeah. And then, and then they obscure, you know, the great historical sites of London, like the Shoreditch box. I mean, we all remember when what Tyler and the peasants revolt, they marched straight to the Shoreditch box. It was because they wanted the right, they wanted the right to swim in the pool between the two buildings in Battersea. It's not a clown fucking city.

Jesus Christ. It should be allowed in the Sky Pool. We have the Sky Pool. Let the Oath swim in the Sky Pool. We have the Sky Pool. We have the Mound. We have the Climb the London Millennium Dome experience. We have the Cable Car that goes from Canningtown.

Absolutely. Millennium Tier Dome. It is a place that is so, it is so abstract that it is completely forgotten. You know what it is? I've been thinking about this for a little bit. It's like if a Walt Disneyland theme park designer decided to make Main Street in Disneyland more of a Jane Jacobs thing. This is what they would do.

They would do a mound. They would do a cable car. They would do a box park. They would just do embarrassing non-thing after embarrassing thing and it would cost millions of dollars. We're stuck on the fucking zipline. Yeah. That was fun.

That was great. And that's the thing. We're all still spiritually there. That's not living in London as long. Yeah. I'm just excited to see what they're going to do next. Maybe bigger mounds, more mounds everywhere else. Loads of mounds.

Make the whole city into a series of mounds to the point where you won't even be able to tell that that mounds. Well, there's also like a plan to just like erect more cheaply made statues. Uh-huh. Oh yeah. Of course. Cheaply made like plastic cars. Yeah.

More statues, more mounds. Yeah. We could finally get a giant mound with a statue of an Evangelion on top of that. Yeah. Well, what do you think is going to go on top of the mound? I have been in touch with Westminster Council. We've been in conversations for quite a long time. I'm not going to like hold anyone to, I'm not going to like, you know, promise anything.

But what I will say is if you're a betting person, definitely bet on me and my Evangelion statue on top of the mound. I want a statue of the pepperoni guy. Maybe the cheese string guy. I think the London mound overall is just one of these examples of the cancellation of the future is depressing, but also we forget deeply vicariously embarrassing. Yeah. That's right.

I love how low-poly it is. I genuinely do. It's actually, that is very fun. They promise it's going to get better. So we're going to eat our words, I assume, when they can only get better. Patch notes for a hill. Well, they promised that when, um, how do you fuck up building a hill? Why did they call it a mound?

Well, just think burial mounds. I don't think anything good comes out of mounds. Milo. We should get a Motton Bailey on that. Why do they fuck up building a mound? It's a Dutch architecture firm. They don't build mounds. They dig ditches.

Ah, of course. That'll be why. Yeah. You see, the interior of the mound is interesting. It's actually filled with chupache. That's right. Anyway, um, so that's the mound and look, maybe when like, when we update, um, when we update to spring, they'll patch the mound and like the plants will look more realistic.

Get like a mound of the IPOC. Yeah. I hate it when the Chinese tourists keep clipping through the mound. Three takes me out of the experience. I thought I was done with the mound. I have one more thing to say. Never be done with the mound. Oh, the mound is like, it's the, it's the sixth mic, basically.

I have no idea. Mound and pound. Is that anything? Uh, sure. Why not? Yeah. Go up the mound, get a pound. Uh, it costs eight pounds.

So get a pound off going up the mound. Yeah. Eight pounds to go up 82 feet of stairs and look at a car and look at a big road. Yeah. Awesome. It's great to look at from above. Oh, there are some guys smoking shisha over there. It's also perfectly in height to have your view of anything else blocked by trees, which

is just great. Awesome. And they said, they said, well, we didn't plan for this because when we were planning for it, there weren't trees in bloom. And there never will be again. No. I mean, it's the, the, the obvious, like it feels like they made it up as they went along.

Um, but the, the other thing was like, if you look at the design renderings, it actually looks like a quite sort of lush bit of greenery that sort of erupted from the plaza beside Marble Arch. But of course that could never have been executed, but much like so many of the companies we talk about, the point of the design was just to get the thing sold. And now the Dutch architects are just like, what are you going to do about it? You bought the mound, buddy. We talk about the bins because.

Dutch Dondraper just being like, yeah, it's sound as a mount. You got to buy it. It's going to be nice. Tell me about the bins. The bins. Okay. So in every photo that I've seen of the mound, uh, the entrance to it where you queue is just surrounded by like a long, uh, stack of council, uh, wheelie bins, dumpsters.

Um, and also there's like an unfinished construction site with no apparent work going on, on it directly next to the mound. Even if the mound had been good, uh, the second you perceive anything on the periphery of the mound, you remember that you were in London, which is not a functional city. It's just, it's just Britain, right? Like a sort of massive. Are they doing the Greek tax evasion thing where, you know, like in Greece, you only have to pay property taxes on renovations to your house if you complete the renovation.

So like every house in Greece has like a tiny bit of scaffolding on it. Who can say? Yeah. I think we have to put aside our mound for a while and decide it's time to put away childish mounds. Yes. Um, I've done with the mound for now. Okay.

