TRASHFUTURE - Where We're Shopping, We Won't Need Eyes To See feat. This Machine Kills

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Ed and Jathan from This Machine Kills (@machinekillspod) are back to discuss another titan of the tech industry. Amazon's annual leader to shareholders has been released, and in it they advance a sort of inverse labour theory of value (who can be surprised!), with hilarious results. It's scale is now approaching a level that is hard to comprehend, so come with us across the event horizon. But first, we discuss Labour's performance in the elections and the leadership's steadfast ability to not learn anything. If you want more Labour talk, this week's bonus has us reviewing Jon Cruddas MP's terrible book about The Dignity of Work, which you can get here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/51099434 *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s live stand-up show (to be streamed over Zoom!) on May 30th here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/milo-edwards-pindos-tickets-152386986579 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 We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to this, uh, election special election desk coverage episode of T.F. It's election one. That's right. We're talking about the elections. Um, and if you. They sucked. If you could say there has been any one winner of the spate of local and by elections up and down the country.

Conservative party. No, I think it is. It's Laurence Fox and Richard Tice who have used this election to become better friends and now they're opening a business together. The pion nonce is real. They made it real. We laved it. Yeah.

What is it that you normally do before opening a business to someone? I forget. Well, what they did is they announced that they'll be opening a pub in central London serving quote only British food and requiring no masks, which will be the home of free speech and right wing comedy. Yes. That's right. Fucking gravy.

That's all you can have. Yeah. Just hook yourself up to the gravy team. What they're going to do is they're going to have like a, they're going to like a lot because it's a spite based pub and they're going to align with a spite based brewery that makes gravy flavored IPAs for proper brits. Yeah. I do feel like this is actually a useful sort of counter example.

This is what happens if real ale guys do coke. Like normally they just fixate on real ale, but it's like if you if you can combine a coke head with way too much money and a real ale fanatic who's probably a crypto Nazi. This is what you get. You get you get authentic British cuisine where you can go and listen to the trigonometry guys give like their eighth set of the week and everybody just kind of stares at their feet awkwardly because they don't know if they're supposed to watch trigger the Libs Rango perform.

There's what's really funny about Britain is there is genuinely that organization that are quite big the campaign for real ale as though there's something particularly moral about real ale as that's been replaced by all this fake ale. Awful. So what is real ale? Is it just like British ale? You know what? Yeah.

As opposed to like a more European style log. Yeah. It's gross as hell. That's the room temperature stuff. Did this emerge in the last few years or this has always been a plague, you know, lurking? It's been around for a while, I think. Yeah. Real ale guys.

There's like a harmless wing of them, which is like sort of nerds with graying pony tails who like will talk to you at length about speed metal. You got the political wing and then you've got the provisional military wing. Yeah. Anyway, so congrats to Lawrence Fox and Richard Tice for starting a business that will have just thousands of perfectly round red men taking pictures of like a watery curry being like, sorry, if it's your friend, just you know, I'm in it. Cultural appropriation.

Yeah. Triggered. And it's just. Yeah. You just get a giant place of bacon that you can just bury your face. I'm excited to. So I'm excited to go to the inn at the sign of the cry laugh emoji. I'm now just hooked up on a until real ale has served in every pub in the United Kingdom.

A phone box will explode every 12 hours. If you didn't already catch it, it is Riley, Nate, Milo and Alice. And we are joined. Very excited to be rejoined once again, collecting their as as a team, I believe, collecting their third time chit and fourth time chits as individuals. It is. It is. It is Ed and way to junior and J.

Thanks to Dowsky from this machine kills guys. How you doing? Hello, hello. Doing great. You know, happy to be here again. This is really good. Welcome to the trash feature plus lounge. Yeah.

I'm still waiting on that membership card and all the perks that come with it. I mean, I know things take a while to ship down to Australia. We'll get you into the VIP lounge at the fucking pie and. I got blown up in a phone box. Once your cards do come through, you will have access to the free champagne, a glass of free champagne on entry. No longer Prosecco for you guys. And you get to go into the roped off VIP area where you, Lawrence,

Fox and Richard ties can sit around a table, glumly looking at a bottle of vodka with some sparklers on it. And we get the AstraZeneca vaccine. That's right. You get to you get to feel a dead nauseous for 48 hours. Cool. All right. I'll be doing an AstraZeneca power hour where I take one shot of AstraZeneca

for 60 minutes every minute. So we're going to talk a little bit about Amazon's annual report and shareholders letter in a little while. But first we have some election results to review because labor a shit, shit, shit. When that happens, yeah, it ruled. We have to talk about the party that we don't want to talk about. Yeah.

Well, we have to because again, it's very satisfying to be proven right. Yeah. We told you so. We warned you everything that we told you is going to happen happened. You got owned and also you are now probably going to get divorced. Yeah. Yeah. We were owned before, but now they are owned.

Oh, how the tables have turned. Yeah. So basically what happened as a reminder is a bunch of local council elections took place up and down England. We had elections in Scotland and Wales as well. And we had a by-election for the MP representing Hartlepool, which was going to be considered a huge test of Starmer's ability to reclaim the like red wall seats that fell to the Tories.

Now, we all know all of the demographic reasons why that was basically been happening for the last 30 or 40 years. But it's very funny to basically say like, look, our election campaign that's been decided by the just crack-savvy personnel such as like Jenny Chapman and Ben Nunn is going to be, Kirstarmer is going to go get photographed holding flat pints in front of British flags while the Tories initiate a plan. To pace the provisional campaign for LA.

That's right. Well, the Tories initiate a plan of like plugging in the money hose and just turning it on seats that might vote for them. Yeah. No, it's fucking, I mean, yeah, like it's just, I don't know. But I think that there's like, there's two things going on here, which are like the reason why Labour are losing in seats like this is ultimately like a product of forces that have been going on for so long.

Like you can't blame it all on Starmer in the same way that you couldn't blame it all on Corbyn when Corbyn was losing seats. However, their complete failure to acknowledge what any of these reasons might be and like attempt to address any of them and be like, how about the adults are in charge? We're just going to show up and say Tony Blair shit and everyone's going to vote for us again. It's like, no, you idiot.

One thing that I point out too, though, is that like there are places where you have what you might call Corbyn style policies that these councils have held on or gained Labour seats. Similarly, you have obvious demographic trends at work in like Southern England where councils that have never had Labour councillors are electing Labour because people are being forced out of London because of prices. And so it's like, it's weird to me how there's this dual sort of there. I would call it triple even unwillingness to acknowledge what's happening.

Unwillingness to acknowledge what's happening in like these ex-industrial northern towns where the only way young people can get jobs don't suck us to leave. Unwillingness to acknowledge that like actually Labour is growing in some places where it wasn't before because of demographics or and also unwillingness to acknowledge that like in places like Preston or Greater Manchester or in Wales where like they've actually campaigned on we'll do stuff to improve your life. Here's what we do and here's how we can improve it like they've done well. Instead, it always comes back to no, you have to stick your dick in the flag

and wear a flat cap and hold the pint in front of people and say like we're going to destroy the heart left, you know, sing God save the Queen and like they think that's going to work. And even the people in Hartlepool are just like, what the fuck are you talking about? The only way to win elections is by getting the people who voted for you in the 1970s to vote for you again. New voters don't count. Their votes are thrown out. They don't count.

