TRASHFUTURE - Who Will Be the Bill Gates of Perception? feat. Kojo Karam

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Kojo Koram, author of "The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs," joins us to discuss what comes next after the War On Drugs and how capital intends to colonise this new frontier… and why Brewdog is involved (again!) Before that though, we discuss Farage’s latest victim stunt and discuss a VERY real company—perhaps one of the realest in history. Pre-order Kojo's book here! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

So we keep losing really important special people. It is with a heavy heart that I have to bring you the news that looks maxing influencer Connor Murphy has died while trying to inject himself with gold to raise his IQ by several points. It's been a bad week for celebrity deaths, you know? I personally, I'm really broken up about San Neil. I mean, that guy was a great actor. And, you know, there was also another one, which I guess we should talk about.

I think the main thing is, look at what the deep state will do, right? And look at how frightened they are of us on the left, right? Because if you remember the last episode, we were like, this time we're going to talk about Nigel Farage running for election against a bin. We're going to give it all of the scrutiny of which, you know, he is rightfully terrified. we're going to be like absolute like wolfhounds of new media on this. Look at what they did to distract us to make our work impossible. That's what they're going to have that.

They're going to have to like weekend at Bernie's and Whitacom's husband and put him in like the Erica Kirk outfit. He's going to have to come on to like a stage with lots of piramancy. So if you if you don't know, Anne Whitacom, the I would say pantomime villain of the British, back when Britain was a more liberal place before we decided. was chud hegemony. Yeah. I would say that the key way of understanding

Anwittaker is that in British traditional media, being willing to like pick up the phone and go on TV on no notice as a virtue all its own. And if what you're going to say is going to be something so repulsive that it makes people watch, then that's so much the better. And that was her role for a long time. Yeah,

she was last, she was last in politics as a junior minister in John Major's cabinet in charge of prisons. Her flagship policy was, was to keep pregnant prisoners shackled during childbirth to prevent any escaping, I guess, while recovering from childbirth. Yeah, and then having sort of like

had her career top out with that was like, well, I guess I'm evil now. I guess that's my sort of job forever. And the problem became, but there were too many people doing that thing. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. You know, not everybody heard Anne Whitacom, but everyone who did went out and founded a right-wing party.

Yeah. And I mean, so this is someone who has just been a pantomime villain of British television now for decades. Yeah, because I think there's always the temptation when this happens to a right-wing influencer, when they're murdered by someone, to craft a very satisfying narrative of like, well, they were living under the delusion that they could go on GB News and say, hmm, someone's got to do something about all these migrants thinking that they were inculcating stochastic violence against the migrants, not knowing that the stochastic violence can flow.

both ways. And maybe out there, you know, someone is thinking, I understand Prime Minister Kirstenam, I will follow your orders. I will drive 200 miles to murder Anne Whitaker. I like questions over, because like the guy who was arrested and then sort of like not kind of released and has been arrested again and counterterrorism is involved. And I do think it's very compelled. Because I think the sort of hot thinking from what I understand is that this may be like reform, restore beef. I don't think we know. I don't think we're going to have any idea for a for a while yet. entertain the idea that it could be like a

clear loyalist like taking out. Who wouldn't want to impress him, you know? I think the thing is, right, you know, you, you, you photoshop him as Bashar al-Assad or Hitler one too many times and that line of thinking, fallagey places. No, I think the thing is, that narrative doesn't quite work, because

I don't think anyone really took Anne Wittickham seriously, right? I don't think she had a sort of motive effect on sort of reform or restore or anyone else. I think she was riding the wave. I just strikes me as desperately sad to have sort of

like come up in this kind of like politics of new labor where it's like yeah no we can send her out there to defend like making people give birth while they're handcuffed and just the arc from there to just being this kind of provocator just

endlessly until you know everything is so fractured that someone decides yeah this is a good idea to just maybe murder this woman is that's like you had a small part in the tearing of like a much bigger social fabric and it's just really depressing in the main. Yeah. So, you know, condolences to Josh Whitacom on his loss. We were all using that social fabric. Yeah, it turns out. Yeah. Well, the thing is, right, this is someone who is well, I think it's, is being

remembered, let's say very fondly by people like Kier Starrmer and Angela Rainer. And the theme that comes up again and again and again is this was a distinguished politician over many years, many achievements, it's a huge loss. It's right that we pay tribute across the divide to the many years of public service. It's like public, as you say, of a public service in terms of what? In terms of making it worse, but also not really effectually either. I think the other thing is that means that it rings even more falsely when the right do the sort of you just created a million Ann Whitacom's acts, right? Because the only effect that that would have would be to make the job of like daytime TV's scheduling assistance much harder.

I don't know that that would do anything. You already have an oversupply of Anne Whitakums, right? Like I don't know ever you saw the story. I think it was last week where like G.B. News was cutting down stuff and cutting down like freelance producers and everything. And that's like, I feel like that's like a real red flag in the sense of like if you can't run a right wing news channel in the UK and we've got some serious problems, right? But that also means like, you know, you've only the best

Anne Whitacombs can survive this economy. And so we had this thing on the right where they're like initially wanted this to be, you know, I assume some kind of migrant and then following the guidance that all of these chuds made the police change. The police weren't, no, it's a white British man. And every single one of these chuds jumped immediately to, ah, you're talking about a trans woman who murdered Anne Whitacom. I don't know if that's true.

I would be highly surprised, but that's fine. I've been highly surprised before. But again, I don't know that any of this matters other than as a sort of morbid symptom of how bad everything is, you know? Well, reformer trying to turn her into into Charlie Kirk in the sense that they're saying, well, this means that that five million pound donation from Christopher Harbourn, the crypto and gambling entrepreneur who happens to share a crypto gambling project with George Cottrell, the sort of convicted. money launderer that Nigel Farage has kept as a sort of son. You would talk about finances at a time like this, Riley. Well, quite. This is, this is what their point was, which was, oh, the every, what Nigel Farage even said, I took all of these donations in a personal capacity. In one case, uh, from the guy, this Christopher Harbour and this guy, as a personal reward for

delivering Brexit because he was so happy about Brexit. And he's, he's, he, Farage has been like so rattled by this and so ill-tempered. And, and then he's just sort of, handed this discursive gift, right? And I don't, I, you know, think that it can be interpreted as anything else. I think the other thing here is we need to know what Lord Buckethead said about this. Or Count Binface, whatever the fuck is name is right? Lord Buckethead was like a different character, right? Like, I was sort of thinking the other day, but there was another like bin face kind of guy,

but who was it? And it was Buckethead. Yeah. Count Binface, you are temporarily important and we are obliged to like a take your bit seriously. What's the statement bin? Like, do you keep the bit up for that? Do you take, do you like, at this point, you've got to start thinking,

contingency planning, right? What if Farage gets assassinated? What do I do? Do I take off the bin? Do I do like a piece to cap? Do I do like a solemn bin? Am I wearing like a, like a sombre, a more somberly colored bin? How do you make a bin more like a coffin without, but with tasteful?

