TRASHFUTURE - Towards a Political Theory of Smashing ft. Matt Christman

Episode Date: March 1, 2018

Matt Christman (@cushbomb) from Chapo Trap House joins Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Hussein (@HKesvani) to talk about how our culture has fallen apart into nothing but a morass of aspirational references loop-de-looping into one another (with an honourable mention of the Rick and Morty hell-sauce), and then go through how to be a Luddite in the 21st century. We also get into some podcast insider chat, as we learn what happens when you cross Chapo and Pod Save America. Follow us on twitter @trashfuturepod love you all xoxo Riley

I was editing the podcast yesterday and literally fell asleep on my computer. Wonderful. Normal. Labor. Nice. Unionized podcasters. In my honest opinion. What we need to do is... Riley is not letting himself unionize. Because he's boss CEO mindset. He needs to be flexible.

Exactly. We need to be able to innovate. But we had a live show and that was cool. Yeah, that was fine. Didn't get booed. We had more than 10 people show up. Only one of them was your cousin. That was good. That's the update. What about America?

Is everybody in America feeling safe? I'm in San Francisco so I feel pretty safe. It's not a very gunny place. Well, I mean, I get shot on a daily basis. But that's fine because it gives me an iron supplement to my vegan diet. That's the best way to counteract soy. It's a steady diet of lead from an AR-15 which does not stand for assault rifle. So all of those murdered people are actually fine.

It wasn't an assault rifle. Is this why here you now carry several tactical pistols all time with laser sights in order to fend off the libs? No, I just drive around in a giant gun. That also works. I think that's called a tank, isn't it? The way that it moves forward is that the barrels are pointed backwards. So when you fire it, it goes forward from the recoil.

What has our favourite manga artist been up to? We don't know much about Ben Garrison. He hid in the shadows. Apparently he was the director of a very famous anime called Neon Genesis Evangelion. But we're not sure. But he did a bit today. He did a bit this week. He did his cartoon and it shows a young guy holding a gun.

He's at a crossroads. Every time you approach a crossroads, he has two options to go with. On the left, it's a sign that says school with no armed officers. On the other side, it says school with armed officers. The caption is, if you were a school shooter, what school would you go to? Because as we all know, school shooters are incredibly rational people. And also, there was a armed officer at the school that just got shot up. But didn't you see what Trump said?

He was a coward. Yeah. Okay, he was a coward. Are you going to do a coward screening for all of these people you're arming to put into schools? I would love that. How are you supposed to know how these doughy, suburban, basically glorified mall cops are going to respond to somebody showing up with a gun? You have no way of knowing how they're going to fucking respond. I don't know what this armed...

I know there's apparently been pictures of this guy who was supposed to be the armed cop at the school. I don't know what he looks like. So in my head, all I'm seeing is like pulled blood on his scooter. Basically, because when it was discovered that he just stood outside while it was happening, he immediately retired. So he's an older gent. One of the things that I found remarkable about the Trump press conference this week was that he just very blatantly said about... When he was like this whole idea about arming teachers, he said something along the lines of like really talented teachers will be able to stop school shooters. Is this like the point of being a talented teacher?

Yeah, that would put a new slide on debt per se society, wouldn't it? This cop who was on the campus and didn't do anything, it needs more than training. You need to be willing to run in and shoot somebody, which means that there's two basic groups of people you're going to be able to arm to go into a school. There either going to be guys like this deputy who look like their actual deterrent, but it turns out not too keen on walking up to somebody with an assault rifle. Or you get people who are dying for that to happen, who are the ones most likely to shoot somebody for dropping their backpack or something like that. So those are your two options. You give it to sort of like easygoing, pudgy dads when you have no guarantee that they're going to be willing to throw down when the time comes. Or you give it to the most unstable, eager to kill maniacs you can find, which seems like it would cause its own set of problems to put it lightly. If you had a school guarded by those maniacs, it would quickly become the subject of one of those right wing, hard on articles like the most disciplined school in America.

See how well behaved these children are. And then one child like, I didn't do my French homework and I was kneecapped and it was just as it should be, like the good old days. Oh, good. Excellent. Well, I guess the gun crisis will never be solved. There is nothing we can do about it because of freedom, because people are just, because you can't limit freedom in any way. And if there was a law against it, then someone would find a way to break it. So let's just surrender to fucking chance. A bald eagle shedding a single tear as a child with his last breath says, I've never felt so free. Oh, anyway, shall we get into some of the patented content?

I'm not allowed to look at the content even boys and girls. How do we feel about that? Should we introduce the show first? Yeah, that was that was my plan. Miley, we've done this for the dozens of episodes and we never get this right. We've literally never gotten it right. And maybe this will maybe next time will be the time maybe on our one year anniversary. You can finally do the introduction properly.