We don't want them. No, the only votes that count are people that used to vote for you in the 1970s and now are died in the wall conservatives. Those are the only constituency that matters. New Labour does not mean new voters. No, that's right. It doesn't. I think it's worth pointing out right before I go into sort of a Toin B and stuff

that yeah, Nate, as you point out Labour did not eat shit in Preston or in Salford where their local councils have a history of delivering things. Delivering things you might say that are at least a little bit more bottom up than how the Tories are doing right now in places like the Tees Valley where they won like a Turkmenistan percentage of the vote. Yeah, all whales for that matter. Where Mark Drakeford, who had been like endorsed by Corbyn increased his majority by like 10,000 votes.

But I want to talk about the comparison I think is between Tees Valley and Preston which are both like different ways to ameliorate austerity, right? Now that we're going to have a gold statue of Ben Houchin that turns to face the sun in Tees Valley but part of the reason why is that he's very Westminster connected and he's hooked up the money hose to Tees Valley and what he does is he gives out these indulgences like sort of free bus travel or whatever which is great, which you should have but it's not given as something like a right.

It's not something that was created sort of, created democratically you might say like in Preston and what worries me about that is that if you beat people down with austerity for 10 years and then you can basically give back 5% of what you've taken away from them, those cuts and you can give it back not as something that they fought for and built for themselves but as a privilege or a boon that you grant as their feudal lord and then you can take it away just as easily

whereas in councils that work on like the Preston model which is where there is a lot of like local co-op ownership where we worry about the ownership of things and the services that they provide it's much harder for a government to be like no you don't get that anymore, you don't get the privilege that we give you so what's happening is there appears to be a bottom-up and a top-down version of moving beyond austerity

and it seems like good labour councils understand that like Salford and Preston whereas even Greater Manchester under Andy Burnham but that's not sucking him off too much but it seems like the national party, the parliamentary labour party the UK wide one is basically constituted to never understand that because the problem is always like that Ash Sarkar is tweeting or that like there are some momentum members

who forgot to cancel their memberships or whatever once again the hard left and all this nest of vipers instead of seeing what's happening both in terms of like political reactions to moving beyond austerity or just demographic changes that are giving them ton bridge wells which is unthinkable

they are just basically because they are a nest of rats and vipers they all just know how to backstab one another and so that's why there are like rumours of affairs leaking and like Angela Rainer being fired and then it being briefed that actually she's not being fired she's being promoted

and getting rid of Lisa Nandy for disloyalty while Keir Starmer says he's going to change the thing that needs changing and that's the change he's going to make In Keir Starmer's labour party being fired kind of is a promotion like you're going to end up with a better job than the one you've got almost certainly

I was saying this to Nate the other day it's like what's really funny about the people who can't move beyond like Blairism and the politics of Blairism is that they refuse to do any of the shit that Blair did that worked like they refuse to have like an Alistair Campbell guy yelling at everyone and making sure they don't do stupid shit

like they have none of the like the thing about Blair was they were a bunch of people who were evil and smart and they did things in an evil and smart way and that's why they won and these guys are just like no we're going to be like evil and stupid you say that but Mandelson

Mandelson's back and yes baby what he did is haven't we missed him we missed Lord Mandelson at the time when we could have been exploiting Tory Sleaze we got Peter Mandelson back the guy who's not only his photograph with Epstein

but literally called Epstein in jail to try to get him to give him a personal favour I got that I'm trying to test the tensile strength of this hyoid bone can you check this out please but I'll put this out too that yesterday Mandelson was going on the radio

and TV saying that it was our failure comes down to two C's Covid and Corbin Corbin hasn't been the leader for 13 months the fuck are you talking about but once again I think another thing to bear in mind is that much like

Blair might as well be a billionaire but when you have this much money and dumb people surrounding you you have no real relationship with reality so this is the kind of stuff you say that you get people like between Polly Toynbee all of these guys are so memorable

which is what you want did you see the other thing that Peter Mandelson said which is that he blamed it on electing Ed Miliband instead of David he said people were coming up to him saying you picked the wrong brother in 2010

to be honest I was saying that I was the one who walked up to him and said that I really want David Miliband back I really need the extraordinary rendition guy who works for Facebook he's the one who's going to fix my fucking bin collections and horrible balls. Peter Mandelson spoke to like 5 year old Riley in the shorts

remember when bin men could water board speaking of remember when bin men were in the CIA it was better then pour a lot of water on your face it was good then as part of this sort of examination

of what you might call the tragedy of Blairism and the farce of Starmerism it's bonus episode be reading The Dignity of Labor by John Crutus which is like blurred by Starmer as like his offering to working people to understand

like the just sheer emptiness and nostalgia because it is an aesthetic project right all of the like you said like the Blair people like some of them at least maybe not Mandelson but like Campbell were like competent at doing at doing things just the things they were doing were bad

but in this case we have only the image and feel of professionalism as interpreted by lobby journalists who are like pond life essentially so a few more things here I welcome Blairism but I would call on it to go further and fire all of the competent people

so in 2019 and people who worked in the NHS only 6% of them supported the Tories I would like to ask Ed and Jason what do you think that number is now I'm going to guess

it's only had to have gone up right yes let's say 20 I'm afraid that's not quite it Jason okay well you're not giving me a hint if it's higher or lower so I'm going to be

I'm going to be conservative here and say 15% 42% oh my god this is this is after the conservatives the conservatives say that we're not going to we're going to give the NHS workers

after the Covid pandemic a pay rise equivalent to less than the rate of inflation something like what like 1.9% I think they said they were going to give them like an insulting amount and the nurses union had said they wanted a 15% raise Starmer had an opportunity to say that he would at least do something close

and he said he's like no I think we would offer a 2.5% and then I tried to negotiate higher is it because the Tories I wish I was exaggerating bang their pots and pans louder than Labour is that why the Tories were behind that boat

doing donuts in the 10s which as we all know was the turning point and also Keir Starmer was phoning in from the Australian autoerotic asphyxiation clinic which I think has chances a little bit that's right so

the last thing to note is Paulie Toynbee has said she's a journalist not a Labour insider but one of these she's very annoying though she's a complete idiot and you have to remember with Paulie Toynbee that number one

I believe her dad was a pretty significant leftist or Marxist intellectual in the UK and she obviously is sort of a failed daughter on a Synecure but if you really want true derangement you should go back and read some of her columns during the 2015 leadership election

for when Jeremy Corbyn won because it was like genuinely she tried to gain to tell people that actually the true enthusiasm was for Yvette Cooper I think is who she supported and then finally when she melted out she's like look I get it I went through a leftist phase in university too

but you have to understand that it's not electable the only person who's electable is the person who tells you that all you can expect is just boiled beans for the rest of you Yvette Cooper! What are the least electable people? It's such a good grift to be a red diaper baby

and then like parlay that into a conservative celebrity I mean like it worked for like Kamala Harris right like her father is a Marxist if any of us have children at all we really have to be careful Pete Boosterchurch's dad

is like a pretty renowned translator of Gramsci Ralph Miliband Basically if you are a Marxist academic never ever have children You actually have to kill your kid That's like a final test

You gotta do reverse psychology on kids I'm raising my kids Nazi to make sure they turn out Marxism Then there'll be an even better Marxist That's right A few more things Before I go into Toine B Labour has lost control

of eight councils and 310 councillors Including Luke the Nuke Aikhurst He is now no longer a Labour councillor What a shame He lost to a guy called Dick Wolf which is also very exciting Executive producer

and Green councillor Dick Wolf Dick Wolf took down the nuke last night and never underestimate the Dick Wolf The people of Oxfordshire are just huge fans of SVU and they looked at Luke Aikhurst I don't like the look of this guy