How do you do it? face, elected MP for Clacton by default after Nigel Farage is assassinated by someone with an inscrutable loyalty to Keir Starner and just forced to like swear the oath at the House of Commons in memory of Nigel Farage. Yeah, I may be a have I got news for you writer or whatever, but I promise to govern as Nigel Farage would have governed. I mean, I think the other thing is, It's, you know, Stama learning the lesson of a lot of dictators, which is you can just assassinate all the dissidents on the way out. It's easy to do. So this, I mean, this is genuinely what, how Nigel Farage is portraying it.

Because, like, Farage claims that, like, every parliamentary standards inquiry, every tough question from a journalist about how come all of these zillionaires keep on, how come, how come he gets, like, the Lord Ali treatment, like, 50 times a day, right? Is actually, that's giving him the full Whitacom. Not Josh, but Ann. It's getting the full Whitacom every time he gets asked that question. Pulling any of these threads, right, of going like, hey, why did Elon Musk's shitty brother say that the Musk Family Foundation

paid for Tommy Robinson to go to Moscow? But asking that is basically like attacking me like Kato from the Pink Panther, as happened to Anne Whitakam, allegedly. Yeah, alleged by us. And he says, he said, though, all of these inquiries. are demonizing me in public life, just like Anne Whitacom was demonized in public life, again, largely by herself because she knew that was her role on panel shows. Yeah, because she made herself a pantomime villain.

Yeah. Like, I don't know, and I won't, you know, speculate as to what extent she actually believed the things that she said, but she said them in the full knowledge that it was a career of, like, you know, poking the sort of starving dogs, right? I mean, also, yeah, this is the thing that's sort of been running through my head, which is like, this is the stuff that you want. Right? Like you want, but what they actually want is like they want to be the villain.

They want to get like enough blowback or enough sort of like criticism, whatever from people who are like broadly insignificant in the way that like influence is sort of taken serious. And who's influenced, who gets taken seriously and who does? They want to be, they want to be criticized by people who they know will not be taken seriously by people by like institutions that can actually do something. And so they do want to sort of feel the pressure of like at least a victimhood that they can control, but the moment that they can no longer control it, it sort of becomes a problem. And in Farage's case, it's the fact that, like, you know, he is kind, you know, the sort of

charismatic Pints guy is not really a character that he can really play for that much longer. And again, like, less of that is to do with just like, oh, he's now being taken seriously as a politician. It's like, no, it's just that he exists in, like, a media environment with, like, guys like, HS Tiki-toki. And, like, he just can't, and he just can't survive in that. Because, like, for all, you know, you know, he set the blueprint for how. how you can get this constant stream of attention

across multiple platforms and multiple verticals. And now he's competing against all these fucking 20 year olds who can do it so much better than him. And so he is going to be taken like seriously in a different way and he can't handle that. And then you've got another side of the spectrum of people who like really were able to make quite a good career or post-parliamentary career being the worst person that you know.

But like as you mentioned November of the start of the thing, like if you're going to play with the loaded gun, like you do have to accept that like the bullet might come for you. you know? Yeah, you have to accept that Kia Stama has shoes. And so, I think they're moving into the Farage thing

a little bit, right? Because Farage is now trying to deal with all of these scandals that have grown up around him. And, you know, we'll sort of go through them a little bit. One of them is, again, this undeclared donation. I think the fact that it was a personal reward for how happy he was with Brexit

is ludicrous to me. The other, the second statement, of course, was, is to fund personal security for the rest of my life because, and he said this, I am the most physically and verbally assaulted politician in all of British history. One crypto investor seeing him get milkshaked and is so horrified, he immediately starts writing a blank check. Yeah.

Or I think, you know, there have, Britain's had a lot of politicians, some of whom have made, let's see, King Charles II leaps to mind as a politician against whom some violence was done. Well, also, not to sort of belabor this point, but after Joe, Cox was murdered. Farage talked about how, you know, Brexit had been one without a single shot being fired. But now that shot is coming for him and Anne Whitaker. Yeah, so it seems. So it seems that there are sort of like, you know, continuity Starmerists out there with caches of arms who, you know, we don't know what they're prepared to do. And thankfully, this isn't my problem because I fucking hate care starmer. Are we suggesting that like the Obama administration left caches of small

arms around like the BBC studios in parts of Gloucestershire. I don't think that we want to lave people believing in pronouns gladio into existence. Although they kind of already do. This is kind of what like reform and restore people sort of believe. And so the other thing is, so this the other thing, right, which is I need this gambling and crypto billionaire to give me five million pounds for personal security for the rest of my life.

He also has. Yeah, why don't we get any of that? Like, we just get regular like Patreon subs. If you think we've done an unusually good episode, you should be able to like give us five million quip. Yeah, yeah, for personal security for the rest of our life. Well, yeah, in case we do an episode that's so good that we're going to get assassinated. So Farage also appears to have this kind of Caesar Augustus relationship with George Cottrell,

the sion of an aristocratic family, a crypto guy who went to prison in the US for money laundering, also involved in tether.com. And who calls Farage daddy? Yeah. I mean, this is the, get, that typical sense of, oh, are they trolling? Are they not trolling? Doesn't matter, right? Because they're having fun together, basically.

They're having fun doing it. Some real like twinks for Trump energy, you know? It's crazy how Milo Yanophilus can regenerate like the doctor. So, so, yes, you say, they refer to each other as father and son. No, they don't. They refers to each other as daddy and son. Different thing. Daddy and son, different thing.

And he always had these strange, semi-official gray roles in reform, a bit like Lord Ali or had in labor, or Peter, Mandelson before he was appointed. He would just be like wandering around 10 Downing Street because it's like, well, I'm important and I'm here and I should be here. But Cottrell and his friend who was like, again, profiled in the Times. Why is it that like anyone in politics, any party is just like, oh yeah, here's my go from the Black Lodge? Yeah. Well, as his like fascist dark zoomer friend, did all reforms media production came up with the idea of the Boris wave and so on and so on. It's just a little

another version of the same thing. And this is again, like the party of old people, everyday working people, law and order, et cetera, et cetera, all these things that they claim, right? It's being ridden by like zoomer fascists. And, you know, because once again, like politics is libidinal. The reform supporters are like loving reform because it's anti-elite in general. They want to be lorted over by a baron. They don't want to be lorted over by their barista in their imagination.

It's it's libisional farragists versus libidinal starmerists. Yeah. I mean, think about it this way. Think about it this way, right? Like, it really kind of mocks the left, right? Because we've just been doing electoralism and like community stuff and Zach Polanski, you know, we went a couple of by-elections, right? That's all great. Fantastic. We've got good policies. You look over at what the Labor Rights are doing. And it's just start killing them. Just a gun. Just start killing them. I don't know that I agree with that. But it's got a tempo all its own, you know? Yeah, there's a shadow war going on, whether that is like, arson attacks or, or sort of Nigel Farage being murdered by a parliamentary standards inquiry. Well, you know what it is. You know what it is? It's the combination of the sort of high of England doing well in the World Cup and the knowledge of Burnham being about to come in.