Uh, am I done with the mound? I'll be back. Am I done with the mound forever? No. We will be talking about that. We will be talking about the mound again. I love the mound so much because, uh, I want to get into an article that James has coming out for open democracy soon, um, which sort of is a kind of part two to what we talked

about in our mound. Yeah. It's, he wrote an article about the mound and open democracy in a sense. He sort of did. Um, it, as much as the article is about James is looking very uncertain in the sense that the, the article is about what, whether the active state now that sort of coronavirus has forced that to happen and that sort of is a bit of, um, an answer to what we said in season episode one of season three, which is, well, the, the, the neoliberalism as you

sort of know it is going to be replaced by something else because it cannot continue. By building mounds. Yeah. We're getting, it's Neo-moundalism. Yeah. But before we do that, I want to do a quick startup. Okay. It's called step ladder.

It has nothing to do with the mound. Yeah. Yeah. Gotta get on top of the mound somehow. Yeah. Well, uh, and so I'm going to, I'm going to ask our guest, James, it's called step ladder. It's called step ladder. What do you think step ladder does reminding you it is nothing to do with literal step

ladder? As usual with these things, it's, it's the, the, the relationship between what the company does and the name given to it is completely like non-existent. So the zoom is almost anything there's nothing not only to do with not step ladders, but anything that might plausibly be associated with a step ladder. So anything to do with height is probably ruled out. Anything to do with actually climbing anything to do with anything to do with anything that might actually be useful in some circumstances can probably do with your biological ladder.

I'll tell you this. They're often very heavy handed, poorly thought out metaphors. So Milo, heavy handed, poorly thought out metaphor. It's called step ladder and I'll give you one more hint. It describes itself as a collaborative blank platform. Is it, is it like a thing like an incubator? It like brings people together to come up with a bad business idea. It does bring people together not to come up with a bad business idea.

Hussain, step. I assume it's something to do with jobs and it's something to do with like, it sounds to me like it's some sort of convoluted mentor scheme. It's convoluted, but no, it's not to do with jobs or innovation. It's called cocaine. I genuinely have no idea. Step ladder. Is it, is it maybe like some kind of like nested series of loans?

No. Well, yes, no, it is, no, it is, no, it is. It's like it's actually the financing. So what you're saying is that it's kind of like a micro, it's a micro MLM. You guys are getting very good at this effectively. Yes, loan trioshka. However, I appreciate this at all. They call it a collaborative finance platform. OK, all right.

It's a pyramid scheme. Well, actually, I checked on their FAQ and the first entry on their FAQ is it's step ladder appearance scheme. Yeah. Well, is it this is like the thing where, you know, the rule of headlines, where any headline question can be answered with no any FAQ on the website, one that can be answered with yes. Yes, it absolutely is. So it's basically it's a collaborative finance platform.

You're struggling to raise a housing deposit, work on your credit score, raise a deposit, work in your credit score, ask a risk, raise a deposit and achieve your financial goals. So is step ladder a Ponzi scheme? In the early days of setting up step ladder, this was one of the questions we were most often asked. I really distrust that they had the chance to answer with no as the first word and they didn't choose to do that.

Yeah, like you can just lie. Why do they not know that? But guess what? And they're like, well, strictly speaking, not exactly the financial conduct authority, don't put Ponzi schemes on their register. And B, if we were with those guys over at the financial contact authority, put us on their register. They don't put things called Ponzi schemes on their register.

Yeah, you have to pretend to not be one for like a whole 45 minute meeting. Who could do that? Hey, it's very thorough. They come around and they ask you, is this a Ponzi scheme? You have to go, no, I go, well, OK, then. Yeah, well, if you'd said yes, we'd be having a different conversation. That's right. You've been in a lot of trouble right now.

We'd say, hey, don't say that. Yeah. Hey, say something else. You got to say something different. B, if we were, we'd have closed down by now or you'd have read about it in the press. Oh, no Ponzi scheme has ever been long running or successful. No, here's the thing. Sorry, sorry, that's their actual answer. Yes, that's their answer from their FAQ.

We can't possibly be a Ponzi scheme because we'd have been caught if we were a Ponzi scheme. Yeah, exactly. We've been building the form that said we weren't and everything's fine. Could a criminal do this and then like a little bit of juggling or something? So then people got like, ooh. So basically they say it is a method. So it's peer to peer lending.

It's a method of raising money and basically what you do is you sign up and then you join with a goal. So let's say you want to raise ten thousand pounds towards your housing deposit, you then get signed, you sign up, you get put into a circle with other people who want to raise ten thousand pounds drum circle. You each pay into that pot of money, let's say five hundred pounds a month or whatever, and then as soon as there's ten thousand pounds in it, it gets randomly allocated to one of you, but everyone has to keep paying in until

all ten thousand pounds is raised for everyone. We're genuinely getting closer and closer to tontine the start up. T-O-N-T-N. So basically, right, it's a bit, it's instead of having a deposit, and again, it is just ways that we're sort of solving the housing affordability crisis or ways that startups are coming in to, quote, help solve the housing affordability crisis by instead praying on people trying to afford it. We'll help you over-leverage yourself and how do they make money from this?

Oh, hell, they charge a simple, a tiny, a microscopic five percent management fee. Oh, only five percent. I got this right, it's a lottery. Well, you're guaranteed to win at some point. Oh, like the lottery. Yeah, the lottery, if you buy 14 million tickets, you're probably going to win. Yeah, it's basically, so it's, let's say there are ten of you, you're all putting in ten thousand pounds a month, you all want to raise ten thousand.