I'm very excited to welcome six Mike of Trash Uche Luke Aikhurst Ice tea is going to show up at your council meetings if you live there Especially The kids are calling these things cycle lanes

Are you saying that the bin collection is late? So let's That's your ice tea I can't do voices I really appreciate that you still try Riley You won't let people get you down Of course I will never let people get me to stop doing voices

Now I know what Milo feels like That's right I feel like it every day actually Writing in the Guardian When politicians lose elections they must blame themselves but never the voter They just not follow her own advice Failure sends them into male culprits

of listening to seek out the fault within their party Again, when we know what because this is all about the projection of the image of competence projection of the image of political seriousness and so on, we know what they really mean by listening means just getting more conservative because when you are purely retail politics

purely politics as market research and matching what we offer to what people want, you just become more conservative because that's what's being campaigned for more effectively Although Keir has gone a bit further Instead of just doing active listening he's done active listening

followed by purging the entire stuff left Which is some fucking funny to me They only know how to backstab It's very fun Look how bad I want it Yeah, and just like

fucking knifing Angela Rainer and then denying that he had done that and then briefing that she was mad because he had promoted her but not to a thing we can say what it was So, she says The rest of us are under no such constraint to pretend the voter can't be wrong

or irresponsible, gullible or bribed without checking the basic facts able to click as the mouse Voters have no excuse with Keir Starmer and his front bench a thoroughly electable decent and honest alternative compared with the worst gallery on us You can't say they're electable

when they just lost Milo That's the one thing they're not Milo, she's electable if you fucking go for it That's right Devin somewhere is tearing their shirt right now What do you think?

Electable is basically just makes me feel good about myself as a columnist who would have a dinner party with That's basically what all these columnists mean And the veil It is unpierced by events

No, it doesn't change It never changes Some people are electable and that's completely untethered from elections Much like the line is untethered from the economy Similarly, electability, nothing to do with elections For a while, electability here they were more explicit about

would you grab a drink with them and then they just realized that's a little weird So we'll just say electable It's the same exact thing Would you let your kid be watched by this politician? Okay, then you should go out and vote Would you go out for a bovril with Kirstalmer? Would you go down there?

Would you go down to pie nonce for a bovril and then you'll pile with Kirstalmer? I would He's electable I get a nice gravy ale I'm taking Kirstalmer We were watching Constantine kissing doing a set about pronouns

I just saw a news update I don't know if you guys are familiar with this but Kirstal incredibly labor-centric city Basically, it wasn't that way before but with the advent of Corbin a lot of activists got involved

It took over every council in the city They were doing very well They basically swung hard to either de-selecting or suspending or literally just muting the mic of people in councils speaking out against, for example the suspension of Corbin

or in favor of any kind of socialist policy Their labor MP is a huge landlord and loves being pro-landlords She spoke against the eviction ban stuff like that They just had a 40% swing to the Greens and a bunch of labor councillors

lost their positions in Bristol Because once again, when you're like where the fuck are you idiots going to go? Who are you going to vote for? Especially in local elections It's really embarrassing to lose to the Greens Just like a white guy with dreadlocks who's like, if you put the wrong thing in your recycling

you should get a £10,000 fine That's respect for the bin man That's right Remember when the green men were in front I thought the bin men were environmentally friendly Yeah The green men Yeah, that's right

There could be a Tory green coalition where they increase military spending but it's to provide predator escorts for the bin men That would win 110% of the vote in Britain Geron escorted bin men There's only two green men we respect

in this country The ones who take out the trash in the Middle East and the ones who take out the trash on your street That's right Exactly I would say living in Australia you've actually vicariously absorbed a certain bit of the British mentality

which is 100% it One thing I think bears mentioning after this as well Aside from the massive mishandling of the whole strategy by Labour generally there is an emerging

trend here as well which is like the places that are flipping from Tory to Labour worthy Tumbridge Wells is the big one Private Eye used to have this running joke where they would have letters from fictional Tories that would be written

that were always addressed disgusted of Tumbridge Wells This was the Mary White House homeland and the fact that it's gone Labour is actually seismic and I think no one's quite appreciating that much that's driven by demographics but those demographics are

I hate to say it those are educated relatively more middle class probably property owning now demographics so like Labour if it wants to still be the party of a working class which again I know it doesn't but if there is to be some kind of

next opportunity for a takeover that is something it's going to have to reckon with right? These are relatively well off, more middle class more educated possibly property owners who are now voting for them and you need to make

the only way forward presumably is to allow those demographics to keep voting for you while making sure that you emphasize like the localism in the old sort of post-industrial working class towns of like oppressed and mainly so close to Manchester who can say

but that there is going to need to be a coalition that is built between those two camps of voters but then again fuck the Labour party they're probably never going to go back to caring about that kind of thing so they can do one We're all greens now I guess

Yeah why not Sorry Milo It's dreads for you It's dreads for you Put on the Birkenstock sandals Welcome to Crystal's future This is an overview podcast about healing yourself I vote for the greens if

Iced tea told me to Getting the iced tea endorsement is really all that it would take to switch us to green tea Thank you So let's fuck you Let's Let's move off

British politics for a while but if you do want more British politics about the emerging promise or lack thereof of scarmerism that is the bonus episode this week I look forward to Milo trading in his new convertible for a new electric bicycle

Oh yeah Oh man there's nothing more cocks than an electric bicycle Just get a regular bicycle Just get a normal bike so I'm pretty cocked actually No you're gonna get a recumbent bike that you're gonna come in down to the studio

I love getting destroyed by a truck five meters from my house I regret to announce that Milo has been killed after his penny-farthing careened into a DPD van It's a warrior's death Yeah and also you're gonna get rid of all your shoes

you're gonna wear a lot of hemp necklaces Yeah it's gonna be great recumbent bicycles for when all you can do is lay down and take it That's right yeah absolutely Let's talk about some dreams are dying out there another

car another sort of car company or car adjacent company Lyft the ride hailing service in the US has sold off its self-driving division with the quote Lyft is set up to win

the transition to autonomous driving through a hybrid network of human drivers and AVs advanced marketplace tech and leading fleet management capabilities so in so doing we have gotten rid of our full self-driving research division because we have realized that it is a massive white elephant it doesn't work I mean I love

to win the transition more than anyone but it seems like all of these people are just kind of like like Lyft and even Tesla were like car companies like but the stalking horse was self-driving cars that was going to be the main thing that's what the valuation

as inflated as it was was based on was that they were going to invent the self-driving car and now it seems like we've just gone sort of this has now flipped over and all of these companies going ah it turns out we can't make a self-driving car that doesn't immediately kill you by driving you into a dvd van

Yeah immediately runs over the recumbent bicycle guy Yeah yeah yeah and so now we're just going to we're going to quietly ditch that and we're going to go back to whatever our our nominal sort of purpose was I think that was like exactly also what Uber did Uber you know

burned like 30 almost 30 billion dollars of investor capital sold off like it's AV unit basically it paid another company to take over it's AV unit like here just take the shit off of our books after they spent like over 10 billion dollars on autonomous vehicles and for years they're like no look the reason

why we can't make any money right now is because you have to pay the driver we're going to get rid of obviously in like 10 years and now fuck off fuck all that you know of course It puts us in a really weird position as Marxist of being the only people even like remotely concerned with the profitability of these

companies like like they have completely abandoned all business fundamentals and I again and again just feel like an old crotchety like business school professors and being like what about the fundamentals