You know how Stam has been like more fun on social media lately? This is wise. He's undoing the tie. He's opening the top button. He's issuing the kill orders on like all of the chuts. Everybody. But he got, actually is him that got Lindsay Graham. Not a lot of people know that.

You know, they were like, all right, Britain, Britain can do. MI6 wanted to mogs the CIA and was like, we're going to get one of them in America. You're going to see. Some was going for a walk and he just came across a book that said defno on it and he was just like, Mitch McConnell getting a signed bouquet, like a bouquet from MI6 that says you have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once. But yeah, so Farage is doing his usual shtick. He's calling us an establishment hit job.

And the funny thing is, he's right. Which to be clear, we agree with. Yeah, it's right. Like all of these investigations, the journalists suddenly figuring out how to ask follow-up questions, fully an establishment hit job. Absolutely correct. Yeah. Sometimes they just turn the taps off, right?

Like we saw it happen with Corbyn, right? Where it's just like the media in this country has a kill switch, right? And it gets to go like, oh, no, you're done with playing. You're done playing with this toy. you're done with this person. Right? Like you, because they're not serious, right?

And once they're not serious, it's actually kind of embarrassing for you to like this person anymore. Yeah, we saw it happen with Rishi. We saw it happen with Starmer, right? When all these, they get bored and then they notice

all the shitty stuff that you've done. And the only way to get that senior is to do a bunch of shitty stuff apparently. Or if you haven't done a bunch of shitty stuff, they look at all the good stuff you've done and said, that was bad. And then,

and this is just, it's happening to Farage because you know what Farage hit a ceiling he's got a he hit a ceiling of 30% he's got a competitor on the right he's no longer fun he's no longer hat no longer hats and so yeah fully this is an establishment hit job it's just all of

the charges happen to also be correct because Nigel Farage only knows how to play British politics on Tutorial Island he's been playing with like God mode cheat codes on for fucking decades and now suddenly he's not and this is

what brings it back around. It's like, the moment Nigel Farage stopped playing British politics with God mode on, he found himself in a solo election against a sort of tiresome joke candidate. And that's got to hurt.

That's got to hurt. I mean, there is one other detail, one other Whitacom thing that I want to focus on, which is, I've been paying close attention to this, a university researcher in Scotland

getting investigated by the police or posting, what I would describe as a risky joke, but I get it, right? where she's like, I think she said like, you know, she deserved to get killed and I hope she died, you know, handcuffed the bed screaming in pain because that's what she wanted to be inflicted on like pregnant prison inmates, right? I get that, but it looks bad on paper, right? That's the sort of first stage of this, right? Whether you try and sort of push the envelope as far as it can go and, you know, you get sort of a minute's silence at the World Cup semifinals for Ann Whitaker or whatever. Give it six months. I want to hear about like a six. six-figure settlement for that woman. You think we're going to get like the woke professors Wittickham fun? Start the clock is all I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Look, look, before we exit today, I wanted to do one company. It's companies, it's been in the news, but I looked into it and there's more to it than that. So the company is called FIA, P-H-I-A, and I'm going to start with a question. What do Chloe Kardashian, Alex Earle, Mindy, Kaling, Carly, Clause, Jessica Alba, Ashley Graham, Halsey, Jay Shetty, Olivia Copo, Winnie Harlow, Lori Jave, Barbie, Barry Brown, Rachel Zoe, Sydney, Sweeney,

Paris Hilton, Priyanka, Troper Jonas all have in common. That's a tough one. I don't know. Credibly linked to the assassination of Anne Woodham. It was the reverse John Hinkley where it was like a bunch of celebrities thought that they were being told by the television. People don't know this. It was actually

a kind of like a murder on the Orient Express type situation. It was an ensemble. They all invested in Fia's Series A raise. Oh, well, if that's where Priyanka Chopra is putting her money,

then yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So alongside Robin Hood's Vlad Tene have another some serious tech investors. So what does Fia do? This is from their site. Find the lowest price every time. Tap on Fia on any item page

and we'll find you cheaper alternatives. Are you familiar with this kind of product? It's a browser extension, basically, that price compares for you and finds voucher codes. That's it? That's it. It's a browser extension.

That's some pretty thin gruel. How much money if they raise? It can't be a lot, right? Let's see. They're valued post money at $185 million. Oh. Okay. Sure.

Why? Thank you so much for asking. So like I say, it's largely a browser extension that does quote-unquote AI powered in heavy, air quotes, price comparisons for you. The other thing to note, there are a million of these. This is a commodity. This is not a big innovation. This is a commodity.

This is a write-up from Time Magazine's Best Invention of 2025 article. So it was one of the best inventions of 2025. Online shopping is overwhelming and it's tricky to weigh the pros and cons of prices, quality, and environmental impact. Enter Fia, a free AI-powered shopping assistant co-founded by former Stanford classmates,

Sophie Kiani, and Phoebe Gates. Oh, okay. Right, yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yeah, gotcha. Yeah, there we go. So, Fia's user-friendly interface available on iOS and has a Google Chrome browser extension compares prices for new and used clothing, shoes, and accessories one click. It also provides insights into how certain brands hold value in the resale market. And crucially, it has an unlimited line of money so long as one of the founders can call her dad.

Yes, I believe so. Moreover, funding it would be a great way to do a favor for her dad. Because like previously, the ways to do favors for her dad, you can't do anymore because he doesn't get on those sorts of planes anymore that we know of, allegedly. Phoebe Gates wants you to know that she is making what is essentially a gussied up affiliate marketing Chrome extension. By the most famous one, it's called Honey. It was owned by PayPal, currently is subject of a huge class action lawsuit because of how much data it collects on people. So she wants you to know that she's making this organization to get out from under the shadow with her father. Oh, okay. Well, that'll work, right? Because it's famously small.

Yes. It's a small shadow and she's got a brilliant product that's only been done. dozens of times before. You kind of can't do that as the problem. At a certain point, right, you get rich enough and it becomes kind of like an evil thing to have kids, right? Because there's nothing

that they could do that would not make them sort of like chiefly your kid. Yeah. In the same way that like, you know, fucking, and all this stuff is like, unfortunately, like tangibly harassable like it's real bad

I mean the only thing she could do maybe hey she could do like she could become like Keir Starmers number one hit woman I guess and that would make her fame people would be like her dad was the tech guy that's weird you can I guess get like disowned by them like Elon Musk's daughter or

the one kid that Steve Jobs never acknowledged I guess but even then so any case you know Bill Gates even because he's involved as an advisor not as an investor even helped her out by working for one day on the Fia customer experience team. Was the advice, would you like Infinity Money

because I have that because I'm Bill Gates? The advice is don't go on vacation to the little St. James. It's not as good anymore. Honestly, he was like there as a customer service associate for a day, which meant if that was true and not just a lie, probably was a lie, but still, generationally missed opportunity to start talking about Epstein stuff. Getting Bill Gates on the web chat thing for my browser extension.