So you're all putting in a thousand pounds a month, you want to raise ten thousand pounds. So for ten months, each of you puts in a thousand pounds, and then each month, one of you will receive the ten thousand pounds. But again, minus the quite onerous five percent management fee taken by the company, that all they've done is sort of put you together. And then they also make money another way, which is by connecting you to the kind of mortgage broker that will accept a loaned deposit.

Because once you have your deposit, you still have to keep paying. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And the only mortgage brokers that will accept a loaned deposit, generally speaking, are ones that charge relatively high interest. Fantastic. So what we've done is we've called some sort of a loan marine animal. Yeah.

Exactly. A loan loan. A loan loan. One of those loan manatee. Yeah. A loan manatee. Also, I checked it. Step ladder is not covered in the financial services compensation scheme,

which means if it goes bust, you are fucked. Oh, yeah. I'm not scared. Yeah, yeah. But and the thing is right, this company has received, I would say, quite a bit of almost puff press coverage. Yeah, from us. Yeah, right now, obviously.

Hey, and this is financial advice. You should go invest in this. No, you should not do it illegally, if not for now. Legally, do not do that. Don't do it illegally, either. Yeah, don't do anything. Yeah, don't do anything. That's our advice.

It's not an investment of our own. No, either invest in it, nor don't invest in it. Yeah, we are offering you contradictory, non-existent advice. Yeah, you can just go jack off instead. This is jacking off advice. You might be asking, well, hang on, and also, by the way, they get this this company is funded to the tune of, again, millions of pounds by various London-based VCs,

because it's a London-based company. Of course, only only a British company could be like people saving for a housing deposit. An American company would be like, figure out a way to like, turn your house into something they can rent you. A British company would be like, are you saving for a deposit? Fuck it. Yeah, I think that's the wrong accent for the kind of guy who's running this company.

Yes, that's true. This is the... Oh, did you know there are some people who don't have a housing deposit because they haven't had the foresight to have wealthy parents? Well, I say, you know, Hugo, I think we can get in on this. I think there's a market here. And if you don't finish it, if for some reason you're not able to pay, you get kicked out of the circle and given your money back, less the fees,

which means it's basically a savings account at negative 5% interest. Fantastic. You're buying German government debt. Basically, yeah, but with none of the security and also you can't do anything with it. If anything, it is less secure than German government debt because at least like, you know, the ECB may print money to pay that debt if it's German, maybe. Yeah, so that's...

So they're basically saying, oh, yeah, actually, this is actually done all around the world like this, you know, in where people in like Brazil or whatever will have community... Ogdenville, North Havenbrook... Nobody's ever been scammed in like Brazil or somewhere. Yeah. I would a scammer be a Nigerian general. No, so basically, it is a way that like community,

like communities in Brazil will raise money between them in a way like this where everyone's like, I want to get a new dishwasher and then like they will pay into a fund and do it like this, right? But these guys have... They do sponsored flexos in the town square. These guys have figured out a way to basically... To make that evil. To make that profitable for them and their investors.

And dangerous and risky for you. This, unlike many of the startups we talk about on this show, is actually very profitable, I would imagine, because this is just like you just take people's money for in exchange for nothing. Well, all I'm thinking is that, you know, there's like five verse plus, you know. Yeah, I've got an idea. If anyone's interested. Okay.

Yeah, we should... Is it a tanteen? Is it a trash-reaching mound? Yeah, that's right. Exactly, that's right. We should put in 10,000 pound each so that we can buy a mound. I see immediately one problem here. Yeah.

Well, okay, well... Look, we just don't tell Nate and we just build a mound at the new office. A mound? Yeah. I think we can really... Our one parking space is just a fucking mound. I really think we could make a great mound. Look, we just create a tanteen to fund this mound and can bring it all together.

I think people would come to see the Hackney Mound. We're going to build the Hackney Mound and we're going to do it with this extremely stupid form of finance. From the mound, you could see the junky shit that was taken on the parking space next to ours. You could also see the Sainsbury's. Yeah, you could see that. No, that would be blocked by the building. You can see the shortage box park and if you look really far ahead, you could see the Croydon box park as well.

Yeah. If you have all the box park... Oh, we could get one of those coin-operated binoculars. That's how we recoup the money. But it takes four... See, now we're thinking like business people. Four two-pound coins for 30 seconds of looking through the binoculars. That's right.

Yeah. The binoculars do not work. No. No kaleidoscope. Yes, that's right. It's a viewfinder of different box parks. Yeah. It's got pictures of us in there.

Why not? Look at cool guys. A picture of that time we went to Russia. Yeah, exactly. It's me rather than Karl Marx. Yeah. No. So that's that step ladder.

And I want to sort of now put aside child or start-ups, but I'm putting it with the mound. Yeah. And I want to move ahead to... Our offices are at one the mound. One Mound Street. Yeah. Where...

James, you and I have sort of spoken about this sort of for quite a while now, where a question that sort of is, I think, has been on people's minds ever since COVID happened, is how is capital going to organize itself now that the sort of... The heady days of sort of China's accession to the WTO,

the sort of the promise of the tech boom 1.0 or what have you, are now basically dead. And we must... And in order to secure its precious returns, a more sort of nakedly political solution is required. Yeah, that's exactly it. And it's not just COVID. I mean, this is all happening well before.