Warren Buffett Sudeski over here yeah the economy really does make me feel smarter every day because I'm just looking at stuff and I'm like well at least I'm not stupid enough to come up with that but the thing is they came up with the story and the story made them billionaires

yeah it's incredible isn't it I also really loved that statement because it was like this automatic vehicle thing it's going fine and there's nothing to see here however we are canning it we're going to win the transition by not marketing double speak and the thing is right I don't want to

come across as like I would like driving for long periods of time sucks it would be nice if there was some kind of an autonomous way to transport lots of people you know and maybe one sort of direction or another where they wouldn't have to

pay attention to the wheel some kind of some kind of a well I imagine it would need to go to many different cars you could just build like maybe a track or something for it like a cage you know you chain the people down and there it goes down a central route you know maybe there stops along

the way something like this almost as though the whole full self-driving full the whole full self-driving fantasy is basically just just like the sort of the autonomous free individual is like a fantasy as an economic actor right these there is no such thing as the free

autonomous individual in like in a complex society of people just doesn't exist doesn't make sense doesn't make sense to reason that way all this talk of trains calm down there Pete Buttigieg alright

we're buses you know we don't want buses we want a perpetual ride but that's just it right it's this idea that I am a free autonomous individual I must therefore have a transport solution that is completely key to every last thing I could

possibly need and we just and the fact is that's just not possible in a real city full of real people in like Milo on a recumbent bike cutting in and out of traffic like it just doesn't work and so like the solution to this is easy and something we discovered in the

like 19th century which is like public transport trains that's right everyone should have a convertible the what you're getting at as well Riley is really interesting because it's kind of a chicken and a question because it's like

you know the argument against trains is like oh well that will require us to build a bunch of infrastructure right like a bunch of heavy rail and light rail and like stuff that doesn't exist especially in the US for a large part and so it's like oh autonomous vehicles

we can just use all of this road vehicle infrastructure that's already in place and get around that problem but the fact of the matter is is that it's not only that like cities are complex in a social way but also a lot of the infrastructure is too

bad for autonomous vehicles to be able to like technically drive on like you know even the fact that like a lot of you know all the potholes and but even like the lane divider lines need to be repainted so that the cars

can actually recognize that they're in a lane and so like they want to get around this infrastructure problem with AVs but that would require re-hauling all of the infrastructure in the US anyways So fuck it

Recumbent bikes for all I actually saw a map where they superimposed Texas onto like Germany and that proved to me that you just can't have trains in America. It's impossible because they never built trains in America before there's certainly there's nothing in the history of America where most of it was

done actually by building huge railways No. No, that never happened We just have no idea how to do this It was all done with cars Like a woman's in concrete you know nobody knows how to do it It's that We're in the train dark ages Also partly when it came time

to build the trains America didn't care about the people it was violently expropriating but now America does slightly does slightly care about those people who it would practically have to violently expropriate or not non-violently probably because it would mostly be like guys getting eminent domain off of like a

subsidized corn farm I mean yeah if you own a massive ranch or something in Texas and someone wants to buy 10% of it to build a railroad they're probably going to pay you over the fucking odds inevitably But I think also the fact is right it comes down to the fact that that infrastructure

was all built when America was like we don't care about the people who currently live here you know basically kill them imprison them drive them out etc and now a big overhaul of an infrastructure would require collective action and sacrifices being made by people

that America as a settler state is unwilling to ask to make sacrifices right I think we have to convince people that we have to colonize rich people if we can do that then we can get the old fucking engine going again Crawford Ranch

would be turned into just turned into a rail yard I also think that a pretty instructive example of this would be if you look at what's happened with California with high speed rail like it's because of the way the laborious way in which the consultations now have to be done and just the endless slew of lawsuits from

the people who own the land when they try to build anything and then obviously the funding problems and just the blow and the usual fucking skimming and all the shit that happens with you know basically we can't do stuff even with they can't do stuff via the public sector so they have to just dump money into the private sector to build everything

you wind up with a situation where the very first thing that Trump's department of transportation person did was cut the funding to the high speed rail thing because it's a right wing you know fucking how do you describe it like it's a thing right wingers lose their minds about

California high speed rail even if they don't live in California the same way that people in like a faster share are convinced that London is stab city because like they hate city con like it's absolutely a it's just like fixation on their port and never thought I'd say this but we need

randianism back and the reason why I'm excited to hear why is because there was a time when right wingers had an aesthetic attraction to trains and now they're just like no fuck trains no we need to convince them that actually

it's based as I understand it the air corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles is like one of the busiest if not the busiest in the world and obviously this would be a huge thing if they could get it done but like it's as it stands right now they're hoping it would be done by like 2040 and the initial

consultation started in 2008 and it's like the Tories fucking suck but they'll have built like like HS 19 by the time that the first fucking train goes from San Francisco to LA if it ever happens we'll build the train after we destroy the ecosystem and hopefully before the big one

that's our timeline let's a little more about FSD and then I want to go on to Amazon the dream of FSD is also rapidly dying at Tesla where some basically they had some legal disclosures from Tesla basically had to

clarify that Elon's tweets shock horror do not match the engineering reality of Tesla at five levels of full self-driving Tesla's currently stuck at level two which is where if you put a sack of potatoes in the front you can burn to death trapped

in a car as a bet. Yeah then you get roast potatoes. That's cool. How else do you want to make roast potatoes? I can't think of the simpler. I can't think of a cheaper way. But if I go to the store to buy potatoes and you want me to roast them you want me to go to the store put them in the car drive home take them out

of the car go into my house and then put them laboriously one by one in the oven. But what I could do might some process improvements just as just is just be in the car and yeah I'll be killed but then my family will have delicious roast potatoes. That's right. No. So effectively

right even though January even though in January musk said to investors he's quote highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year and by the way if you were all the way back to our episode about Tesla with quantian full self-driving has been a year away for the last

five or so years at Tesla. Yeah. Which means it's going to happen really soon. It's going to must be. Yeah. Come on. It's been a year away for so long. Yeah. Probably already happened. We just don't know about that. That's right. That's right. That's so good we've not even noticed. Yeah. Well they have to put let the project

to human into the into the driver's seat. Yeah. Your mom is actually Tesla. You think you're driving the car. My car is actually like the Flintstone phone like none of it does anything. I'm just having fun. Yeah. Another dream as well died with Elon went on

SNL and called Dogecoin a hustle and now it seems that by naming it what it was always known to be he has destroyed it which is very funny to me. Oh no. I also I remember reading yesterday that one wallet owns

twenty two billion dollars worth of Dogecoin and when I read that I was like oh this is good this is not a bubble this is actually like this is the future this is great. Yeah. That's right. But it's very funny to me right that everyone who and it's as happens with any of the cryptocurrency scams every or even

some of the stuff like the pump and dumps like Nokia or whatever is that everyone involved knows it's a pump and dump and is very honest about that with one another but as soon as it is like recognized as a hustle by by someone like Musk because the whole point is

it is this this projection of belief down by Musk onto a bunch of you know like fundamentally weak-willed idiots who are just able to bask in that collective belief taken from him we really do live in an increasingly feudal world don't we? Oh yeah.

