TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* 1001 Arabian NFTs feat. Dominik Leusder

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

This week's regular episode will be out tomorrow! The gang delves into the realm of a movie being entirely funded by NFTs and filmed in the only place less real than NFTs (Neom.) Then, Riley speaks with Dominik Leusder from the Eurotrash podcast and LSE Ideas about how exactly energy got so wildly expensive. If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ 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 *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237.  *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, Trash Future listeners. This week's free episode is going to be out on Wednesday, as Riley just got back into town and is preparing the notes. In the meantime, please enjoy this unlocked bonus episode featuring Dominic Loisder of the EuroTrash podcast in a discussion about fuel prices and energy markets, and why the UK's fuel costs are skyrocketing. Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of TF. It is me, Riley, and I'm here with Milo, Alice, and Hussain. And we have just, god damn it. You know what? Here's the thing. We have a guest in the second half of this episode. It's Dominic Loisder, host of the EuroTrash podcast with Anton Yeager, who's the research director of the LSE Global Economic Governance Commission.

He didn't have to hear you say bonus in your stupid sexy voice. He's going to hear it when he listens back. It's a good job he didn't hear it because he'd have come instantly. The podcast makes our guests come. That's Trash Future Promise. The ISS would have been in serious danger. Before we start off, I want to revisit actually something of a new friend. This was handed to me on the news ticker today. If those of you who listened to the recording of the last live show,

you will remember that we spoke about city coins, such as Miami coin and NYC coin. Alice, for your benefit, just really quickly. Since I was being played by a stand-up of Kyle Marks at the live show. There was no stand-up playing you at all. I'm going to start coming to live shows. You were being played by Asimo holding an iPad with a picture of you on it. Yeah. So basically, there's this thing called city coins. And it's a way for you to invest in cities by basically, you know what?

What's the dumbest possible city that could do this? Fucking like, Miami. Of course. So basically, it's the long and short of it is that they... I'm shorting Miami coin based on predicted sea level rises. I'm afraid it's too late to short Miami coin. It's down 95%. Because of sea level rises or...

You could still make a small return if you shorted it now, I'm sure. It would cost so much to borrow. Ever was trying to borrow it to short it. Legally, this is not investment advice. No, it's not. Anyway, so the way it works, right, for refresh your memory, is it's a way to replace taxes with allowing people to invest in cities. Oh my God.

So wait, wait, wait, sorry. Not to recapitulate a whole live show here, but they were going to like... Much like Eric Adams and the mayor of Miami, whose name I forgot, were competing about taking their paychecks in Bitcoin. They're also now, or were, also going to collect city taxes in Bitcoin. Well, that's the argument, right? In Miami coin?

Yes. The argument is that instead that you do away with taxes entirely, and then depending on how good of a city you are, then people invest in you by buying your coin, and then they can like stake it for rewards, and those rewards are what other people use to try to buy the coin. Of course, it's a terrible idea. That's why it's in the middle of failing.

The ideas that we talk about on this show are normally so good. Yeah, but if you live in Miami and you have Miami coin, then you can get like a gold skinned AK or whatever. Oh, no, no, you don't get anything with it. Oh, okay. No, no, no. You just hold it and then it allows you to win money. Other people are gambling trying to get one,

and then some of the money is diverted to the city's wallet. As soon as I show up in Miami, I appear as Rick and Morty. Yeah, the Miami verse. So basically, just imagine though, like you've spent the last several years or even several months trying to carve out a niche for yourself because you're like, wow, I can't believe the economy has been changed forever by the blockchain,

and then opening up the annual Bitcoin conference in Miami by calling yourself the most Bitcoin-friendly mayor on the planet. I think the only thing probably worse than that is if you actually tried to introduce Bitcoin as a currency held by your central bank, and that caused a default. Yep, well, I've done it, so good work. It says, by carving out this political lane,

Suarez has increased his appeal to the deep-pocketed Silicon Valley libertarians in cryptocurrency cycles that he's recruited to relocate to Miami over the last several years. But again, it's now just like worth barely anything, like everyone who's decided they wanted to get in on the future of taxes, it's turned out that all you've done

is given tons of money to the early, to the first people in. That was the result. And Miami got like a few million dollars the first month, then almost no money. And now it's worth next to... It was worth almost nothing when we talked about it in the live show. Now it's worth 95% less than that.

Yeah, well, 95% of nothing is that's... Sorry, 95% less than nothing, that's not good. So the founder, because remember, it's a private company that's trying to get cities to get on board. The founder insists that it can and will have practical applications soon, of course, now that tons of money has been channeled into it. Of course.

He insisted city coins... I love this. He acknowledged legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrencies, but insists that city coins... It's terrible. But insisted city coins is an exception. The rare crypto product with transformative potential. And he says...

Sure, it's lost 95% of its value now, but stop thinking about the short term. Yeah, of course. It's just to see that what I... Topics I now consider to be our sweet children, to go out into the world and flourish. They're leaving the nests. And by nest, I mean profitability.

That's right. That is correct. Yeah, but just the idea... The idea that you were gonna replace taxes with gambling entirely, and just replace public services with a thing that'll let you bid on going through a red light or whatever... Oh, yeah, awesome. It's just...

We all knew it was going to fail, but it is laughable to see it actually fail. Miami hasn't lost its sense of self. It's still doing really dumb stuff. And that's what's important. That's the character of Miami. Absolutely. And they'll learn nothing from this.

Removing the Miami crypto bull, so that all of these guys have lost all of their money on crypto can focus on their mental health. Exactly, yeah. We're putting the Miami crypto bull in a box. About the crypto bull so much. We're locking it in there with Ed Sheeran. Look, here's the thing.

I've decided where... Look, was there some stuff that happened in Britain? Did some Tory ministers say some air-headed shit? Of course they did. They always do. Every week. Every week. Every week.