This is from 2008 onwards. You have this sort of happy period in capitalism, which we all remember well of the 2000s boom. Massive amount of credit flowing through great chunks of the world economy. No return to boom and bust if you're Gordon Brown, which all sort of comes crashing to hold around about 2007, 2008, and it's been limping along,

at least in sort of North America and Europe ever since. It's not really limping along if you're in China or if you're in other parts of the world. But that limping, that failure to recover growth and productivity growth and all the other things is what's driving this sort of political turn, or at least it's one of the factors driving it. So in other words, instead of saying,

okay, we're going to invest and build these companies and there'll be loads of growth and everyone's got jobs, you say, can we develop a relationship with our government and get money off them in some way? Right? Yeah, I think this is one of the sort of things that I think might mark an almost sort of sea change in this attitude is recently,

the sort of why we're talking about this now, is that a core part of one of the private companies that supplied parts of the UK's completely useless nuclear submarine fleet. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, had gotten to some trouble because it was a massive defense contractor and that is just your entire industry.

This is just a mound. Your entire industry is nothing but boondoggles, right? So Sheffield Forgemasters, this company, which sounds like someone that makes Warhammer 40k miniatures to be honest. Yeah, it does. It also sounds like a company, Alan Partridge, would be doing like a private event for.

The Sheffield Forgemasters. They're very serious people then. This is some kind of joke. They forge Warhammer figurines. These are men of battle. I read that in the ad copy. Isn't Games Workshop like the most successful company in the entire country at the minute?

It was some share prices gone through the roof last year. Yeah, the government's going to nationalize it. So what happened was this company was in trouble because the whole sector of defense contracting is sort of nothing but a bunch of boondoggles kind of just sort of floating along because they know that the government is sort of their buyers of last resort.

First of all, let us say that this is not a boondoggle. The F-35, we get asked this a lot. It's not a boondoggle. Look, many people are asking us if it's a boondoggle, but would a government contractor create a boondoggle? Yeah, this is a very different kind of doggle, first of all. This isn't your mom's doggle. No, but essentially what happened

is this company was then nationalized. The Ministry of Defense has purchased Sheffield Forgemasters. Technically a kind of sausage. I think this is different from sort of the government reluctantly taking a stake in RBS in 2008 because we are going to hold on to this. We're going to get rid of it as soon as possible. This feels different. Why is that?

I think that's broadly right. I mean, they are saying they'll return it to the private sector and it will still be a competitive market and this sort of thing. So Sheffield Forgemasters capture and release. We'll let it come back to its natural habitat eventually. It just needs to gain a bit of strength. Yeah, so that's roughly what they say they're going to do and then they never do.

RBS are still great chunks of its own by the government here. In this case, it's different because they're sort of... They're directly going out and saying, okay, we need to get hold of this particular company, Sheffield Forgemasters, because it produces very high quality steel for various bits of defense. And they want to make sure that steel is being supplied because they've got all these extra bits of defense

that they want to do at some point in the future. So in other words, they're deliberately intervening in the supply chain to try and hold the things together, rather than in a state of something like panic, where if RBS collapses, like the rest of the whole economy falls down the big hole, it leaves behind it. Yeah, the big hole that we built in Hackney. So it all disappears down the economy hole, sometimes in 2008.

Yeah, we have to nationalise it. What a very different world it would have been if that happened. So they nationalise it in a sort of positive, if you like, way. It's something where they want to get hold of the supply chain, get the thing running as they would see it properly. And it's an intervention of the kind that we've not, rhetorically, 40-odd years at least, you've had governments basically say, we can't ever possibly do this sort of thing.

You must nationalise nothing. Everything must be decided by the private sector. So in other words, it's a turn against neoliberalism. It's another part of this big turn. You see, not just here actually, you see in America, you see it across Europe, similar sort of things happening. I think when we say, when you say sort of turn against neoliberalism, I sort of will turn back to some of my co-hosts here, right?

I think it's very easy to think what you mean is turn against capitalism, when what you really mean, I think, is capital has, capital has sort of, has decided it does want the state to do certain things, to solve certain problems for it, right? That's exactly it. So it's, yeah, exactly. I mean, the problem is, if you say, oh, it's a turn against neoliberalism,

neoliberalism, you know, it's on the way out. People sort of think, oh, that's good. That means we're going to get something much better, and it'll all be like some happy, social-democratic, shangry laugh. It could be worse. It could be very significant. So you have a big, increasingly authoritarian state sort of taking great chunks of the economy

into its hands and deciding what they're going to do with it. It's not necessarily a brilliant situation to get to. So everything could easily get worse. I can't see how that could go wrong. That's right. Would the authoritarian state do anything bad? I think that your silence speaks volumes. As a matter of fact, if...

And again, the idea of this isn't sort of entirely new. I think there is a fantasy understanding of neoliberalism as neoliberalism is when markets, which I think is overly simplified, right? Neoliberalism is a historical thing. It was brought about sort of in history. It has its historical sort of rise, sort of propagating itself throughout institutions

at the global level with free trade, at the domestic level with things like welfare state, with anti-trade unionism, welfare state, residualization, all this stuff. And that it's... But that the state is very active in doing this. It's that the state is active as a facilitator rather than, say, an owner or an entrepreneur.

And if you want another example of an entrepreneurial state, did you know that a firm called Incutail has recently purchased a large stake in a British company called MindTek. MindTek being a company... This is just CompuGlobal Hypervecacorp shit. MindTek being a company that creates data to train CCTV, AI-enabled CCTV cameras on.