Yeah. Basically they are to Elon Musk where all of those guys in the middle ages were to like Genghis Khan when they believed he was like the second coming of the Messiah and he was going to make Europe Christian again and defeat the Muslims. Yeah. That's basically what they think Elon Musk is but actually

the guy on a horse is going to kill them all. He's going to take us to Mars and we're going to somehow live there with the power of the joke coin. I fully I fully believe that Elon Musk has it was in this power to make sure that some people possibly including him die on Mars and I'm

willing to let him try it. The thing about Dogecoin I think that the interesting thing about it to me and it's something we haven't talked about before and I think probably won't talk about again but just the the simple fact that the magic of it

was that it's kind of a joke. It's known to be a scam but if we all sort of collaborate together we can make something hilarious happen which is a joke cryptocurrency featuring an eight year old meme suddenly becomes worth

actual money. I think it has a nine million dollar valuation. Well what it is is the ideology machine kind of getting a paper jam and just printing out a bunch of weird streaky shit. And that's the weird

thing. It's perfect that this is the case with Dogecoin now because it was created as a parody of Bitcoin. Self-consciously created as a parody of Bitcoin and then it started taking off and the founder of it was just like oh I mean

yeah I created it as a parody but it's actually really serious now. I actually believe in this. That's always a good sign of something to build your economy on. I saw this chart also that I was saying there's more

cryptocurrency circling than US currency right which makes me feel good. That's definitely not another bubble or risk factor we should think about. It's fine. It's fine. What's the worst that can happen? It's not as though the price of Bitcoin

is being held up by US dollar tethers which are themselves basically being minted in a very sort of dodgy way. It's a stable coin that connects the value of Bitcoin and the value of the US dollar. And there's this idea that each time

a tether is minted then a certain amount of other currency will be purchased to maintain that peg. But there are a lot, let's just say a lot of reporting has been done on tether that essentially it's kind of the same thing.

There's actually quite a bit more that's just sort of increasing its value and there's a feedback loop between the value of tether and Bitcoin. So the fact is all of these things that are, that's what I mean when I say the ideology machine got a paper jam in it and now we are just sort of

it's like the dancing plagues that would come over like towns in the Holy Roman Empire right? It's just the, it is stuck. We left the ideology machine on maximum and now it's starting to rattle around. Oh no, we have an autonomous ideology

machine it's self-driving. Especially with the tether it's like there's no evidence that they actually peg it one to one but they just say they're like, no, no, no, it's one to one. Yeah, it's one to one. Trust me, it's one to one.

It's one to one, no worry. And that's like yeah, significant driver for one of the major speculative asset bubbles that we're going to see pop within the decade. It'll be good. I feel comfortable about this. At least there are no systemic risks.

Yeah, of course not. I mean, it's not like institutions are normalizing it or legitimizing it or incorporating it into their balance sheets. That would be a problem. Yeah. Great scale who? Musk has essentially put a brick on the gas pedal of the ideology machine

dove out of the driver's side car and is convincing everybody it's self-driving into a wall. That's right. And he's epic. And although I'll say this so if SNL brings

back the Californians or Celebrity Jeopardy then they can they can have fucking Prince Andrew on. I don't care. I will watch it. I think the next move for Elon needs to be either paint doge coin

on the side of a rocket and then have it blow up and that will really do it in or just shoot it in a laser just take a physical big coin and shoot it into the fucking Mars. I don't know. At his future resting spot

where he'll crash. I think SNL should have Prince Andrew on. I think it'd be a fun sketch where he goes to loads of places where it would be really useful to sweat like a sauna for example. He could do like you do an Epstein but I think he could reference it and they'd be like oh that was

they'd say it's a little far but like everyone like becomes a cult favorite on YouTube in five years. It's blind date but all the people lined up for Prince Andrew like people he met through Epstein on the other side of a wall describing themselves. But no I honestly believe SNL worth watching if the Californians

or Celebrity Jeopardy is on. Two very funny running sketches. That's the main take away from that segment. So that's a little bit on sort of full self-driving and the ideology machine. Let's talk about a little more ideology

a little more sort of consent manufacturing but it's happening from Amazon right in front of our eyes. And now Jathan the two of you and I we spoke about this a little bit beforehand but with the publication of Amazon's annual shareholders letter

that accompanies its annual report it's a good opportunity to get an insight into something that is now becoming difficult to comprehend because of its size. If you try to think of the number of all the stars that are in the galaxy that is not easy to do it is hard to think about

things once they pass a certain threshold and Amazon is very quickly coming to this threshold especially as its growth has been accelerated about a decade's worth within the last year. Yeah. Go ahead. I was just going to say that I think

it is also constantly important to beat that John. It's really impossible to comprehend how stupendous Amazon's numbers are by the book and also how big of a juggernaut they are, how stupendous the numbers are and how they're only going to get worse

for us but better for them and they're best. Stupid cotton does this spinning Jenny? This is all the spinning Jenny's fault. I think this question of Amazon's bigness, like Ed said, it's really important to beat this drum

because it's increasingly impossible to keep all of Amazon in your head at once but also I've noticed in my own thinking especially as you know looking at companies like Amazon reading their annual reports but also like Ed and I

on this machine kills have been doing an occasional series of episodes looking at asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard and these big index funds and here we're looking at numbers that are well into the trillions of dollars

and I've noticed this with my own thinking that my own sense of scale has gone completely out of whack because I'm now having to attune myself to thinking in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars trillions of dollars and now it's like startups

that are like hundreds of millions of dollar range, I'm like alright you'll get there one day. Who cares about unicorns anymore? What the fuck is he? It's worth a billy? There's a dog walking app that's worth that.

Fuck off. We've had this level of inflation in the economy and particularly in the tech industry over the last just five years that means that like billion dollar companies unicorns are fucking like

a dime a dozen, right? You gotta be thinking in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars. And it always again, this is a question of scale it always felt like there was this explosion of tons and tons of tech companies

but what was actually happening was as we've talked about before on this podcast you talked about in your podcast the concentration of wealth and the appearance of democracy, not democracy but the appearance of choice and competition and innovation

well what was actually happening was the rapid and only getting more rapid concentration of power and wealth which essentially is power, the power to command human labor into this or smaller and smaller hands.

That also means right the explosion in size means that that's that like the challenge to challenge these organizations is now becoming equally difficult, right? So for example, right with Amazon increasing the wages of only it's