It's a bit like the school shootings, really. If only there was some way to prevent this. No, I don't see one. I'm too free. I mean, the only solution would be for all of us to be armed, right? So you can shoot me every time I love the intro. Create a sense of tension. It'll come out in the audio quality. Pressure makes diamonds.

Welcome finally. No, that sounds like a Jay jetty to eat. Okay, welcome to trash future. The podcast for how the future is trash or will continue to be trash. If we don't adopt fully automated luxury gay space communism. My name is Riley. You can find me on Twitter at Rala. My name is Hussain.

You can follow me at H. Jump the gun to and are to two denizens of the ball today in the great, the great liberal states of America. Yeah, the America. I think you'll find the the libs. So the less interesting of the two me on every episode of this podcast, Milo Edwards, you can follow me on Twitter at Milo underscore Edwards. I have a hangover.

Okay, I'm Matt Christman. Hello, everyone. I've just never introduced myself when I've guested on a podcast. Okay, well thrown. Would you rather we intrude you? No, we're fine. I just I didn't know that's how they did it across the pond. But I'm Matt Christman from the podcast.

Is this a violation of your right? That house. That's me. Wonderful. Yeah, that's this is we have a number of traditions across the pond. Many of them are to do with us extracting free labor from our podcast guests. You know, because we don't let them unionize. We can just make them introduce themselves. Yeah.

Oh, good. Excellent. Okay, so product time. Yes. I have I have here in front of me a product that I will ask you guys what you think this is. Matt, I've actually picked this one especially for you. I think this will I wonder it may make you it may make you angry if it does.

I'm sorry in advance. All right. I'm bracing myself. All right. I'm girding my loins. It is Crocs. Oh, it's the shoes. Crocs.

Ordinarily, we reserve this for really, really stupid products and Crocs normal are very comfortable and good footwear. So good. My first instinct is Wi-Fi enabled. Well, hang on. So is the name what is the name of this thing actually Crocs, but it's just an unrelated product? Is that what I'm supposed to understand?

Okay, it is the full name is leather Crocs and condom socks. That's a tile of one of my Facebook albums. Wow. You've actually really stumped me on this one. Yep. Yeah, I thought so. Does it have anything to do with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth? No, this is of the two things that we deal with, sort of the technological and the sort

of pointlessly fancy. This is one of the latter. Okay. So it's a pointlessly fancy croc. Okay. So it's a croc that also acts as a condom for when you're having sex with a woman who is blind. Unfortunately, none of that is quite right.

And just because of the nature of this thing, I'm going to dive right in more to the actual description. The premium leather Crocs featuring hender schemes, famed leather craftsmanship and Goodyear welt technique are the major key piece from this year's collection. Perfect for when you have your kid's soccer game at 3 p.m., but a meeting at 4 p.m. Wait, are they perfect for the boardroom and the yard? Yeah, not to mention the discoteca. I would wear crocs to the discoteca.

No, Matt, I picked this because I know you're a croc aficionado. The reason I sort of picked this is that this is essentially a version, like how much is a normal croc? One of them, that would be odd. I've never priced single ones. No, a pair of them, I think I've bought... It depends if we're talking saltwater or freshwater. I bought my pair for, I think, something like $20.

Okay, relatively reasonable. Nice round number. Reasonable. Yeah, but what do we think like a premium leather croc that is perfect for taking your kid to the soccer game and then going to a meeting throughout the course of an afternoon, possibly a discoteca later? Maybe $50. I mean, I really value that kind of convenience and luxury, so I'm going to say $5,000.

I'm going to say $500. I reckon this is for the everyman, this shoe. This isn't for the elites. Yeah, this is affordable style. Well, this is the thing. This has proven very hard to find, but I've taken an average of all of Hender Scheme's other shoes. It's this Japanese company.

It looks as though this pair of crocs is probably going to, on average, run you between 8 and 900 pounds, which in a... Oof, my own. Yeah, seems like a deal to me. See, we don't have a Patreon, so we... No, we only have CryptoKissies, and we're not actually sure how much those CryptoKissies are worth. Well, I checked.

It was anywhere between $10 and $10,000, but... Oh, you know, even one of them, as Jay Chassey was saying. And anywhere between a one square inch of a Hender Scheme leather croc and several pairs of Hender Scheme leather crocs. The reason that this struck me so much is I think it proves one of the... Also, got condom socks. That knows never really, never made clear. Maybe bright-colored socks that come in condom style wrappers, which I guess that's part

of what you get for $2,000. The only condom a croc user will ever need. But what makes this jump out to me is... It does almost prove in any kind of real sense, but I think it lends something to, I think, one of our show's main contentions, which is that a state of extreme inequality produces less and less rational products as the marginal value of every dollar goes down for a smaller and smaller number of people with a stupid amount of buying power. And you'll end up with several months' rent for a pair of what can only be described as