Hi, I'm Bill. I see you. You're looking for a voucher code. So she has this chip on her shoulder. Does Phoebe Gates daughter of Bill Gates? Because she's more than just the daughter of Bill Gates said the daughter of Bill, Bill Gates, Gates. But she's not, though, is the problem. So Kleiner Perkins, coastal adventures and notable capital alongside this like star-studded term sheet all also invested. But they're serious institutional money. They wouldn't invest in crap, right? Well. No, no, not unless they had like a big name attached to it.

Well, the other, yeah, because it's like, would any serious institutional money have invested in this totally undifferentiated commodity product up to $185 million if it was fronted by someone else? Because it's just a great way to buy a favor from Bill Phoebe Gates's father, Gates. And notable is also the two founders, very large social media followings were front and center in the pitch deck. Now, here's the thing. This would just be normal, funny and almost not worth mentioning, unless the product wasn't one of the genuinely shittiest, leekiest pieces of shit. shit to ever curse your browser. It was horrible. They didn't even make their Nepo company right.

You're telling me that we got a sort of software Wyatt Coke here. You know what? You could buy his shirts using Fia. Yeah, and the shirts closed all the way. You could button them. This would be like if Wyatt Coke's shirts,

you couldn't button them, or like every time you ordered them, they came printed with your social security number. on them. Like, they had a, they had a QR code to all like your online banking information. Because, because remember this October 2025, it gets written up in time as one of the best innovations of 2025. November 2025, it is determined that Fia's independent security researchers find that

Fia's extension captures HTML snapshots of every web page the user visited all the time. Is it supposed to do that? It is 100% not supposed to do that, but it was made so lazily, presumably just by like shopping out like to different random fiber people to like just make different modules that what it would do. I'm going to read from Mahir Sharma as an independent security reacher's media post. At first, I wasn't expecting anything unusual. I casually switched over to my Gmail tab to reply to a few emails, planning to explore the functionality of the extension later. However, when I returned to my console, something unexpected caught my eye. A series of queries have been triggered in the background, even though I hadn't even visited any e-commerce site.

or clicked the should I buy this button button. One particular API call stood out, which is log complete each HTML to GCS being sent to API.Fi.com, which means they were basically taking full screenshots of everywhere you went and then sending it back to FIA so it could determine if it is an online shopping site, which includes emails, bank statements, passwords, Instagram messages, everything. The savings panopticon? Yeah, they could.

Bill Gates and her college roommate and a bunch of celebrities got together to create a sort of online shopping pen opticon by accident. And you're sure they didn't do this on purpose. It's not like evil. It's just vibe coded. Yeah, this is not part of their core offering. This is not related to their business at all. They just accidentally happened to spy on everything that everybody was doing without making it part of their browser extension app company. That's cool.

I mean, look, we went from one phase where, like, we were developing sort of military systems that ended up having some civilian capabilities once we were done with them. And now we're trying to make civilian-based software that people don't like, but we're turning them into, like, military tools instead. Are you describing the reverse microwave? Yeah. Well, look, if, like, if our friend Phoebe Gates is listening, here's an idea for you, the reverse microwave. And she is. If anyone has this tab open, she is listening. What if what if your like Teflon pan was also a gun?

How about that? So through sloppy construction or simple carelessness, Fia was monitoring snapshots of everything you do and it wasn't even on purpose, really. They claim to fix this, fine. You know, this is so funny because it's also like, the first thing of media, because I guess I've been thinking a lot about Christopher Nolan today

for, for like, reasons. But it's like that, you know, at the end, like, the sort of in the dark night where they make the surveillance system And Lucius Fox is like, if you use this, I can't work here because I'm too moral, I'm too ethical. And Batman's like, yeah, whatever, old man. See you in the next one. This is what Phoebe Gates has done. She's made the Dark Knight surveillance machine out of her shopping app.

And Lucius Fox is in the background being like, Phoebe, you can't do this. You can't do this. I'm not, I'm not, I can't be here if we keep doing this. And she's ignoring him. Yeah. And she's basically built the surveillance tool of the 21st century. and we are all going to be subject to it eventually. Hey, but we might get some discounts.

So here's the thing. That was the first scandal. There is a new scandal with Fia. There's something else wrong with this Panazacom. So this is from Bloomberg, where Bloomberg tested Fia's extension across more than 50 retail sites. So how this usually works, right,

this affiliate thing, is that you'll get referred, is that you say, hey, Fia, find me this thing. And then it'll find you a bunch and you click on it and you buy it. And then you clicking on it and buying it get that Fia then charges the person who sold you the, I don't know, the dress of the shoes or whatever, like some pennies for the conversion.

Yeah, it's a sort of affiliate link commission. It literally is an affiliate, it's literally an affiliate marketing program worth $185 million. Because it would have to be because that's already something that like, you know, Amazon or whatever have built, right? It would have to just be this thing and use that architecture. So it turns out, and Fia's team claims this was a mistake that Fia entirely by accident, what they do is they open. a background tab during checkout processes that have nothing to do with it and maliciously inserts its own referral code in order to artificially juice its sales numbers to appear like a more legitimate company and not like the product of two failed daughters. Riley, Riley,

that's a that's a sort of like terminological and exactitude. You say maliciously, I say hustlingly. That's right. Entrepreneurally, because the thing is, not everybody would do that, but the people who do have a certain kind of brilliance. You know what that brilliance is worth? 185 minutes. The funny thing is, it's not even an original crime. It's like so common that in the affiliate marketing industry, it has a name called packet stuffing. Like, it's like not only is their company committing what appears to be fraud. It's not even innovating in the form of fraud it's committing. It's just a straight up boring old fraud.

And the funny thing is, here's the funniest thing about it. What made me decide that I was going to say, oh, should we talk about this? Should we not? because because the whole thing, right? The whole company was never designed to make money for Phoebe Gates or its investors. The whole thing is just the investors buying access to Bill Gates and then Phoebe Gates getting to feel like, instead of having to sit on like an art gallery's board or whatever, right? Now you need to be an entrepreneur just like everybody else.

All that is, we're paper clipping failed children into cosplaying the people that are supposed to create fail children. Right. And you can hear them talk about. all of this on the burnouts with Phoebe and Sophia presented on the Call Her Daddy podcast network. Yes. Background call her daddy. Yeah. So, would you believe it as well?

It was releasing pretty regularly. Huh. Until about mid-May. Oh, well, that's fine. There can be gaps in things. Sometimes, listen, you don't have to part of the veil for these people. It's, sometimes there's production stuff, and they'll find out about it when they find out about it. So they have episodes such as dating as an ambitious woman,

How to Seduce Anyone Featuring Chloe Shee. They have billionaire makeup artist, spills the Kardashians beauty secrets, and how celebs get perfect faces. Oh shit, that's big news. Yeah, they also have, they have an interview with Michael Rubin, what is really like at a billionaire's private party?

Which again, Phoebe Gates, that is the wrong billionaire to be asking what private parties are like. Duolinko CEO. How to brainwash yourself to success and get addicted to learning. The top lessons from building a $185 million business and the Phoebe and Sophia's best lessons they've learned from the career playbooks to the most successful people in the world. And the thumbnail image, I shit you not, is do not wear sweatpants from the daughter of Bill Gates. Slacks only.