Incutail is, of course, owned by the CIA. Again, that's just like they say it on their website. We are the CIA's investment fund. Nice, great. So this is, again, this can't be bad. If you want to know what states are investing in, they're investing in data to train AIs that surveillance of focused AIs

steal to make nuclear submarines. They're investing in... But what are they investing in versus what are they not? Alice, we were talking about this earlier today, right? Sort of this history, this decline in fall, this demarcating... The big gray ideology box, as you call it. Yeah.

Well, I think it's possible to make too much of this as like a symptom of decline of neoliberalism. I think it's... Certainly, we've seen that like... We're sort of in crisis mode because, you know, some contradictions have been heightened and now things are getting a bit difficult for capital sometimes, particularly if you want to do stuff

that seems important to you maintaining that economic system, whether that's like having steel to build things with or, you know, having CCTV cameras to watch people with or whatever. But I think it's possible to make the mistake of believing that this is sort of... A, some grand retreat from neoliberalism. B, done by people who really believe in neoliberalism.

Right? And that's a distinction I think it's important to draw. There's a couple of like ASI freak shows who look like haunted muppets who really do believe that, like, the free of the markets, the free of the people, right? But, like, for the most part, the ideology at work here is still basically just...

Me and my friends should get rich and everybody else is just kind of like gonna have to deal with that. Yeah, it's been much harder recently here at The Fund, you know. It's not been so straightforward. We've had to cut back on some of this stuff, you know. Gary, the plumber, is not calling me back about the apartments we own in Katting.

It's been trouble getting hold of him. He's going through a divorce. We've had to fire some of the Twinks who suck me off. Oh, no, not them. Not easy, you know. All suffering. Genuinely, though, I think it is a case of, like, kicking the can down the road. I think it's a way of, like,

keeping these things in-house for exactly as long as you need to to get them working and then doing the catch and release thing. And just kind of hoping that the problems go away on their own, which is very funny to me. I also do this. Probably some of these steel companies, you know, if the government touches them, then their mother won't take them back. You know, you think you're doing the right thing,

but actually, it's tricky. I think that's broadly right. But that's how neoliberalism came about in the first place. There are a few, like, real ideologues out there, Milton Friedman and Hayek, you know, these sort of people rattling around, who have a clear vision about what they want to get to. But for governments in the most part,

it's just a series of adjustments around some ideas of what they want to do next. Margaret Thatcher doesn't arrive as Prime Minister in 1979 and says, right, here we go, neoliberalism. It's not what the 79 manifesto says. It's just some small adjustments that start to take on something of a life their own. So it develops as a series of responses to crisis.

And what you've got at the minute is a whole load of people who may well sort of believe various versions of neoliberal horseshit about markets and, you know, private enterprise and whatever else. But they're having to work in circumstances where, as you said, Alice, it's a series of crises and a series of problems. So every kind of partial adjustment they make

leads them further and further out of the previous neoliberal system, which, as I said, I think since 2008, it didn't collapse all at once, but it's been in a bad way and it's been some form of retreat ever since then. One of the things, right, that... And I think this sort of brings together a few threads that we talk about quite a bit,

is that most of the growth and value since 2008, especially in markets, has been big mega cap tech companies that all lose money and don't really do anything. What they do is they make money. This is the first time hearing of this. They make... Oh, yeah, because you go into a fugue state once you... And when you think about what the next thing,

the twonkhole capital guy says... Oh, no, my investment's in smolt. Are they still going? But what... I think when you say, like, what neoliberalism creates is, as you say, Alice, my friends and I get rich. And for a long time, the paradigm of how to do that after 2008 was,

oh, all we need to do is inflate the value of these assets because money is going to be cheap and free forever. And that's what happens. Nothing bad ever happened. And so you get the scam economy out of that, right? That's how you get the scam economy. And the thing is, the scam economy works great

for capitalists until they actually need to do something, which is a crisis. And so a crisis has presented itself and our economy has to... Almost like truck factories retooling to build tanks. Our factories have to retool

to not be Potemkin fake scam ones anymore, but actually they have to do things. Which we're suddenly worried about our capacity. In the U.S., there's a massive panic about the capacity to not make, for example, PPE anymore, right? And I think what this does is,

it means that there is a strategic state that is, again, sort of solving problems in an ad hoc way. But because all of those problems are different symptoms of the same thing, which is, oh, shit,

we forgot that sometimes production has to actually happen. You can't all be just people giving each other pieces of paper and say stuff on it. They have to be connected to something. You can apply a great power lens to this. There's a lot of anxiety, for instance,

about China, as like China. Both from people who, like, falsely believe that it is not a capitalist economy, and also people who are afraid that it might be a capitalist economy that works better than ours. Because you can

make people make things rather than just pieces of paper saying... That's a big driver in the U.S., I think, very, very clearly, right? Successive governments. Donald Trump did this as we just mentioned. China was his big obsession.

Biden has arrived with exactly the same sort of focus on what we have to do with China, and there's a real panic. For the first time, really, 80 years, 100 years, the U.S. isn't necessarily the world's leading technology economy anymore in some key sectors. I mean, look at Huawei. Huawei produces 5G

better than anybody else on the planet. The Chinese government has subsidized it hugely for a long period of time. But nonetheless, it's Huawei that can do this. It's not some American company that can do this. So there's a panic, an attempt to kind of reorganize and get the state to sort of intervene in a way that

we haven't seen for the last 40 years of sort of various versions of neoliberalism where you're just not supposed to do this sort of thing. Yeah, I think this sort of accounts for neoliberalism as well as a historical phenomenon. But I think it's also worth talking about in its institutional dimension, right?