I believe us and UK staff to a minimum wage of fifteen dollars or pounds and what was the UK staff offhand you know if that increase was to fifteen pounds an hour or fifteen dollars an hour in pounds but I don't know offhand I would suspect it's

probably a fifteen dollar equivalent yeah but what it was that that that sounds about right yeah so but what the thing to think about here right is that number one the campaign to make Amazon pay a fair wage only actually

translated to a fair wage in those two countries in places like Spain which are huge hubs for them that has not happened and number two like we talked about earlier with the Ben Houchin thing right yes the higher pay is good yes these things are good to have in themselves but

when they are when they are a matter of patronage they can always be taken away right this is an example of midden's advent this is the this is Jeff Bezos understanding that he must give out patronage to head off a problem but this is not something that

has been the the minimum wage as he talks about in the letter right it is to head off you in your organizing it is to head off bottom up power it is it is a a tactical scrap right and the fact that the fact

of its size means that it is it is able to continue to hand out scraps to prevent things like that can actually challenge it because in growing and this is from its letter to shareholders in growing it has

increased its size to 1.2 million people employed full time and half a million further as delivery drivers employed by Amazon's Flex program which are contractors that are basically you are a full-time employee for Amazon but you are

subcontracted through a local trucking company right so it's 1.7 million people who are effectively directly employed by by Amazon though half a million were sort of in a bit of a fiction like that is

that is enormous and the potential for labor organizing is huge in that population but Amazon must as a priority it must make sure that never happens yeah absolutely I mean this we saw this investment right like they pulled out all the stops

you know in terms of busting that union because they can't let a precedent or you know a good example be set in any way I think the the question of employment and and Amazon's

value creation quote-unquote is really interesting and Jeff Bezos is letter as well like you know we were joking about it I think on Twitter Riley it's like you know the the the capitalist are in the process of creating an anti-labor theory of value right now and that's

like a big part of what Bezos is letter to share owners which is a weird tick he doesn't call them shareholders it's the letter to share owners yeah it's an owner economy but like he lays out all of these like really

wild calculations like the math of capital is on full effect in the letter in terms of talking about all of the value creation that Amazon has done in 2020 and part of that is right to this question of employees

he talks about how they paid $80 billion of wages to employees plus an additional $11 billion of benefits and various payroll taxes and they reframe that as not not paying $91 billion to the

employees but rather this is value that Amazon created not value that the employees earned through wages and creation of surplus value but rather the wages Amazon paid its employees was actually value created

by Amazon I think you could say if tech is essentially capital right because that's why this is much like the much like a factories capital is it spinning Jenny tax capital is its process its software its logistics

whatever there you are essentially getting a capital theory of value right which is and this is I clock this as well where I wrote this as sort of almost a weird version of commodity fetishism but with a process instead of a commodity so he says customers complete

28% of purchases on Amazon in 3 minutes are less and half of all purchases are finished in less than 15 minutes compare that to the typical shopping trip to a store driving parking searching store aisles waiting in the queue finding your car or he is waiting in the line finding your car driving home research suggests the

typical physical store trip takes about an hour if you assume that a typical Amazon purchase takes 15 minutes that it saves you a couple trips to the store a week that's more than 75 hours a year saved so if you get a dollar figure let's value time savings at $10 an hour which is conservative 75 hours multiplied by $10 an hour

gives you value creation for each prime member of about 630 pounds net dollars rather net of the cost of a prime membership we have 200 million prime members for a total in 2020 of $126 billion of value creation this is a perfect example

of a capital theory of value where all of this value is just sort of enjoyed by P Android by consumers as a surplus that comes from nowhere and it's also interesting what value is left out of this letter to right doesn't

mention the $679 billion market capitalization increase and doesn't mention that as wealth that share owners would have right instead focuses on the net income because it'd be a little too rude I guess to push

the value creation number to over a trillion dollars right you know people might get their pitch for it so you have to say they only made 21 billion instead of 700 billion that they made by dominating markets during the pandemic and dominating not just consumer

markets but also labor markets as well right and if you want to talk about what Mark's talks about commodity fetishes what we talk about is the sort of elision of all of the processes and value that goes into the production of the commodity as the commodity itself

and what amp companies like Amazon and also Uber and DoorDash and all of these companies do is instead of having a commodity that is fetishized it is an invisible process that's fetishized when you feel like oh we're so lucky to be living in this high tech world where I can order delivery or DoorDash with the touch of a button

that what's actually happened is the technologies for managing sort of getting controlling and disposing of human labor have become just so so so incredibly advanced it's not that the food production and distribution technologies have become advanced it is essentially

that you are enjoying a way that capital has increased the surplus it can command from labor and then has tricked you into thinking that that is a very slick new process right that like Amazon has solved intractable logistical problems not that Amazon

has figured out has solved one problem which is like how to bring slavery back and then like gloss over something else which is not a particularly difficult problem yeah I saw some of that too right they certainly weren't the first ones to do it even within

a corporate framework you heard about these guys called the US government yeah I mean like Marx also talks about this distinction between absolute surplus value and relative surplus value right and so it's like you know relative surplus value is you just

you make the worker more efficient right so they produce more value in the same amount of time spent working and then absolute surplus value is you just make them work longer hours right and Amazon's like why not both right like we've perfected the process

of maximal extraction of both absolute and relative surplus value and then capitalists just see that as like oh well it's because Amazon's like more efficient and difficult and that's what we talk about fetishism is

the sort of imputation of an almost religious or mystical quality to something right it's easy to forget that in amongst all the coats you know Marx was a creature of his time he was very interested in sort of in spiritual

in the idea of the literature of spiritualism or of Gothic horror and stuff that's why he talks about capital as a vampire and so like the idea of the idea that there is a kind of ideological magic

spell that is cast over a commodity or in this case a process is hardly a new one it's a proud Marxist tradition in fact of saying that essentially some magic has happened here no that's exactly right like it is it's all about

and this is the way that we relate to Amazon as consumers right it's all about alienating us from those processes right making us think that we get our you know next day or same day delivery from Amazon because of some magic of innovation

rather than some magic of just grueling exploitation I'm sure you get into this but like Bezos talks about this near the end of the letter as well where if I can quote from the letter

he says quote in this value creation is not a zero sum game it is not just moving money from one pocket to another drawing the box big around all of society and you'll find that innovation is the root of all real value creation

and value created is best thought of as a metric for innovation I mean this is all about telling a story of how Amazon not only creates just like so much value for every for everything that it touches and you know

which is which is everything in society but does so by being the most innovative inventive company in the world like Bezos goes to great extent to call himself over and over I am an inventor at the end of the day I am nothing but

an inventor it's the same kind of illusion of he's trying to make you think he's someone tinkering around in a garage on trying to invent a whiz bang or new kinds of widgets or whatever when in fact

it is all about enclosure I mean we also look at if you actually look in the report itself Amazon's like most of Amazon's growth from revenue and I think we've said this before on the podcast continues to come from Amazon Web Services which is about the enclosure and privatization or increased

enclosure and increased privatization by one company of the internet right it's and also creation of services that are then going to try to enclose physical life right like cities or you know public spaces or devices that people have

and trying to create these with you know technologies that just network them into more surveillance because importantly Amazon Web Services is not only just the heavy capital right like Amazon it's as a corporation is very heavy in the sense that it actually does own a lot

of tangible assets like data servers and all the warehouses right I think it actually leases most of its warehouses but it's heavy in that sense but AWS is also like was getting at a huge software

service you know that's what like Amazon recognition right the facial recognition program was through AWS right like so increasingly it's both like enclosing the software and the hardware of the industry and everything that touches

like ring like ring rings sidewalk all these things that are just invading and colonizing our personal lives or whether or not you give you know consent to it or not I was thinking about this too because it's interesting that you brought up the fact that you know in the grand scheme of things their

retail isn't necessarily their biggest revenue generator we when we did our show in Birmingham in 2019 Hussain and myself Riley I think you were in the car too we drove up from London to Birmingham and on the way there we passed by Amazon distribution center and it was like

it was a fantastically new building and also just like enormous just just it felt like like like multiple Sam's clubs stacked on top each other and then also laterally like it was just absolutely gigantic and you think about that and you're like wow yeah Amazon really is this retail

powerhouse for sure but then you start looking into it and you're like yes but then they also own Whole Foods and they also own they've bought Audible they've bought Goodreads they've bought I'm trying to think of other things on the top of my head like not just content stuff but like you were saying things like Ring or they're hosting

all the websites that you use I'm pretty sure even like something like Patreon and their web services that they're hosting is AWS like basically there's no if you wanted to boycott everything that Amazon controls like not just not just supports or sustains but literally controls like you'd have to basically live like