Get rich off your side hustle. From Phoebe Gates. Yeah. Well, isn't that what she's doing? So, like, I actually think they started the company to, like, the product of the company is, the podcast. That's also true of our company, but the thing is that we make the podcast and we don't spy on them. No, yeah. Well, not yet anyway.

Like, you know, no, that's coming. Like, don't get me wrong. But like, we are committed to innovation in the fraud space. It's like if we did, if we were actually an oil warehouse,

but we started an oil warehouse in order to talk to like oil traders, that's what this would be. That's quite clever, actually a very clever. It turns out. Yeah, It turns out. Starting a podcast is just an excuse to hang out with people you like.

What if you started like a sort of finance, like a finance podcast and you talk to finance people? And in that podcast, like, you sort of make them so comfortable if they tell you like in, yeah, they tell you secrets that you can then sort of inside a trade to. I wouldn't know anything about that. Well, I couldn't just be any finance people, right? It would have to be someone pretty high up. Do you think they can get him? Like, not like a CFO, you know, like higher than that.

Yeah. Oh, you mean maybe we can see someone higher than a CFO's diary? Maybe you can take a peek inside that little diary? I'm looking for, I'm looking for a diary of the CEO, and it just has Anne Whittaker question mark. Right. Look, I think that's as good a button as any to put on this segment. Why don't you follow Nova and I into the second segment where we speak with academic and author

Kojo Coram about his new book on the legalization of drugs and what that will look like in the coming years. So check that out in just a few seconds. So from the first half, I'm going to welcome us here to the second half where Nova and I are talking with Kojo, Coram, returning champion, a professor of law and political economy at Luftpre University. And you're coming to us with a new book under your belt, the next fix winners and losers in the future of drugs. Kojo, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Riley. Great to be back. Yeah. Now, here's the thing. I don't know if you know, I have some little interests on. There are things that peak that I will just keep going after.

Riley, you can just say autism. Okay. I have some very special interests. And weirdly, one of my special interests has overlapped with something that you talk about, which is what the legal drug economy will look like, who will benefit, and how capital will use it to just keep accumulating. often by dispossession. So I want to open on a character, which is interesting to us. It's a guy called Brendan Kennedy, who was one of the first people to become a billionaire

from legalized cannabis. He's the founder and CEO of Privateer Holdings, as well as, and this is where it intersects with my interests, Till Ray, which eagle-eared listeners will remember, is the entity that purchased Brewdog out of administration two months ago. Yes, indeed. Indeed. Ooh. I'm detecting some vibes off of this guy,

I don't think I like any of them. Yeah. So this guy, Kennedy, got his MBA from Yale in 2005. He now has to claim, like, in interviews and stuff, that he, quote, experimented with cannabis before starting privateer, but never really got that into it. He worked at Silicon Valley Bank before he realized it was going to be a bonanza and drug realization. And then as of 2019, he was the second highest paid CEO after Elon Musk.

And this is not somebody who would have been in the drug business until, let's say, it was very much opportune for him to do so. So with that context in mind, tell me about the world into which Tillray exists in the role of drugs, prohibition, culture, these things you talk about in the book. No, absolutely. I mean, like you say, what's happening with Tilray, what's happened with cure relief, what's happened with people like Kennedy or Boris Jordan, who Forbes magazine profiled back in 2019 as the very first person to become a billionaire through legal cannabis.

This has all been the result of a dramatic change. the way that drugs are actually regulated and commercialized over the past decade. And it's one that I think has really slipped under the radar of a lot of mainstream political discourse. You will have grown up in the aftermath or the kind of the dying days of the war on drugs discourse, as did I where, you know, the just say no policy, the idea that legalizing drugs was a serious political initiative for anybody apart from, you know, maybe a couple wacky hippies and rasters were seen as, you know, just simply dear a gure. Over the past decade, starting with Colorado and Washington State, legalizing a fully recreational commercial cannabis market in 2012, there has been a widespread transformation in how drugs are

being regulated, primarily cannabis and now over the past few years psychedelics. You know, we have half of the U.S. states with legal commercial cannabis markets, Canada, Germany legalized cannabis, Uruguay, Australia rescheduled psychedelics to make legal psychedelic therapy legal in a nation state for the very first time. And in the aftermath of those regulatory changes, regulatory changes which were often produced by on the ground grassroots activism that was led by racial justice activists, patient rights groups pushing for access to public health with things like medicinal cannabis, things like psychedelic-informed therapy, environmental justice groups who were campaigning on the devastation

that the war on drugs has impacted in places in the global south, they pushed for and delivered a lot of that change, but a lot of the beneficiaries of that change have actually been, you know, Silicon Valley-backed biotech companies, multinational and multi-state cannabis corporations that are now floating on the New York Stock Exchange,

like True Leave. True Leave just did very recently. And we are looking at a world in the future where I think that there's going to be a real, bifurcation between how different people are treated for these Aksa Mact. And so I, you know, I pretty much started off the book, The Next Fix, by going back to when I first got interested in interpolicy reform, which was when I worked as a lawyer in the United States, at a prison called Angola Prison, which is the largest maximum security prison in the United States of America,

and is based on a former slave plantation, hence the name Angola, and it keeps the name to this day, just to give you a little indication of the friendly atmosphere of this insubrician. institution. And a lot of the inmates that I spoke to are there for drug convictions. Multiple drug convictions in Louisiana could lead you having life in prison. And this institution and the entire system of mass incarceration that was built by the war on drugs, it's happening at exactly the same time that there are people becoming literal billionaires doing exactly the same thing, cultivating and distributing cannabis. And so we're in a very different world in the 21st century. and with the next fix, I just tried to navigate that.

I traveled across all these different countries that have gone through some sort of drug legalization initiative and really try to look at what the impacts were. You know, what were the social costs? What were the political costs? And perhaps most substantially for me, what were the economic consequences? These things are all very bound up together with one another, right?

Like the social, legal and economic cost of drug legalization, if you have like mushrooms by Monsanto, right? And let's say the certain cultivars of silo cylocibin or cannabis or whatever become patented and regulated like seeds by Monsanto are, you could end up with a world where instead of just most drugs being de facto legal for wealthy or wider people in the global north, it becomes actually formal where let's say, well, I actually, I have my, the legal cartel works with like the wealthy or sort of social insiders and everyone else still has to deal with the illegal cartel. still get to fill up Angola, but Monsanto gets to cultivate a whole range of new plants. Is that one of the futures that you see? I think that's the particularly dystopian future that could be one pathway forward. This is something I really started to have to wrestle with as I was going through the journey of the research that then produced the next fix.