Because they understand content. They know you've got to be churning it out every week. Yeah, so in this case, some or other minister has said, look, the cost of living is rocketing up. Wages are not keeping pace. We're certainly not going to help with benefits. So why doesn't everyone in the country just get a promotion or move to combat the cost of living crisis?

Yeah, why didn't they move to Miami? This was the week after another conservative MP had said, there's no real rise in food banks. It's just that people don't know how to cook. And again, I think it's... It's just utterly true of you two. I do think it's very... I do think the idea of taking that to its logical conclusion,

right, what this minister, Rachel McLean, said, which is that, well, everyone in the country gets a promotion and moves to a high-wage area. Yeah, this is what leveling up is. Yeah, it's just trying to put everyone in one big trade union, actually, where we're all going to collectively bargain. Yeah, exactly. Everyone from the steel workers through to the spreadsheet people,

through to people who do the reception at the nail salon, they're all going to be in one big really unwieldy union and they're all going to go to their various different bosses on the same day and they're going to go, hey, we're not calling it a trade union because it's a Tory thing, but more money. I like the idea that what we do instead is we simply find and kill the top earning person in the country

and everyone else moves up one. You just get the person above you's income. And you also get their job, even if it's something completely different to you, like, you're a plumber. Now, the person above you was actually an architect. Well, good luck. Well, I'd like to see those surgeons do podcasting.

Yeah, exactly. I would, I would. I think the funnier implication is that on a long enough timeline, everyone just converges on the same either software engineering or like Saudi defense ministry advising job. Oh, we all get Matt Damon's job in Siriana. Fantastic. Everyone in Britain is going to appear as Matt Damon

in the crypto.com commercial one week too late to profit from it. Well, we're not really that far away from like one of the ministers just sort of, you know, talking about how everyone in the country should have a side hustle, because that's what's really going to keep the economy going, which is to say that, like, ultimately, this, the future of this country rests on basically like at least half of the country becoming content creators.

Yeah, get a TikTok. That's the Tori advice. The perfect, the perfect balance. Half TikTok creators, half landlords. Yeah. And then, of course, TikTok landlords, which is another entirely cursed category. Those who we are elite, they will rule us.

The model, the model is actually sort of there, because like I, I was looking like for, for, for my other show, I was looking up like what some of the kind of OG YouTubers were up to like now that they're old, right? So like your Zoellas and everything. And they've basically become landlords. Like they've, like, How old is Zoella?

Like older, older age probably. Old enough to have a kid. But like, you know, as, as, as the like the YouTube money sort of like dries up, like, you know, what being of a strategy has sort of been in investing in assets. Actually, the year older than me, she is old. And, you know, and it's kind of like, okay, will she go back into sort of doing like baby content? I don't know.

But like, it's very evident. And like, this is stuff that even like Twitch streamers and like, you know, esports people are sort of being told as well, which is that like, you know, the party lasts for a really short time. So basically you want to invest in real estate. So what we're going to see is that like, you have like OG content creators becoming landlords and then renting out their properties to younger TikTokers in the form of big hype houses,

where you have 20 people living in a property making videos where the landlord then gets a commission. So that's the, that's the business plan for trashy it should then. That's also, yeah, that's also the conservative party 2024 manifesto. So that's, that's, that's what they call it. Hype House of Parliament. You know what, as far as I'm concerned, as far as I'm concerned, that's the circular economy and I refuse to learn otherwise.

Yeah, don't, don't let anyone tell you that we're not giving back to the community as we rent out our studio to them. The Epic Meal Time guys, not eating such Epic Meals anymore. It's been some lean years. This is the seventh in cows over Epic Meal Time. Just one measly bacon strip for tea this evening, father. The good thing is it'll never happen to us. Well, look, here's the thing.

We've got a very solid business plan. I have something today. I have something today to talk about. It's not a startup. It is a Web 3 project, but it does have something it does other than just provide liquidity between different pools that exist to provide one another liquidity and keep the tokens moving. They are trying to actually do a thing that is recognizable as a thing.

Okay, yeah, all right. I love how low the bar is now. They're trying to do a thing that you'll look at and you'll be like, oh, that's a thing. Yeah, I recognize that. That's an item. That's not just like you're not just weirdly backwards inventing a form of interbank lending, but where there's no ultimate beneficiary, except the people who own the banks. Doing phenomenology on startups, fantastic.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Look, so, Alice, you showed this to me so you know what it is. And it was sent in by a listener. I want you to tell me, Antara, A-N-T-A-R-A. It is a Web3 project that is producing something recognizable in the world. Is it cum? Yeah, is it producing cum? Are they finally going to build cum from the building blocks?

Cum-3. All right, so I'm so sorry. Yeah, you cum just dropped. I'm so sorry, Dominic. Antara, A-N-T-A-R-A. I'll give you another hint. It's in Neon. Give you another hint since I know what this is.

Is it cum? What's another industry that's also full of scams and like producing projects that never really get made? Cars, maybe. Getting warmer. We've all had scams so we can get made. Big projects, a lot of money, but a lot of them never really... Is it like an electric vehicle project?

It is to do with something that would have been considered a vehicle at one point in history. Oh, it's a Richard Linklater movie. Are they reinventing the penny-throbbing? No, Milo, you almost had it. Yeah. Okay, so it's a movie. It's a movie, yes. Right, okay, awesome.

They're making a movie and it is... Are they going to use all the board apes? It's close. Instead of apes, it's camels. The Epic of Antara, the first major movie in history. They're doing Avatar but with camels. Is it Avatar but with camels? It retells the...

It's a sword and sandals epic set in the 6th century. Sword and sandals. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Is it like some Emirati country is doing a website project to tell the story about like the Prophet Muhammad or something? I don't know. Close enough.