ironic shoes. Speak for yourself, mate. I'm going to go buy myself a pair. I can't believe that they're actually recommending that you wear them with socks. That's what I find most upsetting about this. That's how I wear them. But the thing is, is that I did not get the croc because I had any preference for them as a shoe. I had bought a pair of loafers and while I was wearing them, I realized very quickly that

they were creating a very drastically enlarged blister in the back of my foot that exploded all over the place. And I put a band-aid on it and I tried to let it heal, but they were the shoes I was wearing and I couldn't basically wear the shoes without this thing rubbing against this very, very sore, open wound. So, I needed a shoe that would allow my heel to be not rubbed against. And I have a personal oath that I will never wear sandals of any kind. So, the only thing that kind of fit the bill of leaving the heel exposed without technically

being sandals were crocs. So, I only got them medicinally. They had a medical purpose to them. And I will admit they're comfortable, but I don't wear them that much now. Now that I'm healed up. Yeah, now that you're... This is actually the trash-eucher infomercial. This is how we monetize the podcast.

Infowars has their pills, but we advertise crocs. What really strikes me as hilarious is that it appears as though for a massive premium, you can get rid of the element of your shoe that will not have you get blisters. Because I can't see a universe in which someone paying for this wouldn't get blisters. But I guess I think the thing I'm trying to drive to with this, I suppose, is this... There is just this very, very strange fetish. And you see it quite a bit in everything from food culture to now fucking multi-thousand-dollar crocs. Is this weird fetishization of stuff that is supposed to be cheap and sort of turned into a luxe product?

Yeah, absolutely. Because nobody's making any new ideas, nobody can do a new thing. So all you can do is sort of slowly march down the cultural ladder and exoticize and make luxury every element of it going all the way down. Because we've run out of ideas. We're just kind of waiting around to die. And so, yeah, if having a viable retail model is entirely predicated on taking money from people who basically have forgotten what money means because they have so much of it. Yeah, you just make everything leather or Wi-Fi enabled, or you throw some... If it's food, you deconstruct it and throw some truffle oil in there.

Or you make it just hazardous for human consumption like raw water. So the marketplace of ideas is actually a failure. Shocking, I know. I know. So all the YouTube videos that I've been watching, they were lying to me. Imagine my shock. I don't know if you guys saw this either, but McDonald's today announced that they're now bringing back Szechuan sauce in every outlet in unlimited quantities. And they're releasing a podcast series about the initial Szechuan sauce debacle. Finally, a triumph for the smartest people on earth.

So this is the Szechuan sauce that came as the result of very smart, intelligent show Rick and Morty, right? Yeah, The Genius Show. The Genius Show. And it caused lots of mid-late 20s people to riot outside of McDonald's because they wanted that sauce. Without going for too much podcast intertextuality, Matt, I'm aware that this phenomenon has in the past given you one of your many aneurysms. Yeah, it's pretty discereting the whole deal about the Szechuan sauce. And now them turning it into a chance to be a meat. I mean, everyone makes fun of brands trying to be cool on Twitter by using slang and talking about how their nuggets are fleek or whatever.

But they really does seem like you're crossing a very terrifying Rubicon to have a fucking podcast. Like that is the machine taking human form. That's like Skynet becoming self-aware, where it's just we're not just going to use slang that the kids like to try to sound relatable. We're going to actually have some of our people be like, hey, you know, check out our SoundCloud link. We don't know if we'll do another one, but it was fun to record this one, everybody. So this week, McDonald's launched a podcast, Logan Paul launched a podcast. We've got some competition boys. We've got some competition, but there was an interesting point on a very serious note because I don't know if you know what's happening over in the UK.

But the big news of, I guess, this week was that a load of KFCs closed down. Yes, I heard about that. So KFC are kind of saying that now everything's fine. But they took out an advertisement in some of the country's big newspapers basically saying, you know, we're sorry, it's never going to happen again. Everyone was sort of praising this really smart sleek campaign by KFC to basically capitalize off a fucking outsourcing failure. It was reported a couple of years ago when this outsourcing company was contracted like KFC because of the job losses that came from the outsourcing proportion of it. But one of the bits of the very scary subtext was that KFC was really able to capitalize off this really major fucking corporate failure. And what it ultimately showed was that places like KFC have reached a point where people have literally said online that I cannot live without you.

That's kind of the message that kind of came across from this and the marketing people at KFC were really able to kind of nail that down. And I think that sort of feeds into, you know, what, you know, we had just been talking about McDonald's and the idea of like the Szechuan sauce and building cultures around like this dedication to these like really ghoulish corporate brands. Yeah, like Neville, Neville cheeseboro set himself on fire in front of his local KFC when he couldn't get his zinger meal. Sorry folks, we're a cute sad company whom going through a lot right now. Give us give us patience, please. Even you can see like millennials just like us. Yeah, no, that's the thing is KFC is a millennial company. It still lives with Colonel Sanders, but you saw that even then they released an ad that just said FCK on the bucket.