You know, we now are in a world where just in April this year, a Republican conservative president in Donald Trump, you know, sat in the Oval Office. That's the same Oval Office that Richard Nix's. and Ronald Reagan sat in every night, George H. W. Bush, you know, telling the American public about how drugs were public enemy number one. And, you know, we needed to be vigilant and our streets and our schools to fight the war on drugs. Well, in that very same Oval Office earlier this year, Donald Trump sat, you know, flanked by Joe Rogan, of all people, signed an executive order to fast track psychedelic, conformed

therapeutic treatment across the United States of America. And he's joking about, you know, you know, can I have some ibogaine? Like, you know, this is something that I think, you know, If Ronald Reagan could see this, you know, he would be, you know, he'd be like, what if someone spiked me with? This is the new world that we're moving into. And in some ways, I think, you know, people are positive about the way that these reforms are breaking through so much that, you know, even the Trump administration is, you know, rescheduling cannabis as it's doing at the moment, fast-tracked and psychedelic medicines. And, you know, don't get me wrong, if people are able to access these treatments,

which the clinical evidence has shown, can have dramatic consequences for people with acute depression, you know, suicidal radiation. That is obviously a progressive social move. But as you mentioned, we also need to keep an eye on what the process of commodification actually is looking like, because the patenting of psychedelic medicines, the buying up a monopolization of licenses around the distribution of cannabis and cannabis dispensaries, a lot of these are flowing through the very same mechanisms of capsulist accumulation that have led to the grossly only, core world that we're all trying to navigate. You know, look at the people who are funding the biotech companies that are commandeering so much of the value of the, you know, emerging psychedelic

marketplace. Peter Field put 125 million pounds into a biotech company that was developing psychedelic medicines. Google, Sergei, Britain's done the same. You know, you can see a lot of the same game plan of how Silicon Valley captured the entire value of the internet now being implemented on these ostensibly progressive social reforms that so many people have fought so hard for. And I think that, you know, if you want to look at what the future might appear to be where you can have mass criminalization and mass commercialization happen at the same time, you know, you can look at December 2, 2025 where Donald Trump signed an executive order rescheduling cannabis in the very same month that he used the laws around drug criminalization

to seize Nicholas Maduro from Venezuela on Trump. Brook traffic and charges and, you know, extraditem to the United States. So criminalization and commercialization can happen at the same time, especially when commercialization allows for such a capture of the value of these potentially incredibly profitable commodities. And people might want to look at some of the interviews that Peter Thiel's partner in the kind of psychedelic Renaissance, the CEO of a Thai Christian Angermeyer, they just finished doing the enhanced games together Psychedelic transformation, you know, is there other great collaborative project? His interviews with the New York Times recently or with Bloomberg, you know, where he says,

like, I know we're going to be a billion dollar company because we own this entire sector. And by owning, it means the capturing and the, you know, hoarding of the patents around the particular drug molecules that will be given the FDA approval to be rolled out in the psychedelic informed, you know, wellness services. It's weird culturally these guys because I know it's sort of a canon now to say that drugs won the war on drugs I wasn't expecting them the

the drugs that won the war on drugs to be Eric Schmidt's Burning Man Iowaska trip, you know? And it's so much weirder now that people like Peter Thiel are involved because you know you mentioned the enhanced games and you know you think about things like peptides as well

it's so so weird to me that these people are transhumanists for everything except gender it seems seems like and somehow also profoundly chuddered. Absolutely. I think that it really is fascinating the kind of also cultural shift that's happened, particularly with psychedelics, which again, you know, you go back to those kind of mantras of the war on drugs.

The idea that, you know, psychedelics were a pathway to either making you insane, you would lose your mind, you think you could fly, jump off a building or whatever, or it would make you a loser. You know, you would be disengaged from the traditional capitalist productive incentive, and, you know, you would spend your life wasting away playing video games. And then now, you know, you read the Financial Times, Woffrey Journal, Bloomberg, and they will all have articles about the potential productive power of microdose and psilocybin, you know, of, you know, accessing this kind of biohacking, self-optimization rhetoric. You know, there was, the famous Wall Street Journal interview with Elon Musk, where he's being quizzed about his ketamine use.

And, you know, he responds by saying, well, look at the, look at the value of my companies, you know. So whatever I'm taking, you know, this should be celebrated. This should be, you know, this is just a further example of further confirmation, as you mentioned, of the belief that at least for a certain portion of human society, there is a ability through technology, drugs and, you know, science alongside, like you mentioned, this transhumanist discourse that extends everything from gene editing to the synthesization of AI and the human body, that the idea that the accepted constraints of the human existence, you know, sadness, aging, you know, trauma, these can all be transcended for a particular proportion, you know, of the cognitive elite.

And, you know, psychedelics is an element, it's an element for that. You know, it's almost this idea that like, well, if I think. take psychedelics, you know, I will reach some enlightened space of consciousness because I, you know, am already of a cognitive kind of register removed from yourself. But if you take it, you know, that will lead to disillusionment with your particular social role. And we can't have that. And that needs to be policed and needs to be criminalized and needs to be punished with the full force of the law. So I think we really are moving into a world where there are going to be different rules for the same drugs for different people.

What this sounds to me, right, like is that old proverb, which is both kings and beggars have the liberty to sleep under a bridge. I hate that the winners are on the war on drugs are broodog, though. Yeah, I mean, because like this view that, like, there are some cognitive elites that can take drugs. And the thing is, people like taking drugs. It's popular for a reason. And there always is some explanation as to why.

There's a real loading screen tip. people like taking drugs. It's popular for a reason. Watch out for exclamation points above police officers. It used to be, right? Now, like the big one is psychedelics among the tech bro elite.

Used to be cocaine for bankers, right? Where there was this belief that this same substance sort of distributed to one of two different kinds of people produces two different kinds of outcomes. Either if it's consumed by black people in the form of crack, it creates crime. If it's consumed by white people,

encephalated as a powder, it creates enormous value at Goldman Sachs, right? If anything, it's like, it's the same story getting told over and over again. And it's like, what's different now, it seems, is that this industry and the actual policymaking machine have become so close that instead of being de facto legal for certain kinds of people, the goal is to make more and more drugs officially legal, again, only for the right kinds of person. But what's very strange is that that is happening at such different paces around the world, not only in different geographies, but with different substances, right? Like, opioids were legal for a while if you got them through Purdue pharmaceuticals, but you never got enough to, to, like, keep you going once they

addicted you. Nothing is illegal in Britain at all. In fact, if you remember about eight years ago, they accidentally made coffee illegal briefly. Yeah. With the psychics of substances bill, yeah. Yeah, yeah, they briefly made coffee illegal. And then in Canada and the states, it's state by states, substance by substance. There's not really that much of, I don't think, I put a political and economic pressure group to legalize heroin beyond sort of like safe injection sites, but that's a huge fight in British Columbia. And so just bringing it all back around sort of back home, the Britain seems to be outside of like Thailand and Malaysia, one of the most restrictive in terms of its official legal status of drugs.

And you could see this with like Zach Balansky getting pilloried for suggesting, hey, maybe we should agree that the war on drugs has been a failure. Yeah, no, I think that, you know, some of those, those kind of like structural failings of how the British state, you know, can respond to regulatory change that's happening across the world. The identified is clear with this, you know. The way that cannabis has been legalized across the United States has been, like I mentioned, kind of bottom-up lead.