It is a 6th century Arabian warrior. They are doing essentially like Muslim Ben-Hur through an NFT foundation. Ben-Hur. Okay. And I will say one other thing about this, which is that as of January this year, there was a bidding war as to where they would film this thing between Abu Dhabi and Neon. How are you going to film it in Neon? It's just a line.

Well, the camel starts from one side and goes to the other side. Yeah, exactly. It's like the sets you use to make a car look like it's moving. It's just... Well, I mean, it's like the movie Locke because in the movie Locke, he goes from Birmingham to Manchester, from Birmingham to London, and the whole movie is just like this one car journey and he goes through a bunch of shit on that very straight car journey.

So it's that but with the camel going from one side of Neon to the other. The camel needs to get some help from some McKinsey consultants who are helpfully all there. So it's, I mean, because the thing is like if you're, it's like just follow the big fake moon and you can't get lost. So I'm just going to, I'm going to share a link to a pictures of the camels. We can take this part out of you. Yeah, the camels look like the worst shit you've ever seen. It looks worse than board apes.

I'm also going to point out that if you go to the homepage of Arabian camels, Arabian camels.io, you can scroll down what that what that Tory MP was trying to do in the comments when you can have an unfortunate misclick. You can scroll down and you can see partners and helpers and on that list, you will see the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, Yale University, and SOAS. I looked into this a little bit and I thought for a second that this would be a classic case of like university investments, right? It's not the case.

What they're actually doing is they're kind of lying a little bit because per this other article on Globe News1, I found the production of the movie was meticulously put together with the help of professors of Arabic literature from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, and the School of Oriental and African Studies. So what they've done is they've run this past a professor at each of these institutions in a sort of like Professor Chomsky, what do you think about NFTs? And then when they've said, yeah, whatever, they've put the fucking logo on the site, which I think gives you an intriguing sort of glimpse of what the vibe is here.

Incredible. I've also just seen something on their website which says, hump in, join the caravan. I don't think they understand what in English the verb hump means. Just fucking way into the movie. Justin, that's right. Fuck your way in. Or rather, don't fuck, but just kind of rob yourself up against the movie.

I want to know more about the movie. Like, is the camel the main character? Is it like? No, the movie's just like played relatively straight. It's just like a sort of desert epic, if you like. But the movie isn't itself an NFT. Wait, it says as seen on MSN. That's so funny.

It says as seen on MSN. Yeah, people are like messaging me gifts about this movie. They do say that your NFT can be in the movie. Like you can audition your NFT to be in the film. What? How? But they make the NFTs. Okay, so there's three categories, right? Categories, right?

There is the three categories are welcome to the caravan. Arabian Camels is proud to announce the upcoming Entara Movie NFT in partnership with Swap Protocol. That's WAPP. Arabian Camels is the first NFT community to create a $50 million DeFi Hollywood movie together owned by everyone via NFTs. So the idea being, of course, if you buy this like,

again, just like it looks exactly like a board ape, but it's a camel, exact same shitty new grounds art style, then you will own some of the rights to this Hollywood film. Not just owning the rights to it. If you own an original Arabian Camel NFT, then you are eligible to purchase from them an acting role in the movie, a producer credit.

So you can literally buy your way. Oh, yeah. Okay, so it's doing that. It's doing a weird kind of like nepotism, but not really. But yeah, absolutely. You can still buy your way into... Oh my God, there's a Marilyn Monroe Camel. Movies have been funded by weirder things,

in particular, like every art movie you like is usually funded by a cabal of dentists who just had a weird amount of money. That really happened in Canada. There was a tax credit. Yeah, the Canadian tax credit that led to some of like David Cronenberg's original movies getting made by dentists

who wanted to dodge tax. But this is nothing. And they want to raise $50 million. No, I now tend to disagree that this David Cronenberg movie is good. I don't tend to disagree that your teeth shouldn't look like that. Yeah, that's right. As dentists, we are horrified by the content of this film, although we think it is quite good.

Do not merge your face with your television. It's not good for your teeth. No, that's right. Watch Videodrome, everyone. NFT holders can get utility, such as acting roles in the movies. Come location scouting. Get producer credits. Come location scouting.

Scouting the location for come. Yeah. And hang out with the stars cast and crew. In on set in the desert. Basically, like you get to be just like, you had to like live what I think is actually quite a reasonable dream, which is to just like be a guy wandering around a movie set, just like looking at stuff, eating craft services.

Just you're supposed to be there, but you don't have to do anything. Perfect. You can like take a few like awkward selfies with like Jennifer Lawrence and like just post them everywhere for the rest of your life. And like, yeah, like make that part of your life story. Yeah. Okay, fine.

All right, I can see that. So Tarsim Singh is supposed to be directing Antara. Tarsim Singh, of course, also very well known for directing selfless. That sounds like it says a lot about our society. Yeah, absolutely. As well as the cell, but with the cell, very good film with Vince Vaughn. Jennifer Lopez. But he's most notable for directing music videos,

including those above. Hold on by En Vogue, Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest, and Losing My Religion by Ari Hemp. Absolutely incredible. Making a camel movie. I'm making a film in a straight line. I'm being paid in oil. He's being paid in oil that is funded by cryptocurrency.

Come on, or the other way around. You're even getting paid. You're paying them more or less. So basically, it starts off. There's a 13-step process to a movie to try a triumph of cinema. So, you know, take note of all you future screenwriters out there. Yeah, this is all drawn directly from the views of Orson Welles. You start with an NFT drop.

Number two, Lamborghini, Rolex, and Gold Bar give away upon selling out of the NFTs. Sorry. This is like if you asked us to make a joke about what rich golf guys would do if they tried to make a movie. Lamborghini and Gold Bar give away. Yeah. If you're asking yourself, who are these people? You can go on their website to the About Us page,

and under our team, you can see all of their camels. And only one of them has the actual name. I love when a guy claims to be like a rich guy from Saudi Arabia and says, hey, I need to fund my movie. Can you give me some money? At some point, one of you will win a Lamborghini. Yes. This feels like you don't even need to like send an email to like an old person.