They almost swore, but they didn't even notice. Yeah, they say they'll do better next time like someone who like, you know, does like a an acrostic an acrostic tweet that spells out a slur like sorry. But it's just like it's sort of remarkable that like no one in the kind of mainstream conversation was really talking about like is how like this was the result like an outsourcing company, right? And no one knows the story. I didn't know this story. No one really knows the story of like why the hell this like outsourcing company really fucked up, right? Like, was it a distribution problem? Was it like, you know, I have a feeling there's actually do if like, you know, employee like employee strikes, but no one knows this story.

And this is like coming a few weeks after the whole like carillion thing where everyone was talking about outsourcing and how like fucked up outsourcing is. So the way that like we treat, you know, government and infrastructure projects. We're not necessarily applying that to like these companies and these organizations who not only like are used every day but actually have like a lot of, you know, arguably a lot more cultural power than, you know, carillion based companies, right? Like, and that's how like these PR people and all these advertisers can really, you know, capitalize off this conversation. And they kind of say, you know, distract away from like the failures of like this sort of like shitty, you know, late capitalist bullshit. Like, every time this this happens, I always go back to a door. I think I think more and more of just fucking a keyboard, right? You like your French Marxist.

Well, yeah, everything everything is just an advertisement for its own existence. Yeah, all these things just all these all these currents of media that we kind of think of as differentiated are really just one sort of one long held note of sort of self reference and self justification. Welcome to my Twitter account. I think then that that leads us, I think, to this. We accidentally did are doing like a whole our whole first segment on like delicious treats. But the I don't know if you guys have seen this, but if I know you guys have seen this because we talked about it. There is a movie that is going to be made about flaming hot Cheetos like a hero a hero film about the creation of flaming hot Cheetos. You know, if we're entering like a new cinematic universe where we basically lionized CEOs, then at some point we're going to wait for like a free part Elon Musk bio pic, right?

I'm surprised they haven't. Have they made that? I mean, well, no, actually, this is the cinematic universe we're going towards, which is again going going back to my some of my favorite European Marxist is there's going to be one movie every year. It's going to be like seven days long and it's going to have all your favorite characters in it. It's going to have Captain America going to have Homer Simpson. It's going to have fucking Subway Jared because that's now a cute reference. It's going to have it's going to it's good. There's going to be a version of the of the Avengers where like Hank Hill is involved because all of these companies is going to have big fancy shirts. There's going to be a human centipede of every actor who's played Colonel Sanders in the commercial.

But one of them is a woman. So it's good. Be respectful. She's the last person in the centipede. She is the ur kernel. Does that mean she goes at the front of the centipede or at the back? I guess that's a good question. Yeah, she'd want to be at the front.

You always want to be at the front of the centipede. That is the best gig. And you know, that's why I'm not a big fan of unions because that usually ends up just being seniority. It's not who's the best person in the centipede. It's who's been in the centipede the longest. That's not fair. It reduces my incentive to be a productive when I can't work my way to the front of the centipede. I cannot wait until the point where we can write think pieces about why people of color should be at the front of the human centipede.

I cannot wait for this part of this course. In many ways, the worst thing about the human centipede was the first in first out rule. Well, no, our human centipede is going to be dynamic and innovative, so a union's not right for it. Basically, the flaming hot Cheetos film is... Elon Musk is going to make a human centipede that will go into space, won't he? Yeah, but everyone's going to be wearing shirts that say, like, the cake is a lie or 42 or, you know, like... It'll be cute and edgy. Yeah, it's going to be... No, everyone's going to be like having cat makeup on.

Elon Musk is going to make a human centipede where everyone has to wear cat makeup. That's how that's going to go. But this thing is a story about how Richard Montanez, the guy who invented this thing, was the son of an immigrant who grew up as a migrant farm worker in the great fields of Southern California, got a job as a janitor at the Frito Lay plant in a town called Rancho Cucamonga in 76 after dropping out of high school, and then one day watched a video from the Frito Lay president that asked Montanez and his fellow employees to, quote, act like an owner. It's almost like you can see, just even from this little couple sentences, exactly what this film is going to be.

It's going to be, A, an advertisement for flaming hot Cheetos and the system that continues to produce them. But it also is going to be lionizing a useful immigrant, someone we shouldn't kick out because he came in and gave us a new way to clog our arteries. What I want to know is who's going to play the flaming hot Cheeto? There's one guy I have in mind, but he's busy being the president right now. Whoa, Trevor Noah. It's going to be played by a human centipede of like Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling and Paul Ryan. No, I told you it's Subway Jarrod. Oscar winning Subway Jarrod.

Well, this is basically Oscar winning. It's eight mile for CEO mindset gamers, isn't it? It's like his palms, his palms are greasy, knees weak, mouse is heavy. There's Cheetos on his sweater already starring Jay Shetty. What really catches me about this is the speech where the owner of Frito Lay says act like an owner. Act like an owner. You're not going to get paid like an owner, but please do go ahead and act like one. I mean, this is what's happening like Jay Shetty.