Because as we mentioned, right, there are the institutions of neoliberalism as we describe it are, as we mentioned, the WTO was like the granddaddy one, right? But also, for example, the Job Center and the DWP. That is also an institution of neoliberalism because it is

dealing with, say, like, one of the things that the state has to do is deal with labor market fluctuations, right? The Job Center is where they make the jobs. Exactly, you need jobs for the economy. Job coach, that's a job. Yeah, exactly. I mostly work in the Potemkin business.

There's a lot of money there, you'd be surprised. The state needs to do things in a certain way and that you might ask yourself sort of, as we sort of find ourselves transitioning into an era of different and crucially probably

worse, you need to ask where is it neoliberalism in retreat and where is it not? Because it's certainly not in retreat from the Job Center. It's not in retreat from the Job Center. It's also not in retreat from our moronic public procurement, such as the Mound,

which, again, is I think is a perfect sort of farce to the art of neoliberal public procurement, which is, of course, we must encourage people to come to this place so they can shop, so we're going to look at a bin.

We're going to private, we're going to have a bunch of like Dutchmen come and build a hill by a bin. What will the Americans think if London is the only global capital without a nonce hole? But if you

want to think about sort of the institutional transformations, unemployment, insurance in America becomes much more generous. It becomes, it sort of things reverse to something like that this force is dialed back for a little bit. Again, not permanently. But then in Britain, we

handle sort of the labor market dimension of like handling this actual crisis that required actually governing and doing things with, through employers, right? So institutionally, we handle it in a way that is much more, I think, friendly to that other paradigm, right? So it's not so simple as, well,

neoliberalism ended on, as soon as the COVID was declared a pandemic, rather it's like, it was confronting all of these other crises in different ways in different times. Again, each sort of stumbling forward in an ad hoc way. What always the question they're answering is how do we make

sure that everything stays functional just enough for me and my friends to keep getting rich? Yeah, and I mean, you can like think about this as an extended experiment in forms of, forms of capital that are going to successfully defend me and my friends getting rich,

like that natural part of the government. And you can see what the sort of the threats to capital are in which forms of it feel obliged to like triangulate to what, whether it's like you can have a bit of technocracy in your capital,

you can have a bit of like right wing nationalism in your capital, even occasionally triangulate to the left and be like, you can do social you can do social democracy with your capital. You want a caramel waffles in your capital you can have a caramel waffles. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, more or less.

I mean, I think then then it's like, you can almost sort of look, take that. Social democracy it's so gratifying to me that comparatively few of these experiments and like how are we going to like make capital work have like gone there because

to me, once capital starts getting like, oh well we can do social democracy. That's very much the you wouldn't hit me. I'm just a little birthday boy and I have glasses. That's right. What will the end of neoliberalism mean

for the bounty of the sea and the birthday boys who are reliant upon it for their reward. I'm just a little guy and it's my birthday and you can't be mad at me. This actually works in Russia. I've definitely told this to other podcasts before but there was a time when my friend was outside

a bar and we're all like drunk as shit and this guy was about to like fully punch him and I just went over and went, but it's my birthday and the guy went, it's your birthday happy birthday and he got so distracted by wishing me a happy birthday that he no longer punched my friend. So James

back to sort of read the article that you have coming out, right? You sort of, we chart this thing in history we look at it institutionally but also there are the institutions that are sort of non-public institutions like Amazon like Facebook or whatever. Facebook sort of making

if we recall right last year when they were testifying in front of a gigachat, Greg Stooby Oh yeah. Yeah, Mark's a big guy number one, Greg Stooby. Zuckerberg's main point was you need an American style social network

that's going to have American values that's not going to be controlled by China. It is, again, it's playing on that same paranoia because I think when the paranoid style of the state and the paranoid style of the industries that depend on the state because

all of the big mega-corp tech companies all of them exist to take from, as we said earlier, to sort of suck as much money out of the money printer as they possibly can as you were saying earlier Alice, it's like, yeah, you could have some right wing authoritarianism in your capital

you can have some technocracy and it's very clear that these companies are more than happy with the sort of tapering out of the specifics of the neoliberal period because they've already worked out how to do it. They worked it out a while ago. Yeah, they just need the line to go up.

I don't really mind about anything else. I think that's right. I mean, it's the other part of like neoliberalism ending it not necessarily being any better is that you have these, I mean, you mentioned Amazon Facebook, the sort of big tech companies that really have all grown up since 2008. They're products of the crisis and the crash is the period

where these things established themselves and become you know, movable features of the economy and they operate within the neoliberal framework. They grow inside this neoliberal framework but they push continually beyond the boundaries of that. They are continually searching for ways, Facebook is a good example

searching for ways in which they can expand the range of their data grabbing and data analysis operations way beyond what the law regulation said. There's no law something that says Facebook, these are the limits on what you can do. It's not like you're running a bank. A bank that's actually fairly tight laws and regulations that say

these are things you can do. These are things you can't do. That's the framework you operate in. You can lobby to try and get things changed but that's basically where you are. You can't regulate them. They're just going on the computer. That's fine. You don't have to regulate that. Exactly. So Facebook sort of sets its own boundaries even to the point of having this kind of what do they call it? The courts effectively