So, you know, America, you know, for all of the failures of the American legislative system, of which there are many, you know, does have an legislative instrument, a state level called a ballot initiative where if enough people want something to go, you know, on popular referendum, an electoral cycle, it all do so. And that is how legal cannabis, you know, was kind of demanded and then voted through across now 25 of the American states, Virginia just being also just going online just last month. Britain, of course, has a very centralized Westminster system in which power is very much hoarded within the Westminster bubble. and so it's really dependent upon a political party to kind of make the claim for reform

in order for that to actually happen. And like you mentioned, you know, the Green Party is one of only, I think they're the only one to have full legalisation and regulation as part of their manifesto. I know the Lib Dems have decriminalisation, the SMPs have some decriminalisation and they've obviously opened up a drug consumption room over there as well. But you saw the response to the Green Party where Labour thought that it was going to be a real stick that they could beat them with of the Gorton and Denton by election, you know, but I would rebut that, you know, what was the consequences of that attack by the Labour Party where, yeah,

they had all these billboards and adverts saying, you know, the Green Party want to give crack cocaine to children, you know, they want it to be sold, heroin sold, free with every crunching of cornflict or whatever. The Labour Party got absolutely destroyed that election. You know, the British public were clearly not swayed by that argument. and Hannah Spencer won for the Green Party in that by-election by a, you know, shocking majority. And the Labour Party finished in third place, which is, you know, a devastating result for the same party of government. So the British public, I would say, is in a very different place to the British political class. I would also point out in terms of the role the British capital is playing within this transformation.

It also is playing a role that I think quietly outside of the cameras is more in line with the commercialisation that's happened over the past decade. where, as you mentioned, you know, there's always been a kind of de facto legalization for those who have the resources. You know, there's not going to be the same level of drug policing, you know, at Oxford University as there is going to be, you know, in Toxeth or Handsworth. And that's been clear for everyone to know. There was a fascinating Conservative Party leadership election in 2019, actually, where at the same time, the Conservative Party were talking about, you know, taking driving licenses away from anybody called with drug possession. Every single one, of their final five leadership candidates were all on record for having their own personal drug use. Michael Gove with cocaine as a journalist, Jeremy Hunt, Rory Stewart, Boris Johnson. So that dichotomy has always been in place. What has happened over the past 10 years, though, is the attempt for capital to turn previously prohibited drugs from being contraband into being something that could be commodified, into being things that, you know, now can receive investment from private wealth offices

or be floated on the stock exchange or, you know, be able to facilitate measures and acquisitions. And this commodification of previously prohibits to drugs is also very apparent in Britain's now rapidly growing and highly lucrative private medicinal cannabis industry. And so this for me, and I tell the story of this in the book, is almost the perfect example of how capital, can seize this type of social change. Medicinal cannabis was legalized in the UK by the activism of mothers of desperately sick children with chronic epilepsy, who had, through going abroad, realized that medicinal cannabis

was one of the most effective ways of treating this form of chronic complex epilepsy. They came back, they campaigned for the law to change. The Theresa May government changed the law in 2018 in order to stop these negative headlines about mothers with desperately sick children who the government were prohibiting access to their medicine. And then after they changed the law, they did nothing to build an industry that would actually serve those types of patients. So instead, it's all been handed over to a private medical cannabis industry that, you know, just through the profit incentive is going to develop medication for people with, you know, sleep anxiety or, you know, people who might have a little bit of chronic pain.

you know, that's going to be the big market. You know, people with acute illnesses like complex epilepsy or multiple sclerosis is going to be a smaller market. And so they are, you know, those various patients are now being underserved by the industry that's emerged in their wake of their activism. It's obviously incredibly expensive to get the medication that you require. It can be up to £2,000 a month again to access that medication. And if you look at the Sunday Times list recently published of the 100 fastest growing content, In the United Kingdom, and number eight sat a company called Mademeter, which is a medical cannabis company. Can you tell us about some of the examples of what a more inclusive transition away from the war on drugs towards something like a legal, just drug economy would look like?

What have you seen? Excellent. We have all these different countries doing these different initiatives at different times means that you can kind of get a little bit of a comparison. and contrast of the different ways in which the process of drug legalization could be delivered and it could be either highly commercialized and highly commodified, or it could also have at its concerns, you know, what in the U.S. has broadly described as social equity, and in other places you might even go as far as considering it reparative justice initiatives in order to make sure that those who were damaged by the failed war on drugs are at the front of the line when it comes

to the new market that's emerging. And so a couple of examples that, you know, I think might be interesting for readers to explore further is looking at how in the city of Albuquerque in New Mexico, they have been able to fund essentially a universal basic income program for their poorest residents through their cannabis tax revenues. And so, you know, initiatives like universal basic income, initiatives like reparations, the city of Everston in Illinois, launched the first sanctioned municipal reparations program in the USA through their cannabis sales tax revenue up to $25,000 for all qualifying black families for home repairs for historic housing oppression. That's actually been sued by the Trump administration.

So how far they were able to get with that is an ongoing development, but something that's relatively interesting. And then I think there's also more kind of market design initiatives in terms of us trying to move away from this heavily monopolized form of commodity exchange that has really captured so much of the global economy over the past the past few decades. The idea that legalization has to mean a commercial retail model, particularly one that is privately owned, I think is one that we might want to slow down and take a little bit of time and thinking about, well, what are the other regulatory tools? What are the other forms of production, distribution, and consumption? We might be able to

facilitate through this essentially emerging market that we get to design from scratch. And so Rhode Island, for example, requires in its legalization law that 25% of all the licenses for the cannabis stores go to worker-owned cooperatives. And so this idea of how we might want to try a cooperative-owned distributor is being implemented in there. Similar in Germany, where they legalize cannabis but didn't legalize a commercial retail store model. And this is partly because of some of the restrictions of the European Union law, but also I think there's a tradition and a history in places like Barcelona or uncontinental Europe

of cannabis social clubs, where you're allowed to become a member of the social club, learn how to grow, cultivate the plants, but you're not establishing a retail commercial initiative that is driven for private profit. And I think that when we look at also how this cultivation might end up as so much does, being drawn from the global south, you know, I ended the book going to Ghana, which, along with

a number of other African states, has legalized cannabis cultivation, particularly for the export, to this new emerging market. You know, could we look at initiatives like, you know, seed banks for the farmers to be able to access the seeds they require to grow, you know, breaking out from that Monsanto-owned patenting structure that you mentioned a little bit earlier, could we think about, you know, land being held in a commons that has made available for farmers to do this cultivation, cooperative farming agreements being the type of agreements that governments give their licenses to. You know, this might be the overly optimistic side of me because I've given so much negativity in this in this interview so far. But I think that there is a potential for really stopping

and thinking, how would we design a market if we've got to design it from scratch? You know, so often we're all trying to lobby against all these different industries where power has been crystallized and centralized now for decades, whether that's fossil fuels, whether that's the tech industry. And here we have an example of an industry where the rules are still to be written. They're still being written at the moment. But I think unless we argue for them and unless we make these demands, these rules are going to be written, like you say, by the Peterfields of the world, whilst at the same time being presented as being a progressive move away from, you know, the tragedy and the failure of mass criminalization and the war on drugs.