Oh, I'm sorry. That's a typo. It says act like a boner. This is like something that comes out of Jay Shetty's videos, right? Which is like if you act like a CEO, then you will become a CEO, right? Like what the fuck do you owners do? He just he coded some Cheetos with chili powder one day. Disrupting Cheetos. Yeah, I sort of spoke with the president and company's secretary and then said, you know, I had two weeks to repair a presentation for the company's executives.

I made a trip to the library. One slide presentation. I wrote a book on business strategies, bought his first ever tie, and then, you know, boldly went to go in and sell the idea to the company's executives. Wait, so this guy was able to get a copy of Gorilla Mindset. If something comparative happened to now, it would be done by a zero hours worker who wouldn't have actually any rights of ownership anyway. He didn't, is the thing.

Yeah, but the thing is, is that he doesn't get any extra money for making the Cheetos, but when they do the the merchandising from the movie, he gets a percentage of his own plush figures and Funko Pop. I was hoping this was going to be one of those like dark rags to riches back to rags, biopics, you know, like where he like gets rich, but then he goes like mad with power. And, you know, his wife leaves him and he gets addicted to like opiate painkillers, and then he gambles away all his money on Greyhounds. And then one day he's just in like a 7-eleven and there's like a gamer buying a pack of

flaming hot Cheetos and he's like, you know, I actually invented those and they're like, shut up, old man, cut to black. Well, what they did is, is he is an executive now of the company he once worked as a janitor for and spearheads the marketing team. And he says he believes his courage to seize opportunities stems from his humble beginnings. He said, he said, quote, I quote here, the antidote to fear is hunger. When you have hunger for a job position, knowledge or a new house, you go and get it and fear will never get ahold of you.

Jesus Christ. It's not true when I'm scared of things being hungry wouldn't help at all. Well, if someone's like, oh, yeah, do this bungee jump. The last thing I want to be is like also starving hungry. We're like, no, I'm not doing either of these things. Bring me a burger. But it's like, it's like, how loaded with ideology is that? But if it was true, the antidote to fear was really hungry.

It really hungry even like actually like all of London's homeless people should be like, you know, brain billionaire CEOs, right? Well, no, but what we have to do is all of all of the homeless people who are very hungry, give them guns and put them in schools. I mean, you laugh, but you make you joke about that. They probably will happen. It's the right. It is just this idea that the only thing standing between like, you know,

you and material success is that we come across this all the time is you don't want it enough. You just have to want it and want it and want it and want it so bad. The desire for it just consumes you. And before you know it, you're renting a fucking book on entrepreneur, entrepreneur brain and putting chili dust on Cheetos. And so, you know, don't have to starve to death. That's essentially it's that's congratulations. You put chili dust on Cheetos. Now you don't have to starve to death.

Also, you were a good immigrant. But also like the funny thing about this is that like this type of food is very common in like parts of South Asia, whether are lots of poor people because like the way that you kind of keep, you know, so one of the things that, you know, in Gujarat, which is where my family comes from, you know, the poor people that are over there, like the way that they make food to basically sustain themselves for a day is through like, you know, this type of this thing called Chevrolet, which is like, you know, small kind of bits of like fried potato, which they sprinkle with like chili powder, right? And they mix it up.

And the reason why they put chili powder on it is that the chili is supposed like to press the hunger, right? So then you work for longer and you can like sustain yourself using that. It's not a food that you enjoy. It's not a food that like, you know, it's a food that you need to survive because you're so fucking poor that you can't do anything else, or you can't eat anything else. And like your only good meal like is reserved for the night, right? So the fact, you know, so it's sort of like, I was thinking about this and just like, it's just sort of bizarre how, you know, what is effectively like a really similar meal like occupies very different cultural spaces in different countries.

I think I will go see the film, but I only go see the film of Jared Leto is Vecchito. I'll probably see wait for the wait to see that one at home. I'll probably stream that one. Probably not going to go to the theater. Yeah. Downloading it illegally is the moral thing to do. You wouldn't download a car. So why would you download Vecchito film?

Oh, wow. Yeah. So that's that. I guess that that's the that's the up. That's that's the the update in. Oh, that's the cops. That's the cops. The cops coming for bad.

The podcast coming to arrest you for defaming a brand. One second. I just need to I just need to email my actual bus, but please continue. Okay. Well, why don't we take this opportunity to take a quick break and then come back in a second to discuss ways in which, you know, maybe people accidentally people have done praxis in the past and resisted, you know, being sucked under into them into the world of flaming hot cheetos and, you know, brand banter and extremely expensive poor people

wearing team shoes. In terms of podcast natural enemies, it's you guys in pod save America, right? Yeah, we're we're sort of fighting for the soul of the non shod American electorate essentially. It's it's three people that you're contesting basically. Well, it's like is what there's like there's like seven never Trump Republicans in northern Virginia. And then, you know, the but then sort of like the sort of pickled Chardonnay moms. And then who really is who really is up for grabs between you guys?