presented like the Supreme Court. They've set up to oversee sort of boundary cases and what you can and can't put on Facebook. So quasi-judicial function that's been established by the company itself. So this is moving beyond the sort of neoliberal paradigm at that point. It's acting in ways that neoliberal corporations aren't supposed

to do. You're not supposed to just make your own law. You're supposed to accept the law and accept that the government's created this nice level playing field for you. You're not supposed to break it subtly like banks do. Exactly. You also, I think the other great example, if we want to sort of talk about the different mega companies, how they sort of benefit from this, I think the opposite

example to Amazon, which now understands itself as basically an outgrowth of several U.S. government agencies, for example, it's trying to take over from NASA. It's trying to be the main sort of cloud computing supplier to the Ministry of Defense and so on and so on. The other example of how sort of the neoliberal paradigm says you do this is you get the government

to subsidize your wage bill, which is Walmart, right, where Walmart sort of knows that they can pay a minimum wage that's less than the living wage. They know that the costs can go up and it's fine. They know they can play a role in driving costs up because as long as they keep consumer products cheap, which they're happy to do because the labor is cheap, then the government is happy to very quietly subsidize

their wage bill with things like food stamps or with things like sort of things akin to what we would call universal credit here, wage toll fuss and so on. It happens here as well. Yeah. The other supermarkets pay a living wage to their basic rate stuff and I bet a huge proportion of them are on some kind of state income support.

Yeah, and so essentially what's happening is you are paying the... But that is the neoliberal way to do this, right? There are a complicated set of, you might say, technocratic pipes of money where it all sort of goes through the employer. The entrepreneurial state is nowhere to be seen. It is merely individual men and women. I mean, again, I'm talking purely about the ideology.

I'm sort of saying, look at the shadows in the cave wall. They're doing something different. But if only because I think one of the sort of defining features of this is less change, more continuity because the idea that sort of in the neoliberal era, sort of from Thatcher peeking at China and entering the WTO to its sort of decline in the crisis is this fantasy that the state is being a night watchman.

We know that was never true. We know that, for example, the state sort of actively, often violently, intervenes to allow sort of chosen patrons like G4S, for example, to accumulate by dispossession. Well, G4S, they're just so good at what they do. I mean, you can't... You need those guys. War, canary war, for example. But these things are often sort of quite brutal

and they are very, very state-driven. But the state is not itself entrepreneurial. It's responding to the need, what it thinks the needs of not just capital, but businesses are. Whereas in this case, what we have is simply by the fact that capital no longer wants the scam economy if only because it realizes the scam economy

is not going to be profitable for it in the near term, we have to go to a different way of organizing, organizing ourselves politically. Wow, that's a shame that we found out that we can't do the scam forever. It turns out eventually, like someone's like, hey, so you know this big pyramid that we're all in? What's at the bottom of it?

Yeah, well, yeah, eventually... Love the pyramid. No shade. Eventually you make so many MLMs that it just becomes, it goes from pyramid into a big mound. That's right. Well, what's on the bottom of the pyramid is more guys building the pyramid.

So long as you keep building the bottom of the pyramid, nothing bad could ever happen. Yeah, that's just infinite guys. And then you get more, once those guys are done, then you get more guys. It's like a Greek house, just you never stop renovating it, the bill never comes due.

Exactly. But I think right there, there is, and so I guess what I want to ask as well is like, you know, how the left, such as it is, sort of has been sort of desiring for the neoliberal era to end. And I feel like we sort of did that on a monkey's paw. Exactly.

Yeah, because you spent a long period of time. Look, the good thing about talking about neoliberalism, if you're on the left, is it gives people who want to overthrow capitalism something to talk to or talk about with people who just want to sort of reform things, make things a bit nicer. Everyone can line up and say,

we all disagree neoliberalism, this is a horrible way of running capitalism, so let's try and do something different. What we're getting in front of it is these versions of something different, but not necessarily any better. So there's a more fundamental question start to open up, which is, what do we do about capitalism as such,

that it can easily change, it's been around for 200 years, it's twisted and changed form over that period of time. There's lots of different ways of running capitalist societies and capitalist economies. And you don't have to just sit in the one that we've had for the last 40 years or so, and say, okay, that's it.

There's a more fundamental question that opens up, which is, what is capitalism doing, and what could we do about that, rather than just like, how do you change the governance of capitalism? Yeah, and I think that it is the question that we deal with. And also, I think it's important to sort of understand,

for example, how different, like legislative battles are sort of going against this kind of thing, right? There are some, and we'll talk about this actually in next week's free episode, there are, for example, like initiatives in California to end the practice of having warehouse workers work to like performance quotas, for example, right?

There is being fought legislatively, but I think the important thing is, for now, from an ideological shadows on the cave wall perspective, is it's time to stop talking about neoliberalism unless you're talking about history. I think that's where we're getting to, and we're going to get there quite rapidly.

And the problem you've got is, there's a version, particularly on the left of the history, where it's like neoliberalism is a sudden eruption, a sudden break, rather than something that appears gradually over a period of time, right? If you take Britain, there are a series of defeats for the left and the trade union movement,

most obviously the miners, but there's steel workers before that, and then ambulance drivers sometime afterwards, and print workers, it's somewhere in between. The left itself is defeated in the 1983 general election inside the Labour Party. All of these things happen, and there's a battle to create neoliberalism,

which really appears in its sort of finished form in the 2000s, under effectively, under new labour. It's a very, very neoliberal government, increased spending, this sort of public spending, but it's still very, very neoliberal government. And instead, we have a version of history, which is like, this arrived all at once, and it's like this was assembled piecemeal.