Like all of the sort of like old people who get easily tricked by email stuff, like they're all sort of dying. And now what happens is like, no, you need to get their kids, their sons. Yeah. And they got an email telling them to drink the stuff under the sink. And they were like, well, the email said. It's like the Democrats don't want you to drink the stuff under the sink. Oh, well, they said, if I don't drink the stuff under the sink,

then I'll have a tax interest rate problem. So I better do it. And then now that guy's kid is getting like is seeing a tweet or seeing an Instagram post that's like being on your hustle, being on your grind set requires you to drink the chemicals you find under the sink. Although in this case, it's just like, oh, I'm not going to my I can't believe my grandfather was taken in by that, you know, person email claiming that they were a prisoner in Spain and needed like $50 to pay their bail or whatever.

No, but however, I am going to help fund this movie by buying a camel that also enters me into a story. I got it wrong last time. Lamborghini, gold bar and Rolex giveaway. Anyway, after that, Arabian camels 2.0 are unleashed. I don't know what that refers to. They're going to do a second drop, I guess. I got two homes.

And then location scouting in the desert. Okay. So we've given away the Lamborghinis. We've got the camels 2.0 and then casting call. Time for auditions. At this point, five steps and you're like cast the movie. Okay. Yeah, we got to do the Lamborghini giveaway first.

Yeah. I mean, that's often where the A24 movies go wrong is they don't do the Lamborghini giveaway. I mean, again, like would I like to see an A24 movie set about the production of this movie set in Neon? I absolutely would. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Rory Kinnear plays every male part again.

That's right. Yeah. The Lamborghini giveaway is a metaphor for not being loved by your father. Yeah. People think that Rory Kinnear playing every male role and man was like a thing the movie was trying to say. It's actually a policy A24 has introduced us. So it's Rory Kinnear is an NFT. Like you can buy different Rory Kinnears.

Yeah, Rory Kinnear FT. Yeah. And then what you do is then you like audition your Rory Kinnear to cast it in the movie. Rory Rory's. Yeah. Rory's, that's right. You've got a picture of Rory Kinnear smoking weed. Yeah.

You've got a picture of Rory Kinnear as a priest. Rory Kinnear as a punk. Rory Kinnear as a cop. Rory Kinnear looking for his own ass. I mean, I'm very excited. I got my Rory Kinnear as a sort of English gentleman cast in the movie as well. I feel like, yeah, A24 with that movie will like accidentally doing a satire of British like TV and filmmaking where like there are only four guys.

There are only four guys everywhere. Yeah. There are only like four guys that they know. So they have to put them in everything. Russell T. Davies has to write everything. Rory Kinnear has to be in everything. This is basically how it works. Yeah. Yeah.

We also missed out one thing in the middle of this movie roadmap, which is. Oh, I haven't gotten there yet. Oh, please go ahead. I'm only on casting call time for audition. Step five after the Lamborghini giveaway in the release of Cavals 2.0. There are so many more steps. Six. Yield farming starts for Antara movie NFT holders via SWAT protocol.

So don't worry. You don't need to get the movie to be released to get paid back on your investment in the movie. You'll start getting paid back right away somehow by a process called yield farming, which has been described by Sam Bankman Freed, the like biggest like crypto exchange investor guy as well. It's like you have a big box and then the people who have the thing take money out of the box and people who want the thing put money into the box. And that's how it works.

And what shape is this box? It's a square box. Okay, right. And then what shape is the thing inside the box? Well, it's the Antara play to earn rating game being made in partnership with the V Empire DAO protocol where you can lease your NFTs to players. So they took that on their idea as well. I'm not just a movie producer.

I'm a landlord of this movie. The V Empire is the best way to describe crypto guys. Yeah, they've all got their Vs all right. Antara gaming token launch. Launch of the Antara play to earn game. And then make the movie. No, lights, lights, action cameras. So make the movie.

But they said that that's the order they say it in. Lights, action cameras. Yeah, so they want to start a media res I guess. I love that we're only three steps from the end. And this is the first point at which a movie is being made. Like anything to do with the making of a movie is actually being done. Draw the rest of the yeah. Well, it's it's step 10 is make the movie step 11 red carpet premiere.

I wish that the crypto market hadn't imploded before this could happen because I think it would have been like apocalypse now out there. Yeah, it would have been impressive. I don't know the fuck is getting this entry and shit. You know, fantastic. It would have been great. No one thought to bring any food or water. They all just brought different tokens.

The entire cast, crew and supporters of the movie Antara found dead in the deserts of Abu Dhabi. The Dyatlov pass incident, but crypto. So I'm clawed his own camel open from the inside. And then, of course, box office streaming and blockchain distribution. Step 13. We have done one of the most significant things of this era. The world is now our oyster.

Fair enough. Yeah. So where are they along this road map? Is it have they done the Rolex thing yet even? We're still in step one. Alice, we're still in the ground floor. They haven't even done the traditional Lamborghini Rolex and gold bar giveaway. Oh, wow.

Which is more of a formality at this point. You know, it's like you're supposed to say the Scottish play. It's like everyone knows you can't make a movie without a Lamborghini giveaway. Yeah. You get into the movie business. You have too many Rolexes to even like count. How do they get all this for free anyway? Lamborghini Rolex and gold just regard it as promotion.

So the thing it's all based on is this swap protocol thing, which again, like I swap with two P's. So, you know, it's cool. And again, I don't know why it's there. Oh, yeah. We base it on this thing that's like monetizing data in general. Like the whole thing just is so fucking bizarre. But apparently you can it's like a savings account while the movie is being made.