I think it's I think it's most people who are just genuinely alienated and horrified by the government. And then they either say then they're they want to fight against it. And they're sort of two groups of people. One of them is saying, Well, the problem is this bad political party. And meanwhile, there's these good guys called the Democrats who if we support them and their efforts to, you know, prosecute Russian intervention and and make get bipartisan solutions for health care, we're going to make everything good again, because basically Obama was great.

And we should just get back to that. And then us saying the Democratic Party is as much responsible for the current hell world as the Republicans. And we have to radically expand the idea of what's possible if we're going to make anything long viable in the long term that isn't just a continued descent into degradation at every level. So yeah, so we're we're any it starts from the people who sort of feel like they want to do something to change.

And then those are sort of the two relatively, I guess at this point, mainstream audio companions to your worldview on how to fix it. Yeah, I mean, the Democrats are increasingly like the Avengers, right? Like cobbling together an increasingly farcical combination of everyone you've ever heard of and now interestingly Oprah Winfrey to sort of combat this like weird cartoon evil. And all of the worst malefactors of the Bush years, also part of that motley crew like Bill Crystal and David from and people with literal blood all over their hands. David from.

Yeah, I made out with his daughter once. No, you didn't. Yes, I literally did. You have to tell the story. You have to tell it. It's well, it's unfortunately there's there's there's not much to it because that makes you like that makes you that makes you that makes you that makes you like a front. You're a collaborator.

If I kiss the daughter of a front, does that make me a front? Yes, it like 100% does. Unfortunately, that's why me and his owner on our life sister to style, you know, sex strike is to avoid collaborating with the Chuds. Unfortunately, there's not really much to much to say like she was around my university and then, you know, we sort of we met it up at a party and sort of ended up, ended up sharing a sharing a wee snog as they say in Britain as we say. I don't know what to say about Britain.

They are we did she like slowly whisper into your ear. You rock was good. No, she it was it was it was a really bizarre experience. She's since she's since at some point then moved to Israel for according to the Facebook update reasons connected to Zionism. David from store to please please call Riley. It's been a long time. We just want to know if you're okay son in law God.

But so, Matt, there was one one thing you were telling us about how when the when there was the lion lay down with the lamb and Felix Peterman went on an episode of Pod Save America. Well, it wasn't Pod Save America. It's a spin off podcast that John Lovett has called love it or leave it, which is apparently like a panel game show for him and his half with Hollywood friends to kind of do wait, don't tell me jokes. And we were at a pod festival podcast festival in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and they were doing it too.

And they've been sort of him and Felix been sort of cordial on Twitter. So he invited him to come on. And like most podcasts that show is generally about an hour long. But Felix's episode if you find it is about 45 minutes because they cut out almost everything he said. They pulled they pulled like the rock bottom interview with Homer Simpson on him. I mean, it's a very like Democrat. But just apparently I was I really wish I'd been there because apparently he made people

very uncomfortable. There's one point where he just flatly said Iran should have a nuke and the entire crowd gasp in unison. That didn't make it into the show. You know, the weird thing is that right? The last person I I know sort of as a foreign policy thinker who is a strong advocate for Iran getting a nuke is Kenneth Waltz, one of the most sort of conservative reactionary like, you know, neocon dumb ass motherfuckers who wrote this like theory of international

thoughts theory of international politics in 1979, which was just this for those of our readers who haven't been studied international relations. The dumbest non science is just it's basically a text on how nothing matters. There is no such thing as ideology. The only thing that creates international political systems is kind of the fact of anarchy and then the balance of power between countries. Nothing else matters at all. I don't think Iran is any less rational than any of the countries that do have nukes.

No, it's not. It would be very rational for Iran to get a nuke. Yeah, it's just we should just smuggle them one. Yeah. So this is to our listeners. Stop sending us crypto kitties and start sending us nukes via Iran. No, it's it's crowdfunding the Iranian nuclear program. I'm saying right is that trash future is to Stani praxis.

I'm going to plug my computer in. Okay, so now I get to lead the show. Great. What do I do? Okay, okay, we are back. That's a I just I just I just I love the idea of Felix advocating a nuclear armed Iran to like a group of people who've come to see near attended make like half of a joke and then it's like 20 minutes of soaring oratory about how America is better than Trump despite the

fact that America elected Trump. So one of the one of the reasons that we sort of Matt's here with us today is largely because he acts him. He knows that. Yes. That a reference from Hagelbaughn and also the fact that that he actually knows about stuff that's happened in the past, which which I don't know if you guys have read read some freaking Orwell, but he who controls the past controls the future.