We'll get this process at the minute wrong as well. It's not like one day you wake up with neoliberalisms over in your authoritarian state capitalism. It's more like the thing is being assembled in front of us, so there's opportunities to change how it's being put together. Oh, it's loony tunes. We're just in the car, and we're putting the track down in front of the car

as quickly as we can. Yeah, and then Karl Marx said that eventually your arms get tired and you can't put the track down anymore, basically. And then also, there's a big fake tunnel that's been painted on the wall of the cliff. So, I mean, Allison, who's saying, how does that idea strike you, this idea that is...

That is, we're... We've sort of built as much as we can in this direction. We're sort of building in another, but behind the great and powerful laws, it's still capital. Yeah, I mean, I like broadly agree with that. I agree with basically everything that was said. Like one thing I've sort of been thinking about a little bit is like really kind of...

I didn't want to call it post ideology, partly because I can't do the Zizek impression of it, but also just because I'm not... I think that might be a bit of a reach, but it definitely feels as if... And for a long time, it's felt as if kind of conversations about this being either the end of neoliberalism

or like an extension of neoliberalism feels kind of misplaced. And it feels kind of misplaced on the basis that there doesn't actually seem to be like a real strong ideological... Like even within like conservative and right-wing like movements that I've been watching, there doesn't seem to be like any real commitment

to an ideological goal, what seems to just be the case. And I think you can also see this in this real kind of impulse and demand to kind of keep on trying to ignite culture wars. Is this real distraction from the fact that ideologically, the people who would have identified as neoliberals,

really genuinely think... Beyond like the ASI freaks, they've all kind of admitted that they failed. They haven't said it openly, but I think a lot of them have sort of accepted that it is a failure and that's why they're trying to like trade culture wars stuff. I think you're totally right.

I will go there and I'll say that it is post-ideology, because like... I do think of it as like... I did a thread a while back where I described like a Xi Jinping thought as like a grey cube of ideology that you like

slot into the big ideology void in your government. And it's like... That's not a unique to China thing by any means. In fact, it's kind of the opposite. There's nothing there.

And I think the cultural point is a very perceptive one. Is there's just like... You just have to like sort of triangulate. And while these people were always hypocrites and while they were always to some extent, you know, treating any sort of ideological thing as like largely disposable,

now it feels like it's just... And also there's just like... There's no point in buying into an ideology because you can just, you know, just do whatever, just import one. I think that you can even connect that back to sort of what we were talking about about sort of

something like GB News, right? Which is... It's sort of... Tune in after this. That's what we make in this... We don't even make in this country now a good culture warranty. It's all sort of crappy, dead on the cheap.

Sort of just just puking out lazy shit for the US. It's not even like there's a single direction here because look at the extent to which American transphobia has managed to just adopt wholesale

stuff from Britain. All of this stuff is just... The other big thing that I think about is the various heads of the Ukrainian governing party, servant of the people, which was... My friends.

Elected on the basis of a fictional TV show, which already says a lot, announced their dedication to Xi Jinping thought and to like studying China as an example of like the way forward.

And that to me is just the perfect example of we don't have an ideology. We better fucking get one. Where can we get one? Well, we'll just file off the serial numbers from this one that seems to serve us better than whatever America's doing right now because it occasionally allows

us to do stuff. Exactly. It's the question what do we make here now? Yeah, I don't know. Posts. Yeah, I was going to say we make the finest turfs. The turfs are distilled

on top of from the top of the giant mound. So you get the cleanest you get the cleanest turf brain when you... Yeah, that's right. You actually got stuff but you can't make your own transphobia anymore. We've given the mound bangs.

So I think this is... The mound is a women only space. I think this is probably a pretty good place to park this one. So I just want to say James, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us. Thank you.

And to all you out there on podcast land, thank you very much for listening and don't forget there is a second episode of the podcast available for five dollars a month. It's stored inside the mound. It's stored inside the mound. It's five dollars to get into the podcasting mound. Well, it's eight pounds to go up the mound.

Five dollars to listen to the podcast episode that's sitting in the mound. Grand Old Duke of York, he had 10,000 men he led them up to the top of the mound. It cost a lot of money. Yeah, it did. And they also saw the bins. It cost 800,000 pounds. So, anyway. The mound collapsed under the weight

of 10,000 men. It was 80,000 pounds. It wasn't built for that. Anyway, all of that being said, what are we doing as our bonus episode? We are going to be going up north. We're talking about Scotland in our bonus episode. Specifically going up north. The town of Cumbernull.

That was Newcastle. No, I know. Just because Riley said we're going up north. Yeah, you didn't let me finish where we were going. It's Scotland. We were talking about Cumbernull. I don't think I'm going to bit Billy Conley here for some reason. I'm stuck in a mound.

I'm never going to mention the name of the place ever again. Why have they built this mound for them? It doesn't make any sense. It's all looking at bins from up here. Credit this course. You're talking about it. Yeah, that is true. It started a conversation.

We make columns, posts, and mounds. Anyway, from one of the three of those three things, we will see you again in a couple of days in the bonus. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.