Ted Kaczynski I mean at this point it's just it's ubiquitous it is like a true in the true sense like a monopoly and the way that like the United States was like a historically unique hegemon Amazon is like historically unique monopoly I mean they do fashion they do music they do video games

right they do clothing they do like widgets they do food they do the software they do retail I mean there isn't an industry that is touched by them they create content they create shows to produce them I mean it's like almost every single arena of life

they have a foot in the door or they're leveraging AWS profits to get a foot in the door and the sad thing is for Ted Kaczynski the sooner or later you won't even be able to send mail bombs without involving Amazon in the process Prime delivery for you sir Prime citizens there is a bomb

in your bell so Amazon Amazon's report actually indicates who they think their competitors are because annual reports for companies to shareholders have to give like these are required disclosures is it the Eldritch Gods well more or less the Eldritch Gods

the federal government unabombers you guy the spirit of the earth itself so number one physical e-commerce and omnichannel retailers publishers vendors distributors manufacturers and the producers of the products we sell and offer to consumers and businesses two publishers producers and distributors of physical digital and interactive

media of all types in all distribution three web search engines comparison shopping website social networks web portals and other online and app based means of discovering using or requiring goods and services either indirectly or in collaboration with other retailers or companies that provide companies that provide e-commerce

services including website development and hosting omnichannel sales inventory supply chain management advertising fulfillment customer service and payment processing five companies that provide fulfillment and logistic services from the selva third parties whether offline or online six companies that provide information technology services or products including on-premise or cloud based infrastructure

and other services seven companies that design manufacture market or sell consumer electronics telecommunications or electronic devices eight companies that sell grocery products online or physical stores nine companies that provide advertising services whether in digital or other formats I

can I throw can I throw one out there just that I saw here in the UK even during the pandemic so we we live really close to a big morrison's grocery store in Peckham and we I would typically before the pandemic you know I would go I would go go shopping there but then like if you want to

get like heavy stuff I don't own a car so you schedule delivery and like there's like a minimum purchase or whatever well they ran out of delivery slots during the pandemic and a lot of places did the grow online grocery places in the UK did but they most of them sort of added to the workforce and added more slots that way what what morrison seems

to have done from what I can tell is that the only way you can get morrison's delivery slots aside from the small number that they they they haven't changed is doing it through Amazon so now when I go to the the big morrisons in Peckham I'll notice like you'll just see all of the Amazon shoppers just start like

hauling these what look like fucking dolly carts just full of people's different shopping because rather than add I maybe they couldn't add the capacity but the way that they they managed to get more customers is to just have Amazon take it over and it's like that's an example of Amazon not like a big you know marquee sort of acquisition

like when they bought Whole Foods but rather you know they have just basically they have supplanted those companies own capacity for doing delivery for example and like I can only imagine that's gonna you know that if I'm noticing that as one

anecdote I can only imagine that anywhere where Amazon has a presence that's also the case and not just with groceries with any other service well I found really insane is when I found out that Google uses Amazon Web Services that to me was an absolute mind fuck well it's that it's it is

even even now there are like there are sort of recent company companies that have gone public like Snowflake which just exist as a way to connect sort of disparate holdings across G Cloud as your AWS and so on as like data piping

between these behemoths these things Snowflake a few more things I want to say about Amazon which I think are worth talking about right back to sort of scale right we talk about Amazon Amazon as it faces consumers and Amazon as it faces

laborers from an article written by Alex Press about about sort of Amazon's effect on the even when you're either buy buy from it directly nor sell your labor to it it's still deeply affects your town and and Bezos loves to talk about

how by putting Amazon distribution centers in places or putting Amazon office in places raises the standard of living of the whole town however press in reviewing this book about also about Amazon by Alec McGillis writes the following the company had in a sense segmented

its workforce into classes and spread them across the map but also it means that Amazon effectively gets to segment whatever country it's in into classes geographically that there were the engineering and software developer towns there were data center towns there were warehouse towns

so Amazon chose the Columbus area as its location for Amazon Web Services US East and then picked three towns north of the city for its centers Hillier Dublin and New Albany and these are the right sort of ex-urban communities to target wealthy enough to support good schools for employees also sufficiently insecure in their

civic infrastructure and identify to be easy marks the warehouses were in areas poorer than those sites so in towns like Obex and Etna were close enough to these struggling towns of southern and eastern Ohio to be in the plausible reach of a long commute for those desperate enough to undertake

it so because of its size it is able to it is able to essentially reproduce and re-entrench class like class divisions such as they are by sort of geographically locking in an area's prosperity might it raise it

a little bit these those claims it does but again that when you have the top-down model you reproduce more than you change right yeah and I think that's a those are good points because that's also something that doesn't get talked about too much that reproduction that is

necessary as per Amazon's logic right it needs to have those white-collar work places so it can socialize its workers and their families and you know ingratiate with in some cases regulators like

they're doing in DC with their Crystal City Enclave or in other places where they just need to take advantage of like the inability of a place to regulate them right or to challenge them but in other places right reproducing this and then coming in

and undermining unionized labor and then becoming a monopsony you know the only employer in town the only buyer of labor in town and then basically saying oh we have this $15 minimum wage aren't we better than every other retail it's like yeah sure but you destroyed everything else

right or you undermine everything else by moving yeah and to that point as well I mean even the the claim that like they raised the standard of living by moving into a place is empirically false like there there have been studies that show when Amazon opens up

a warehouse in a in a location the local wages for other warehouse jobs not a Amazon just other jobs in the same sector fall by an average of 3% but in some locations as much as 30%

and so like you know Amazon whether you work for them or not if they move into your town chances are they're still gonna fuck you right like because your wages are going to drop and I think this is again something that he obviously

because the thing is right we have entered a new era of what kind of ideology these companies are manufacturing they're no longer saying the big ones are no longer saying we're disruptive innovators the big ones now are saying we are socially essential

right because they now have to work with not just they don't just have to get investors they have to work with governments that we're going to continue allowing them to operate in the way that they do right Amazon's biggest problem now isn't any other company it's the government

it is the government essentially like forcing or possibly organized labor which is a challenge they've seen off for now but it is so now they are essentially having to say we're not ruthless we're not disruptive if anything we are nurturing and supportive

and we've actually reached the point now where the government is not Amazon's problem Amazon is the government's problem right it's like Amazon is in a position of dominance for the most part because they are running up against

you know not the federal government but like city governments town governments state governments which they are able to strong arm as we saw with the like hunger games that they ran a few years ago for their HQ too and sort of

further to that as well right if you want to look at what this kind of messaging what this kind of ideology means all you have to do is look at their Bezos is bizarre discussion of the new safety measures that are in place at work at warehouses I must say work houses

we dive deep into safety issues he says for example 40% of work related injuries at Amazon are related to musculoskeletal disorders things like sprains or strains that can be caused by repetitive motions one program we have to reduce these is called working well now

jay than that I know you guys know what this is but Milo and Alice and Nate don't necessarily know what this is so I'm going to do a little like mini startup game where Alice what do you think this is it's the little shotcaller thing no if anything it's more just more dystopian Nate