It's a savings account that earns 80 percent. Now, I want to note something here, which is... Yeah, as in you put in your money and then at the end you have 80 percent of it. And very generous. Yeah. Right. It's really... I sent you the website for this.

And then you put the website in the chat for this podcast. And between us, the hosts of this podcast have managed to take down the site. Incredible. It's just not loading anymore. Too many people. Yeah, too many people were excited about the camels. Whoa, there's been a surge of interest in the Antara movie. The server's gone and lit.

Okay. So there are three... Fleeing town. Three more people involved. Tarasim Singh, one of the most unique directors in Hollywood. That's enough to crash the website between them. Despite being in talks with the agents of Oliver Stone, it was decided that Tarasim was the best director to make Antara into a bold and

artistic desert epic with his strong eye for culture, sophistication and a cinematic technically. If you say, would you like to do this movie? And they say, no, you are in talks about them doing the movie. Yeah. We realized that Oliver Stone was too smart to make this movie. Come on. Wouldn't you love to see an Oliver Stone movie about the...

Just... Just like... Now, the Saudi Arabian government will have you believe that this camel here is... Walk down the embassy. Well, I think you'll find the camel is actually a GIF or JPEG. I represented it on the blockchain. It's not actually a physical camel. I need to see Oliver Stone's Khashoggi immediately.

There's also Stuart Sutherland. Stuart is a producer on Gerard Butler's 50 million dollar Kandahar movie, which is currently finishing its shoot in Saudi Arabia. Wow, that's crazy. Gerard Butler, nine phase good films. And then Mark Fusco. Mark Fusco worked as Steven Spielberg's assistant for almost 15 years. Oh, well, assisting at the right hand of the master.

He must have picked up a lot. And then Alexander Amartai. The project was conceptualized, written and pulled together by Alexander. Alexander has a background in equities, real estate and film finance, and the brainchild behind movies, NFTs. And finally, the last person involved is Arabian camels. The Arabian camels NFT community. Great.

And NFT owned and rubes like you. Yeah. Shall we, we, I mean, I, shall I have a conversation with Dominic Leuister about how European energy prices got so fucked up? Well, none of us would be able to answer you. We have no mouth, but we must scream. I have no bed. I have a bed, but I do not sleep.

What am I? European energy pricing? So, European energy pricing is a punchline. European energy pricing. Yeah. That would be good. I think this spinks. The two poles of trash future punchlines.

I don't know, cum and European energy pricing. That's right. Those are the two, those are the two. It's called a dialectic, folks. That's right. One is directly relative to the other. Yeah. Yeah.

It's going to be Riley in the past slash future. European climate pricing. Yeah, he's going to talk. I'm sorry about European pricing. No, we're not. We're going to talk about European energy pricing and how it's related to deregulation. Cum is, it contains energy.

Okay, let's roll it. Hello and welcome to this second segment of whatever show we are doing. I'm sure that those jokers, including me in the first segment, had some fantastically insightful things to say, by which I mean, I'm sure I had some fantastically insightful things today, and my creatinous friends talked over me the whole time. But I have once again slipped the surly bonds of those clowns I work with to bring you an interview with Dominic Leuzder,

who in addition to being the co-host of the Euro Trash podcast with Anton Yeagerman, and is also, though not in that capacity, in this capacity as a podcaster, is also the research director of the LSE Global Economic Governance Commission. And we're going to talk a little bit about how energy prices, especially in Europe, got so crazy. So, Dom, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So I just want to start off with,

and this is sort of something we spoke about briefly before the recording, with looking at a little bit of what it's like buying energy in Europe, this thing that everyone needs that plays a major role in setting prices in the rest of the economy that people actually experience. And just think about how we got to a place where energy has remained at such a high price and has been such a persistently sort of pricey element of the economy. Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things that's widely over-determined, but you can say that they have some common causes and that these causes can be found in the type of

economic governance framework that was adopted over the last decades. In some, at one part of the story, it's a bit different, perhaps, because unlike the other two elements that lead up to this entire crisis, which were deregulated at some point, or re-regulated to make it more flexible and to make it more open to certain market forces, which introduced these price volatility that we're seeing at the moment, the commodities trading sector was never actually regulated. And maybe that's a good place to start because I think it's currently probably the most overlooked part of this entire crisis, and we can get to why retail and consumer prices are so incredibly high at the moment.

But the things that feed into it are the strange and swashbuckling world of commodity trading firms, the financial industry that evolved to bet on future commodity prices and then how these prices feed into the market structure of the European Union and the UK and elsewhere where these wholesale prices are then transformed into consumer retail prices. So the first thing, where we have to start, I think, is in the late 90s and the US in particular. The Clinton administration in 1999 wanted to pass a bill that would essentially allow financial actors to bet on the future removal of commodity prices, whether this be oil, gas, or food items, concentrated orange juice, you name it. And this was sort of snuck into a bill in 2000, which essentially opened up

these derivative markets for large banks and brokerages. So you could now buy futures on these different commodities. And if I may just sort of jump in for a second here as well, as I understand it, like these markets were created and opened on the basis that allowing speculation, essentially, as you say, betting on the future price, what was the ostensible justify? We know what happened. It created sort of chaos for many people, but then huge returns for those betting. But the ostensible purpose was what was it? Just improved price discovery, like price smoothing? What was it supposed to do this reform? That was the question, right? I mean, in a way, there's sort of an ex-ante case for doing it

ideologically, because you want to see if you can invest in a factory or in a house or anything else, you're also just betting on future returns and price movements. So why shouldn't you be able to do it for other goods? But the point is that, well, in the long run, it'll stimulate more supply and it will, by making these markets terribly competitive, bring down the price for consumers. That's the ostensible justification for doing so. Interestingly, I think we have to preface this by saying there isn't a lot of good data, first of all, to substantiate that claim, but also, frankly, to fully substantiate the claim that these things have led to more price volatility. And there are some examples where some commodities