And that's from Orwell, the inventor of freedom. I mean, I've browsed the Wikipedia pages. Yeah, that's the that's enough for me. I mean, look, that's how you get a first at the University of York. So I what this look this is one of my favorite one of my sort of favorite historical movements that I'm broadly aware of. But there is this basically I just I am very much in love with the idea of the Luddites. And I was I was hoping I could hear a little more about the Wikipedia pages of these people.

Yeah. Well, hold on. Let me pull it up here is that the Luddites were a group of English textile workers and weavers in the 19th century who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. That's from the first line of. Wait a minute. Apparently, I'm sorry. I was wrong.

Luddite is an EP by Grotius released in 1992 by Spirit Music Industries. Shit. No, Luddites were were were stockers, people who were who were field weavers who were being displaced by machinery that was allowing for the mass production of textiles and fearing for the end of their livelihoods. They took to this is roughly during the Napoleonic era in England in the like the teens by 18 teens would wreck machinery. They would they would they would just they would get together.

They would get riled up. Sometimes they would attack factories. They would attack machinery. Occasionally, they killed a couple of mill owners with bushwhacking them. They were named after a fictional guy that there is no NEDLA. That wasn't a real guy. He was just sort of he was sort of he was like the Guy Fox mask that they wore and it was yeah, it was sort of the first.

It was before the lay but it was it was a proto basically labor movement in the sense that it was the first sort of time that that workers in the UK, which is obviously where the Industrial Revolution was born, started to organize, even though it was haphazard and largely sort of around mob mob actions, organized against what they saw as as economic changes that were going to undermine their livelihood. It's it in the because obviously it didn't work because, you know, we not only have not only do we still have weaving machines, but we also still we also now have, you know, labor for weaving machines.

Weaving machine has Wi-Fi and it will tell you that in order to qualify for your company health insurance, you have to do 5000 steps that day. That reminds me of we once reviewed a product that was a scale that has no numbers and instead uses something called psychology. But you can get an enterprise plan where it tells your boss how much you weigh in numbers. Psychology, your boss gets the numbers as the this is so the reason I get the reason I kind of wanted to sort of get into it through this topic and sort of find myself asking all the time, right?

Like if we were to if we were to try to be Luddites today, you know, what what would we smash? You smash your bloody smartphones because they're called that even though they make you profound. That was that that sounded like such a lip tape of more like a dumb phone. Am I right? Put it down and talk to each other, kids. Get off of that Instagram.

Well, it's never show yourself coward. They were they sort of saw that things weren't going weren't really going to plan for them. The first organized labor movement is it did some destruction of capital stock. But like ultimately, like they say, just it didn't it didn't work. You know, we still got the capitalism sort of persevered. Yeah. And there was that was inevitable. And the thing is, is that it really does show that there is a there is a conflict sort of

between. Well, their technological advancement is sort of necessary for capitalism, not only to be developed, but also to be superseded. Like that was Marx's whole point was that capitalism needed to develop to a level whereby labor could be the need for labor could be reduced to the point that there could be equitable distribution of resources without hyper exploitation of workers. And that means you need technology. You need these machines to exist.

But well, since they're being created under capitalism, they also can cause disemployment, not necessarily, but they can. And even if they don't in aggregate, they absolutely do in specific industries. Like, for example, with these stockiners, you know, traditional classical economists would say, Oh, you fools, you're smashing these stocking machines, but don't you realize that by increasing this technological thing that that creates lowered cost of production, which increases with lower prices, increases supply and keeps the economy stronger and increases jobs in the long run.

But that doesn't do anything for a specific person whose specific job is making a stocking that he no longer has. And he has no training in anything else. And that and in the Marxist formula, that tension is supposed to eventually lead to the workers just saying, Well, you know, you are unnecessary since we have the technology and you're literally parasites, we're going to take you. We're in it. We're going to just take it from you.

And what we're seeing now with capitalism and technological capitalism reaching this really advanced stage and with automation really being a potentially massively disrupting trend in the very near future is that at the other side of that is, yes, it creates just it creates alienation and anger among people who are being displaced. But it also reduces the number of people you need to keep a comp economy functioning, which kind of reduces the individual leverage that workers have, because they're less able to withdraw their labor and thereby make capitalism fall apart. I think the exception to that.

And you saw it. We're talking about the KFC thing is in is in logistics. Logistics is still powered by people and we have such an attenuated supply chains now try to keep things smooth and efficient and reduce waste and spillage and things is that you don't have big warehouses full of stuff that can easily be brought to retailers or wherever. It's all spent at the last minute in order to fill specific requests, which means that if, as you saw with the KFC people, if you cut that supply off, it causes an instant crisis. We had a thing like that similar this few months ago here in the U.S.

with Whole Foods, which is a fancy bougie organic chain of grocery stores. They got like eight dollars for pineapple. Right. Well, they changed their procurement process to reduce waste and it led to massive shortages and just empty shelves, just like Venezuela style, just nothing. And that was just because did they make that delivery system? Yeah. And so that's really where there is that's where you could actually do.