is it the thing with the cages where like the robot is like you have to we have to live in the cage with a robot underneath you while you work at Amazon I'll give you a hint it's the cage lives in you Milo oh no they're making they're making their workers into Robocop

effectively yes where what they're doing is they are now have the new staffing schedules into this working well program that rotate employees among jobs to use different muscle tendon groups to decrease repetitive motion means essentially

they are doing like work crossfit employee confusion yeah the workers get the gains they also have this wonderful addition where you got a wellness coach also

mindfulness because the problem if you're stressed and injured from working at Amazon the problem is you're not working at Amazon right that's right you're gonna achieve enlightenment while you're packing those books you have to kill the worker rights you know shell in your head I've heard

describe this as like you show up to work and Bezos tells you if it's leg day or shoulder day or her what it actually is is we were unable to fully replace labor with capital to fully automate all of the tasks of the warehouse

so what we have done is we have put a mind basically robotized the workers so that there are fewer like wear and tear on them essentially as capital so that all of your joints

fail at once instead of one joint failing and then you can't work there anymore they push you to the limit until your whole body collapses and then they just pull someone out and there's an interesting component here in which you know Amazon has

really good granular data on what will push people to leave and what sort of churn rate it can expect from certain types of work I'm curious but I don't think we'll ever know but I'm curious you know how they will use these calculations to maintain those same rates because those rates are also key to

preventing labor organizing right we talked on our show about this report that researcher did sort of ethnography in the warehouse and how you know the churn rate prevents workers from consolidating and holding certain types of knowledge that other places workplaces might have

that would lead to labor activism or at least sustained building sustained momentum that builds up eventually into like a campaign that the company has to respond to and then some Amazon workplaces that has emerged

and then they just shut them down right but there's some I'm curious if like it will end up being used as like an even grander anti labor tool by them and again I think this goes back to what we're talking about which is it's size both in breadth

and depth it's ability to sort of penetrate into the lives of everyone around it it's ability to sort of just through by dint of its own gravitational pull change and solidify the nature of places that it goes into and so on it is

fundamentally a question again not just of size there's no Matt Stoller on this podcast but a question of power right it is it is the allowance of power and what capital does when it has the most power it's ever had

so I want to conclude this section thank you everyone for bearing with me as we go a little long today which is the last segment which I've tentatively titled Amazon is a millennial with generalized anxiety disorder Bezos writes

I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their relationship not infrequently the husband looks at the wife with faux distress and says to her can't you just be normal they both smile and laugh and of course the deep truth is that her distinctiveness is something he loves about

her but at the same time it is also true that things would be easier and take less energy if we were a little more normal he does not know a single married couple that has a shared joke between them the only married couples that Jeff Bezos knows are ones that have already found a new little Saint James to go to

I love that he ended it with like are you high right now do you ever get nervous smashed cut to that wife and she's just in full black face that was what the conversation was about it's one of those fake movies from Seinfeld like

Sack Lunched it's like why don't you be normal this phenomenon he says happens at all scale levels democracies are not normal tyranny is the historical norm Jesus and just wait till we get to the next paragraph like the logic like

this is some real galaxy brain shit like we can't even imagine the levels that Bezos's brain is operating on to make these logical jumps from like I know a fake happily married couple also democracy is not normal

tyranny is normal just put that out there you know when you turn to your wife and you say now is the reign of blood you know when you return to your wife and you're like honey I've noticed that you're using a lot of the same musculoskeletal groups recently have you

considered lifting with your back yeah me and my wife do different positions a few times a week if we stop doing all the hard work that is needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that regard with regard to democracy he would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny

again like it's as valuable as it is to have an insight into the mind of Jeff Bezos this idea of like yes well you know obviously the natural state of humanity is the vicious domination of many by like by the power obviously I would be the god emperor of this planet if

not for all you stupid fucks but I mean it really does show that like you know he's reading his hubs and he conceives of Amazon as the Leviathan right like like pre pre prime

life is nasty brutish short but enter the Leviathan of Amazon the Leviathan of Amazon making life liveable for produce for its workers and its customers making life livable for people who are in tertiary industries connected to them

that like let us say Bezos yeah that's the thing Bezos watched the film 300 and he's like I want to get some nipple rings and be carried around on a huge chair by guys he's secretly bankrolling Zack Snyder I know it we all know that distinctiveness is valuable we are all

taught to be yourself what I'm asking you to do is embrace and be realistic with how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness unless you feel like using a different musculoskeletal group that we have told you to use today which case do not maintain your distinctiveness the world wants you to be typical in a thousand ways it pulls at you don't let that

happen you have to pay a price for distinctiveness and it's worth it the fairy tale version of be yourself is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine or use a non-recommended muscle group by the Amazon wellness program that's right that vision is misleading being yourself is worth it but don't expect it to be easy

or free it will be $15 an hour unless you organize union which case is going to be $7 an hour you'll have to put energy into it continuously continuously for your entire 12 hour shift when the workers of the world look up at me and ask when will the pain stop I will look down upon them and say never

when you rotate to the next crossfit workout station the world will always try to make Amazon more typical I love that the world will always try to make Amazon more typical yeah by having us not like install brick bio chips into our employees these are employees' comic pixie

Amazon which if we if we remember what he said a paragraph earlier where he was like tyranny is the historical norm what he's saying is the world will always try to make Amazon more tyrannical but under my reign it will never be a tyranny

that's right to all of you be kind be original create more than you consume and never never never let the universe smooth you into your surroundings well Jeff Bezos I wish you all the best with your trip out with your ill-advised blue

origin space program and that maybe you guys you and Elon Musk can go to Mars and try to not let the universe smooth you down there how about that it would be a fun little quirk of human history if just like

the two richest people we have disappeared in space you know that'd be nice nice two richest people you have over there be ashamed if they disappeared into space into the vastness of the universe it's slightly bigger than Amazon

that's right anyway I've noticed we've been running super long so Amazon is constantly expanding what is it expanding into local stores I told you the competition I listed oh shit fuck

so I just want to say number one thank you very much for coming and hanging out with us today any time thank you for having us we would like to talk to you and as usual prime time I'm yet again banging my drum that says

listen to this machine kills a competitor of Amazon Web Services with your help we can kill them that's right appropriately in Minecraft yes so definitely if you want to stick it to Amazon Web Services

go listen to their competitor this machine kills that's good that's gonna be our promo now we are an AWS competitor help a local business survive that's right and also to all of you out there in podcast land

thank you so much for listening to all those listening to this in the trash distribution warehouse where it's piped in remember to rotate those musculoskeletal groups that's right so thank you for listening don't forget $5 a month you get a second episode every week it is pretty cool

the bonus one that's right so do check that out yeah also I have a show at the end of the month in London on the 30th of May I'm doing a rerun of my 2019 Edinburgh show and you might think but hey I live in the US or Australia or one of those countries how can I come to a comedy event in London

it will be broadcast online on Amazon Web Services it will be broadcast on probably via Amazon Web Services there will be a link in the description so are you guys going to move on to your Twitch stream now not a competitor of Amazon a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon

that is going to be in about 7 hours we are going to be well from the time you're listening to this it will be in a few days so that's fun anyway that's enough back matter for now

so congratulations to the Labour Party once again on eating shit you deserve it and we will see everyone out here in the bonus episode in a couple of days bye