are actually exempt from this bill, and they're still quite volatile. There's famously the Onion Futures Act, which exempts onions, and for some reason, box office receipts, which were added like 50 years later, from this entire infrastructure, this derivative ecosystem. And nonetheless, we still have these huge fluctuations in onion prices that hit particularly emerging markets, like India, very, very badly. And something else I work here, but the point is that these developments and this market for over-the-counter derivative, which is totally unregulated, so you just, you and a counterparty, it could be two banks, you engage in this bet on the movement of oil prices or nickel prices or whatever, and you create these volatile asset classes in the end,

which over the last two decades have pushed prices to enormous highs, first before the financial crisis, and then in the latter half of the last decade. They also, they become more volatile overall, so they also plummet after these instances, but these heights lead to a lot of social instability in the interim. And so what we have right just is, as I understand it correctly, yeah, we have these ability to bet on betting commodity prices, creating a huge amount of volatility. And into that, we have as well the kind of wholesale liberalization of the European energy market kind of from the 1990s, again, where the idea is, well, if we have all of these extremely competitively priced commodities, and then we allow the energy sector to, again, like

intensively sort of compete internally with itself and to try and offer the best price to consumers, for example, the argument is, and again, this seems to be the justification, which is that all of this competition is going to naturally produce sort of the optimal stable outcomes for all of the consumers who are then empowered to make the choice as to where to put their money. And that could either be retail consumers or that could be industry or whatever, right? Yeah, I mean, we shouldn't forget that this is also very clearly, this was enacted, the Commodity Futures Organization Act of 2000, that's the one I mentioned, and these reforms in the energy market in Europe of the 90s, with the idea that it would boost private profits as well,

right? And that seems a good thing because more income is better, and this is taxable income as well, right? So you're creating a market which was previously quite regulated and which didn't actually provide a lot of opportunities for firms to become engaged in to make a profit, and then the addendum to that is, well, and that would stimulate more investment from the private sector because there's a profit to be made, and then that would increase supply, and that would in the end be better for everyone because then you have more flexibility, and you have lower prices for consumers, yes. And of course, this is, this was the logic, right? You know, this is what they sort of thought, but maybe we, let's talk a little bit about how sort of relinquishing,

just relinquishing this much control of the energy market, this crucial, this thing that, again, is so crucial that where the price of energy is so is quite linked to inflation, for example, right? Let's talk about some of the chaos that actually resulted from this. Yeah, so as you say, the headline inflation figures, if you just aggregate them, there's a very large energy component, right? That's why there's sort of a core inflation, which is, which strips away things like energy and food. And there's a reason why we have that, because energy and food prices are quite volatile. And it just become more volatile over the last decades, as we said, and what that means that they become detached from fundamentals. So

the price of oil might be at $140 or something outrageous, but it might rise very quickly over the course of a few months, even if supply and demand barely moved relative to each other in that period. And that reflects the behavior of financial actors. But it also reflects, at the retail level, the market structure through which these prices are fed. And I think just have to take a brief step back and talk about how the European, the EU's way of structuring their whole energy market has made things worse. And it has even made things quite bad in countries like France, which rely very heavily on nuclear energy, which should be an advantage for them, of course, they don't actually need that much gas, they might need it for domestic heating,

which isn't fully electrified yet. So you still need gas for heating, and you need gas for like your industrial feedstocks, whatever. But it still has a huge impact on electricity prices, because of how these electricity prices sort of piggyback off the higher gas prices. And that has to do with this auction model called pay as you clear. It's in the US, it's called uniform price auctions, or single price clearing auctions in Europe, they're called pay as you clear. What that means is different producers of electricity bid into the markets, and they establish a price according to their production costs. And that will always start with renewable energies, because they don't cost anything to produce, right? They're

out there solar and wind, you need to build the infrastructure and you can sort of produce them quite easily. And you start with your bid on the cheapest and end up at the most marginal, most expensive energy source in this sort of bid stack. And once the full demand satisfies, everyone obtains the price of the last producer from which the energy was bought, electricity was bought. So if I just can confirm my understanding here, right, we're saying, if I have a wind farm that's supplying, you know, like one gigawatt hour for free, and you've got a natural gas plant that's supplying the same amount for, let's say $100, then we all get paid $100 for our units of electricity, and sort of regardless of how much it costs to produce, right?

Yeah, that's right. A different way of putting this might be you compare it to the other model, which is pay as you bid. In other words, everyone gets paid their actual bid, if you like, then they literally get paid the price they bid. This one, you get, so if company A bids at 20 pence per kilowatt, but you need more flexibility, so you have a second company, also wins part of the auction, and they bid a little bit higher, 30 pence per kilowatt, everyone pays the higher price of 30 pence, as opposed to everyone paying what they actually bid. And this is supposed to, this is also called marginal clearing, the marginal clearing price, so that you pay the price at which the entire market clears, and the reason why this is linked

to the gas price, because gas is actually the most expensive to produce. So it's the most marginal price of demand is actually quite high, as it is during winter, as it is during this global supply crunch. You sort of move up this bid stack, and you end up with gas, and that's quite a high price, and then the whole market clears at that very high price, and that's how the high gas price feeds into the normal retail electricity price, even in a country that doesn't actually require another gas. So effectively, what we're saying is, we've sort of set up the market in such a way that extremely high commodity prices driven by speculation will just feed into it, and then in terms of actually buying energy, because of this system of marginal pricing,