I think it's interesting as well that this is coming at a time when we're sort of exploring other avenues of mass criminalization. I think about sort of flock cameras and, you know, various sort of new methods of surveillance. I wonder if it strikes you that it's sort of like now we don't need as much of the sort of logic of the war on drugs in order to perpetuate mass incarceration. I mean, I think that they're still using it. You know, the thing that just is striking. We don't maybe need the logic of the war on drugs, but it's still a very useful tool.

And we're seeing, you know, whether it's, you know, ice agents rounding up people to San Tel Salvador, you know, whether it's, like I mentioned, even on an international level, the use of the legislative architecture of the war on drugs to justify the seizure of Nicholas Maduro or the threatened of Gustavo Petro, you know, are we in the next year going to see a another land American leader brought to the US on narco-trafficking charges. You know, there's a long history of using the war on drugs in this manner. And these have been the ultimate consequences of the war on drugs, not the stated goals of the war on drugs.

You know, we need to remember and kind of really hold the war on drugs to its own standard. And this is something that I think, you know, people who've advocated for legalization really need to be full-throated about. because with these experiments in legalization, as it's framed, over the past decade, there's been a lot of questioning about, well, what's the review process? How are we going to make sure the legalization reaches the requirements that it requires? But the reality is, the war on drugs was the experiment. Prohibition was the experiment, you know, in the history of humans' relationship with these substances.

And the war on drugs didn't reach any of the objectives that it promised it would do. it was supposed to deliver less drugs use, less drug deaths, a drug-free world as the United Nations held a meeting under the banner in 1998. It hasn't delivered those. And what has it delivered? It has delivered the establishment of, you know, a system of mass incarceration, not just in the US, but Brazil, Colombia, the UK. You know, our prisons are overcrowded because of the amount of people in there on drug offenses. And it has delivered an architecture that has facilitated Western intervention in the global south in a number of different jurisdictions. And so I think that, you know, there is a potentially dystopian future where that system of criminalisation is

maintained at the same time the capital seeks to try and turn some of these drugs into new sources of profit and commodification. Because for me, it's no coincidence that the changes in the laws on drugs, which have been argued for by progressive since the 1960s at least, started to actually breakthrough in the post-2008 moment at a time in which the economy reaches its moment of stagnation. Now capital is desperately searching for new sources of profit, new things to input into the economy to facilitate growth. You know, public services are struggling under austerity and looking for new forms of tax revenue. And it's in that context that we start to get the legalization of cannabis and now psychedelics. The way that I tend to think about this is less that these,

are molecules, plants, whatever, is that what we've been talking about, the last sort of 30 or so minutes is the opening of a frontier, because capital always needs a frontier. And in this case, for a number of historically contingent reasons, this is a frontier that has historically been the space of sort of anyone between like liberals and progressives with a few libertarian whack jobs thrown in. And what you're talking about is the race to define what this pre-visors, let's say unused in terms of a legal economy frontier, this frontier territory is going to look like. Because the legal economy is moving into it no matter what. You just think of it in almost territorial terms. What goes there, is it a co-op or is it Monsanto? Is it a seed that gets

shared or patented? Is it going to be someone going to jail because they, are they using a psychedelic mushroom and can't afford $20,000 a year? Or another example I was thinking of just before we end as well is ketamine. Ketamine is a very powerful antidepressant that costs 12,000 pounds a year if you want to be treated by it in the UK. So there's just example after example, after example of that logic that we don't want being prepared to be shoved in there. And there are tons of opportunities that you've talked about, like around the world, especially in places that have more bottom up governance in the global north, like cities in the United States, or like cities in other parts of Europe, or like approaches to more collective farming in the global south.

And here in the UK, it might not be as obvious, but it's exactly as important. So, you know, this is this is about what the transition looks like. Absolutely. I think that that frontier metaphor that you gave is absolutely perfect, you know, that this is these new spaces the capital is looking to move into to commodify. You know, I drew the title, the next fix, you know, partly with the meaning of fix in terms of, you know, its role as kind of drug slang of being that, you know, addiction that has to be, you know, drawn in to maintain a drug dependency,

but also in terms of the kind of classic Marxist understanding of the role of fix within capitalist economies, obviously drawing on the fantastic work of David Harvey, you know, where he talks about the spatial fix at the last time that Capital reached this point of stagnation and plateauing where, you know, it literally moved into new territories in the global south and commodified those territories in order to relaunch this next cycle of growth. And I think that this is, you know, one of the few territories that have not yet been fully commodified,

the kind of vast, untapped resources of the human consciousness as a sense of terrain. And the commodification of it and the monopolization of it that I think is being discussed in the kind of citadales of capital, you know, they are preparing for the world after the war on drugs, whilst we're still debating, you know, drug legalisation, good or bad, you know, they are registering the patents, you know, buying up the licences in anticipation of their market coming

online. And I think we should remember this is not the very first time that these same drugs have been commodified. You know, as I mentioned, the war on drugs, which we've come to see as the kind of historical norm, which we start to see as almost like common sense, was the radical departure from the way that even the European empires dealt with cannabis, cocaine, and and opium. I mean, Britain, we will launch an entire war in order to protect our right to trade opium in the 19th century. You know, the drug war of the 19th century was a war by colonial shipping companies and, you know, the largest corporate actors in the global economy, you know, waging a war on the Qing dynasty of China to say you have to accept our trade of these drugs. You, you know,

and so this is not something that hasn't happened in the past, you know, this mass commercialization, and the protecting of the profits of companies who are trading in drugs. You know, companies who I think were much more successful drug traffickers than, you know, the Pablo Escobar's that we demonized in the 19th century. You know, Pablo Escobar, wishes he could have been William Jardine or James Matheson. You know, they died in the House of Commons, not in a hail of bullets. You know, these individuals could be the precursors to what we're moving into in the 21st century. All these different attempts to try and create,

a relationship to these still risky substances, but ones that put forward the human commitment towards environmental justice, public health, and I think explicitly reparative justice as well. You know, we can't have the world that we're living in now where there are, as you mentioned, people who are now billionaires for legally trading cannabis, and there are still people sitting in prison in sometimes the very same state that these businesses are running for doing literally exactly the same thing. Very, very dystopian to see who, you know, not even who's going to be the Starbucks of weed so much as like who's going to be the, you know, the Bill Gates of perception.

Terrifying. Well, I think that's as good a place as any to end it. Kojo, I want to thank you so much for coming on. The book is The Next Fix. Where can people get it? So, yeah, it's available, you know, all good and even bad bookstores. But the publisher would be hashed and Verso putting it out in the U.S. So, yeah, the next fix.

The winners are losing the future of drugs. And, yeah, thank you so much for talking to me about this. And, you know, I think that this is something that's going to continue to develop as the industry develops over the next, you know, few years. And so, yeah, hopefully we can talk again in the future. Absolutely. And if you want more of this, don't forget, there is a Patreon we have. It's $5 a month and you can get more episodes every week. I think, you know what?

I think in the spirit of the spirit of the conversation we've had today, our outro music is unwritten by Natasha Bettingfield. Thanks everybody. Bye.