If you're going to smash something, that's where you would do it. If you were going to let it up in the 21st century, it would be the gears to put something into would be in the logistics thing because that's where you could have millions of dollars being lost instantly, where you could have massive disruption in a way that would be very difficult for companies to adapt to. Their best life was not lived as a kind of empowered consumer with cheaper stockings, but rather as something close to an empowered worker who's able to eat. Because if you can't eat, it doesn't matter how good the logistics are for KFC, you can't afford any. Wrong.

If you don't eat, then your ambition increases. But I almost wonder, right? In the sort of 17th to 18th centuries, like capital stocks, they were stuff. But even now, there are things that don't seem to have logistics, right? Like companies that just sort of seem to exist to kind of just own stuff, whether that's IP, like software IP. Overlips. Yeah, or CPAC owning the libs, or even like, I saw recently that there was a hedge fund that had started

that trades only in cryptocurrency, and it's all entirely automated. It has no employees. It's just a computer program. And all of its clients are other computerized hedge funds with no employees. It is machines working together to cook the planet. Well, that is the end result of capitalism, and that's where humans are. Because the whole idea is that you create a system that doesn't really need human intelligence to govern itself. And through technology, that's possible more and more.

And then there'll literally be nobody, people can talk about guillotines, but there'll be nobody that kind of head off because it's just algorithms. Yeah, it's this thing where it's like, we have to take our lesson from the Luddites before it's too late. Yeah. It's smashing. Luddites is used as like a slur, isn't it? Yeah, it's used to insult people now. Yeah.

That's where we are in the discourse. Yeah, you're resisting having your weight monitored by your boss. You're resisting this cute, fun, new cinematic universe where King of the Hill gets fucking, where his ass gets beaten off by Thor's hammer. And you're resisting this wonderful new world that will open up to high-frequency trading robots, trading with other high-frequency trading robots in a way that will just extinguish all life on Earth. You're such a fucking Luddite. Why do you hate progress?

Yeah, why are you so backward in thinking that having a secure job is a good thing when, in fact, the future is being flexible and working to live through during the day and over at night? These people in the 17th, 18th centuries, this group of Luddites were unable to be infiltrated because they all knew each other from the factory floor. But now, if you're going to get a group of people together to go and disrupt KFC's supply chain, the question I never can quite answer is how do you get people together to trust one another who've never met because they're all doing fiverr work? Yeah, just doing fiverr work.

I don't know. That's the question I've been asking. That's the media-central crisis and the central, irresolvable at this point, dilemma for organizing in the 21st century. I wish I hadn't answered. I don't. Blockchain maybe gets the way because you have to have an authenticated transaction to be in the blockchain. You know what? You joke about this, but actually, I spoke to someone who was very serious about this the other day. She works in tech PR and she was kind of just saying, but everyone kind of thinks that blockchain is just used for cryptocurrency CEOs and stuff.

But actually, there's so many purposes. I was like, okay, tell me what these purposes are. And she paused for a very long time. I was like, well, and then she came once with the whole thing of, well, people are always very concerned about workers' rights when it comes to freelancing and gig economy stuff. But on the blockchain, because you can't get rid of anything and because it's all kind of sequential, it will be useful for workers' organizations. So in the long term, the blockchain is going to be this revolutionary force.

And like Cedavus, with complete lack of complete unawareness of naivety. If you can't get rid of anything from the blockchain, but in theory, it should be accessible to everyone. And when you have something like that, the people with the most power and resources will automatically have more power than the people not. So it's actually like an even worse way to organize workers. I think that sort of goes back to something Matt was saying earlier, right? Where you've got this thing. They're sort of neutral in themselves.

If you need them, you need that technological development. But at the same time, it's how they're used. And so this is the perfect example of this is that company that wants to be Uber for buses, Skedaddle, trying to end tipping so you can rate every interaction you have with another human on a blockchain. And based on your rating of that interaction, they get an amount of money. That's an enormously unequalizing and not to mention ridiculously stupid, cruel way to organize society. You could either have the Uber for buses where every interaction is rated. And if you're not sort of polite to the guy who's Maserati you're parking,

then you can't afford your meal of flaming hot Cheetos and your movie of flaming hot Cheetos. But if this could be used by anything from insurrectionists to unions, so that they can know everything about one another, they can trust one another, and they can organize without being infiltrated. Yeah, and the thing to remember is it's not like earlier organizers weren't infiltrated, even by people that they knew. Like there was a few years after the Luddite uprising and riots began, there was an attempted sort of working class who attempt in England that got awarded by a spy.

So there's still a chance that you can get owned even when you know people because as plenty of rappers will say, you never really know anyone. So we've been recording for like a life age of the earth and we all have things to do. We don't actually all have things to do, Matt. So Matt, thank you very much for coming on. No problem, thank you for having me. Alright, later everybody. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.