that as I understand, it was introduced actually to try to green the energy system by encouraging renewable production, but what it's actually done is just expose everyone very directly to the most, the highest marginal swings in speculation and things like natural gas. Yeah, this sort of marginal pricing, it prevents consumers from benefiting from cheap renewables, yes, and that means that low costs, sort of green generators actually benefit quite enormously from expensive gas prices, because if the clearing price is higher, they get paid more, but yeah, the consumer gets screwed in this whole situation. And this, you can actually make the argument that in normal time, this may yield relatively low prices, but it's not equipped for this kind of

disruption, and that shows you where this kind of system comes from. It assumes that these kind of disruptions aren't possible or are not the norm, because markets are globally efficient, and just in time, supply chains are going to always work out, and politics are never going to get in the way, supply chains are quite efficient, and that's why it's built on this dumb assumption that everything is going to work out fine with the global energy market, which it doesn't, of course. Yeah, it really does seem like it's another example of the general neoliberal set of assumptions, just being that, well, if we design our energy market in a frictionless vacuum and assume that everyone, not only within these markets that we're designing, but everyone outside the MOOC

could possibly affect them, we're going to just make some crazy assumptions about how they're going to act, and if that all goes well, then we can fulfill our mandate of, say, shrinking the state, increasing private profit, of promoting competition, whatever that means, right? And then all we have to assume is that this very delicately built machine, when it's put out in the real world, isn't going to encounter, say, a stiff breeze or anything unexpected, a car going by and so on, which just seems like an incredibly reckless way to structure something as, again, I want to sort of come back to, I don't want to come back to, but want to reemphasize, is so vital not just to how much you're paying to heat your home, but how much you're paying for

basically everything else. Yeah, I mean, this is on top of everything else, right? I mean, this is on top of two decades of, you know, you could call it cost disease, but it escalating costs of living crisis for everyone where you have a huge inflation in non-tradable goods and services, so education and housing and food, I think clothing as well, perhaps not clothing, but a lot of the things that we need to just get through life has gotten somewhat too expensive. And now if you pay 50% of your income on housing costs, and you have, you suddenly have an energy bill that's doubled, there's almost no way out as a consumer, rather than you're not going to instrument any savings, you might not even get through the day, and you might have to go further into debt. And that's

the consequence of not properly regulating energy market, I suppose. As we say on TF, it's the assumption that if you structure the market correctly, some sort of, you know, genius, shumpterian, creative destroyer will sort of come in and apply the magic of his, you know, his technological heroism to it, to make the world better for everyone. We call that essentially a faith that a wizard will fix it. Yeah, exactly. It's usually like, A leads to B, and between like this, in brackets, miracle happened, essentially. There's always one part of the argument, it's just like, you know, TBD, sort of saying something will happen, and then everything will work out fine.

And I mean, we talk about price inflation, and as you say, right, the price inflation of homes, of education, of foodstuffs, and energy, and so on. And it's not, I don't think sort of, we're claiming like, yes, the energy market is at the root of all of this, but rather that this is such a good example of the way that sort of the technocratic management of the EU, but you know, the UK has some similar, it has some similar approaches, it bids on many of the same electricity markets. So like, this applies to us too, if not directly. But that we have continually taken these decisions in the face of, you know, a globalizing world to sort of say, yes, daddy, please, more exposure to, more exposure of like citizens to the issues stemming

from globalization, as like, because one of the, as the state removes these safeguards, because that's really what's happening with the liberalization of an energy market, with the liberalization of speculation and energy. It's the, I see it anyway, as the removal of a political buffer between people and the vagaries of global markets. And that in all of these cases, it is the removal of that, the stripping back of that political buffer that was, you know, it goes back to sort of Reaganism, Third Wayism, it goes back to the sort of ambitious European project of the 1990s and the way these things were structured. And these assumptions that they made that, well, everything will be fine forever. And, you know, it feels as though, you know,

there was, we went from, we went from this brave new world of sort of everything being liberalized and freed from sort of state control or whatever, to we cannot, it is politically impossible to do anything else because we can't threaten the profits of the energy sector, we can't threaten the jobs that those profits bring. What do you want to do? There's a war between Russia and Ukraine, and we should, you know, get into like how Europe got into this situation, where it became so dependent on Russia for gas, which basically allowed to set the price and so on. But that it is the stripping away of the political between the experience of the individual and the sort of speculation and realities of sort of everything from global high finance to, you know, just energy firms

setting prices. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely true. I wouldn't just to get back to your initial point, I wouldn't actually, technology can mean different things in different places. I mean, there are countries that have far more regulated commodity sectors, far more regular capital accounts. And they do very smart, you know, industrial policy, and the developmental policy, which is an absolutely technocratic endeavor. And they actually managed to pull off absolute miracles in some way. And they've insulated themselves from the vagaries of the global economy to a greater extent, you know, it's like China, for instance, or India to some extent. And it's just that the different ideas took hold at different times. The European project was

unfortunately conceived in decades in which this type of thought was absolutely ascendant. And that got baked in institutionally. And as you say, once it's institutionalized, it's very hard to change for procedural internal reasons. Too many reader players are involved. And the little cost of doing anything is very, very high. You need often you need unanimity voting within the EU to change anything substantial. And globally, the coalitions are no longer there to sustain a different kind of to revert to a different kind of system where the state has far more control on which markets are, if you want to use the word embedded in society and serve different needs. That simply isn't there. So it's the rise of finance which coincides with this particular

macroeconomic framework, and these particular market structures that we see everywhere. And now sort of finance is endangering the whole thing, including its own profits. But it's made politics into this empty shirt, which has, which no longer has enough fetters to reign in markets, unfortunately. And now, as you see in the commodity trading market, which I said before, is perfectly unregulated and always was frankly there, like an oligopoly of large companies which take out unbelievably highly levered to actually buy the commodities, ship them to their end market. They rely on these small set of European banks, and they're very, very vulnerable to margin calls in cases where commodity prices skyrocket.

That's very dangerous. And they are now asking for central banks to provide emergency liquidity to these very high levered markets running out of liquidity. No, I was interviewing Zoltan Posar. Yeah, I know. I'm not that big of a fanboy for Zoltan, but I think this is also a point you would make. Yeah. No, I'm just kidding. So no, it seems as though, yes, as you say, there is this perfect, we are headed towards this perfect storm where, if I understand you correctly, the volatility of high finances is, as you say, threatening its returns as this oligopoly seeks emergency credit to keep this rickety steam engine that we've built ourselves

moving. Yeah. And the volatility itself is the reason why you have the social unrest, because institutionally, you can't adapt to very volatile prices either, as well, right? I mean, you have some countries can, better than others. So if you look across the Middle East and North Africa and South Sahara Africa, which are the regions which are most exposed to very high food stock prices, so grain in particular, but also barley, oil seeds, and these kind of things that come, that are produced in Ukraine and Russia, where they're actually quite cheap to produce, and these poor countries rely on these exports, some countries have an institutional capacity to deal with volatile prices. So Egypt has state firms which buy up a great deal of

domestically produced wheat and imported wheat, and they control prices by controlling these supplies, and they have huge grain silos throughout the country, and they can soften these price shocks. Other countries have a fairly good domestic supply of grain, like Morocco, because they have very good irrigation agriculture. Other countries don't have this, so it's the volatility that kills them. If they have, in a single decade, two enormous spikes in food prices, and commodity prices, they run out of foreign reserves eventually, because their input bill ratchets up, and they can't stomach it socially, because every time you have these huge repercussions politically that just don't ebb, and then another wave comes, and then it gets worse over time.

And I think just to round us out back to Europe as well, we've got these, as you say, sort of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa are extremely vulnerable to price shocks in energy food, and how energy and food into relate, and all this stuff, especially sort of specifically the energy and food that's exported from Ukraine and Russia. But then I guess we say, well, how do we deal with these problems in Europe? This unrest in Europe is austerity, is crackdown, is the slow rolling back of expectations, and so on. I'm always sort of put in mind of how Europe tends to respond to these crises by making it so that if there's a fire on a Greek beach, people die, because Germany said that Greece can't have a fire

department anymore for its beaches. Yeah, the cause of social unrest in Europe is, yeah, you have declining real incomes, rising bills, et cetera, and you have little to no growth, and therefore little to no income growth and social mobility, but you have embedded growth obligations, like people expect to be living as well as their parents, but then because, of course, reality is that they're probably going to never be able to afford a house or accumulate savings, and they're going to live quite precariously for a lot of their life, that's where then the political energy comes from, right? It's a bit different, but it has the same source fundamentally. Yeah, and I guess by way of summing it up a little bit,

I think this whole half-hour conversation really has been the story of how these things have been, not just economic realities, but political choices about how people experience the economy, and they were built on a set of very shaky assumptions, and that if you want to understand why this population in Europe that has low incomes, low savings, very little, you might say, a propensity to raise either of those things is being shocked by much higher prices, and there seems to be little political will to really do anything about it outside of France. This is the story of how that happened in an international financial and also at a European level. These are all political choices, not to invest in renewables and things like heat pumps,

for electrification, in places like Germany, for instance, there's an entirely political decision, and they exposed you far more to this entire energy crunch globally and politically to Russia, but also the choice to unravel and unleash the derivatives markets in the early 2000s was also a purely political choice where, in fact, the financial industry lobbyists snuck in an amendment to a bill at the stroke of midnight more or less. All these things, if I can return to that onion example, it can be done quite easily, then it just needs to be political, it will do it to you. Eisenhower got mad at the fact that there were no onions supplied at some point, they passed this bill, and for the last 70 years, there hasn't been a single onion derivative

traded in Chicago at the broken tile. People got mad about it, and he said, fuck you, sit down, this is going to happen, and the same thing could happen to the current system, and it would hurt the big brokerages and banks, but that shouldn't concern anyone else. Well, I want to say, Dominic, it has been an absolute delight talking to you for the last half hour. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. And I'm going to throw back to myself in the past and or future to do the end matter. I'm sure Milo has plugs, all that stuff. So I'll see you probably with a slightly different voice in just a sec. Well, I for one really enjoyed that segment. Yeah, no, absolutely.

It was very good. Did we all learn a little? I learned that if I don't know how to finish a job, I can say, I don't know, come. I learned that the future of Europe, the future of cohesiveness in Europe is dependent on having a healthy generation of young men who come constantly. That's sure. That's for a kuma generation. That is right. So listen to EuroTrash with Anton and Dom. And also, thank you very much for being a patron of TF. It has been very fun talking to God damn it. You today all about the things that both the movie NFT and also the stuff about Europe. So we'll see you in the free episode in a few short days. Oh, also, I'm doing a show in Tallinn, in Estonia on, I think the second of June,

whichever day the Thursday is, I think it's the second or might be the day I'm going on holiday. Oh, well, there you go. But not to tell you coming to Tallinn. You know, I'm not coming to Tallinn. I'm going to Spain. So any listeners in Spain? Don't find him. I'm going to be in your country. So let that be enough. Let that be enough for you, you hogs. Yeah, Tallinn, either the first or the second of June, there'll be a ticket link on my website, which is always in the description. So if you are in Tallinn, which I know some of you are, why not come to that? You can go see the opera as well. Yeah, you can. You can be in the film, Tenet.

Some weird shit might happen. That's right. Yeah. Well, no, like, yeah, instead of like the instead of the opera scene, it's going to be like your comedy show. And that's actually been used as a way of like eradicating secret agents. But you don't really realize it because you're back, you've reversed in time. Wait, hang on. Isn't the opera scene in Kiev? I think this is a car chase. No, it was filmed but it was filmed in Tallinn. It's fade up. Oh, I see. You actually should just fade in the music over that conversation. That'd be funny.